The Secret History of the Mad Men Lawn-Mower Scene
“That’s life. One minute you’re on top of the world, the next minute some secretary’s running you over with a lawn mower.” So says Sterling Cooper secretary Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks), wearing an unforgettable green dress drenched in gore, toward the end of the shocking, acerbic Mad Men episode, “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency.” By the time it aired 15 years ago, the series had already dominated two consecutive Emmy awards, but this elaborately plotted, tonally tricky, and at times surreal episode — written by series creator Matt Weiner with Robin Veith and directed by Lesli Linka Glatter (who helmed episode five of the original Twin Peaks) — would go on to become one of dramatic TV’s finest hours.
“When I read the script, I thought, Either this is going to be ludicrous beyond belief and absolutely not work, to the point of making viewers ask, ‘What were they thinking?’ Or else it is going to be one of those out-of-the box, iconic episodes,” recalls Glatter, a decade and a half removed. “Fortunately, it turned out to be the second kind of episode.”
As Joan delivers that quip in her characteristic deadpan, she’s sitting in the waiting area of an emergency room, her skirt stained with brown-red blood. The gore-inducing accident happened earlier, at what was supposed to be her going-away party. Employees got too lubricated and started up a John Deere riding mower sent in honor of Sterling Cooper landing the company’s account. Secretary Lois Sadler (Crista Flanagan) climbed into the driver’s seat, drove it across the floor, momentarily lost control, and ran over the right foot of the most powerful person in the company, Guy MacKendrick (Jamie Thomas King), the proxy sent by Putnam, Powell, and Lowe, Sterling Cooper’s London-based parent company. Then she crashed into a floor-to-ceiling glass partition. Joan wasn’t among the advertising-agency employees misted by Guy’s flesh. She’d been on the other side of the room talking to junior copywriter Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), then dashed over to perform first aid, which is how her dress got Jackson Pollock’d. “Jesus, it’s like Iwo Jima out there,” said Joan’s ex, senior partner Roger Sterling (John Slattery).
Weiner says the gruesome equipment snafu originated as a family story: His grandfather once ran over his own shoe with a push-reel mower. “His foot was fine,” Weiner confirmed to me, “but it destroyed the shoe.” The much more gruesome lawn-mower accident that made it to Mad Men, however, was meant to be more than a risky, self-referential bit. It was a turning point for a show about characters who are constantly trying to keep their professional and private lives separate only to see them merge in spectacular fashion. Here, a staple of suburban life transforms into a violent instrument that physically invades the workplace; Guy’s foot is run over by a metaphor. As much as the lawn-mower scene will live on out of context as an endlessly looped video of four happy employees being doused with innards, it’s worth remembering how it propelled forward the show’s longstanding concern with how the sudden eruption of world-altering bad news could linger.
When the John Deere roared to life in “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency,” Joan was already reeling from finding out that her fiancé, Greg (Sam Page), a surgeon, didn’t get an expected promotion, which meant Joan would have to keep her secretary job rather than quit to embrace the postwar ideal and be a stay-at-home wife. But Joan felt she had to go through the motions of retiring anyway. Seated beside Joan in the hospital waiting room is one of her colleagues, womanizing alcoholic genius adman Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who had missed the accident because he was having a private meeting with hotel magnate Conrad Hilton (Chelcie Ross). The meeting was a consolation prize for receiving virtually nothing from his visiting British overlords, save for a compliment from Guy and the “honor” of being named part of his “creative triumvirate” alongside agency co-founder Bert Cooper (Robert Morse). Roger, meanwhile, was omitted from the new organizational chart, and their colleague and friend Lane Pryce (Jared Harris), a transplanted Brit who loved New York City, learned he was being transferred to Bombay.
That this all went down on July 3, the day before Independence Day, added insult to injury. “They’re flying across the ocean to have their knobs polished?,” Roger had asked, right before the English arrived. “Fourth of July,” Don said. “Subtle.”
Meanwhile, in an “B” plot so rich with portent that it could’ve been the “A” plot of another episode, Don’s daughter, Sally (Kiernan Shipka), is dealing with pitch-black feelings unleashed by the death of her beloved maternal grandfather, Gene, and the nearly contemporaneous arrival of her new brother, Baby Gene. Sally’s mom, Betty (January Jones), tries to tamp down Sally’s distress by giving her a Barbie doll and telling her it’s a gift from Baby Gene, which only weirds the kid out further. When nobody’s looking, Sally tosses the doll into the bushes outside the house, but when Daddy comes home, he finds it and places it on his daughter’s nightstand, triggering the episode’s second bloodcurdling scream.
“Sally is dealing with the death of her grandfather and doesn’t know how to grieve losing one of the most special people in her life,” says Shipka, who has since parlayed her role as Sally into a film career that includes Longlegs, Twisters, and The Last Showgirl. “Dealing with emotions is not a Draper strong suit.”
“There’s a lot going on in this episode from a narrative standpoint, for sure,” adds Hamm. He now counts “Guy Walks” among his favorite episodes, not just for the major story lines and moments mentioned above but for the way it puts a new frame around the Don Draper–Roger Sterling relationship (they’d been feuding) and lays track for the multiple-Emmy-winning season finale, “Shut the Door, Have a Seat,” in which core members of Sterling Cooper form a new firm. Plus, Hamm says, there’s the very real American history roiling in the background. “It’s 1963. Vietnam hasn’t really kicked off. There’s still a bit of that postwar optimism, but that’s starting to teeter, and that’s represented by what’s happening in the business. The agency is being bought out by the British, and it all looks very upbeat and promising. But then, obviously, the events of the episode unfold, and the promise of PPL is diminished in a— well, hilarious way is really the only way to say it. Though of course in a macabre way that only Matthew and Robin could’ve created and that only Lesli could’ve directed.”
I haven’t heard the JFK theory, but it does make a lot of sense. I mean, I can certainly see that, with the blood spatter, the spray, the immediacy, the realness.
- Jon Hamm
Glatter, whose résumé stretches from NYPD Blue, The West Wing, and ER through Homeland, The Walking Dead, and The Morning Show, had already directed four hours of Mad Men by this point in the show’s run. “It’s really a great example of that great, dark sense of humor that the show has,” she says. “The emblematic image being Joan and Don sitting in the hospital with a chair in between them, and her in a green dress covered in blood, and they’re laughing.” But she explains that it was luck that landed her in the director’s chair for “Guy Walks.” “I’ve had a couple of these in my career, where I didn’t pick the script or get offered the script, it was just the luck of the draw. I was brought in to direct more than one episode that season, and this one just happened to fall during my week to do another,” she says.
Weiner says he’s grateful it ended up this way because the centerpiece was a scene with stunts and breaking glass. “Leslie is so experienced — she’s probably directed more television than some people have watched — and that’s good, because we didn’t have a lot of money or a lot of time to shoot anything.” Still, he had extremely high standards for season three. By this point, Weiner says he and his writers had talked often about “how, frankly, all of this alcohol in the office was a problem.” Now they felt like the could tell a longform story in which “this balloon got inflated” in the first five episodes of the season and “would be popped” in “Guy Walks,” with Sterling Cooper’s insobriety culminating in a blood-soaked climax — “and the audience would sort of be left there.”
The riding mower came into play as the prop to do the popping when the writers were reviewing period-accurate consumer goods. (The John Deere riding mower was introduced in 1963.) “The sit-down mower fit into the idea of Don as a suburban dad,” Weiner says. “Originally we had Don riding it. Then we thought, Let’s get this thing in the office and let them get drunk and let them lose control.” It was Mad Men executive producer and regular director Scott Hornbacher who came up with the idea of putting Lois on the riding mower, he says. “Crista Flanagan, who played Lois, is a funny person, and we were always looking for ways to use her.”
The filmmakers wanted the moment to be shocking but also ridiculous. “The foot was a prosthetic, which we spent quite a while on, because it needed to have the torn-up toes and the blood rig coming out of it,” says Glatter. “And of course, we had to spatter four characters standing in a line with fake blood. We had an air cannon with all this blood and debris in it. We rehearsed that shot with the actors. The problem is, once you’ve rehearsed it, everyone kind of closes their eyes or anticipates what it’s going to be. They knew it was going to happen on the count of three, so I did it half a beat early. And that was pretty great, with the white cake and the red blood!”
The entire script is about making the audience expect a three count, then going on two and a half. As a writer-producer on The Sopranos, Weiner learned a lot about creating surprise by setting up the audience’s expectations for season-long narratives, then unleashing a device sooner or later than anticipated, or forcing the story in the opposite direction, or even doing nothing at all. “This ‘Guy Walks’ script was really, really hard,” Weiner says, “and it transformed many, many times, but the one thing that we knew was that we really wanted people to think that the show was taking a left turn, and that when Guy comes into the office that this was the new star of the show.”
The result is a master class in weaving together the personal, the historical, and the dreamlike: Right before the accident, there is side-talk about watching TV news coverage of the situation in Vietnam, which had yet to escalate to the point where there was a U.S. body count large enough to inspire protests. Suddenly, in a nightmarish sense, brutality has hit home for Sterling Cooper’s employees, with Joan as combat medic. (In the larger scope of Mad Men, this is another bitter irony involving Joan: It turns out that her fiancé then husband, Greg, can’t be a surgeon because he has shaky hands.) Then there’s Kennedy. The season-long story of Mad Men’s third season kicked off with “Out of Town,” which ends with a close-up invitation to Roger’s daughter’s wedding on November 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The audience spends the season wondering when the assassination will be dealt with. It finally occurs in episode 12, the penultimate episode of the season, “The Grown-Ups,” in which the characters live through that day.
But it has been argued by myself and other fans of the series that “Guy Walks” is essentially a coded re-enactment of the murder at Dealey Plaza, complete with a version of Jackie in her blood-stained dress. None of the individuals interviewed for this episode say they’ve heard the theory that this episode is an “assassination before the assassination,” with the main floor at Sterling Cooper standing in for the setting of Kennedy’s death, and Guy as the president-esque golden boy who’s cut down right after he figuratively and literally gets his foot in the door (as per another great Roger Sterling quip in this episode). But Weiner & Co. don’t hand wave it away, either. “I haven’t heard the JFK theory, but it does make a lot of sense,” Hamm says. “I mean, I can certainly see that, with the blood spatter, the spray, the immediacy, the realness.”
When I asked Glatter, she flashed back to her Twin Peaks days. “I’m thinking now of something so important that I learned from David Lynch that comes up all the time, even now, after so many years of doing this,” Glatter says. “There’s a scene where Kyle MacLachlan and Michael Ontkean’s characters team up. I think they go into a bank vault where you look at your safety-deposit box. And there’s a moose head on the table in the room. No one ever refers to the moose head. It’s just sitting there. It’s an incredible scene partially because the moose head is on the table. I asked David, ‘How did you get the idea to put that moose head on the table? Like, where in the world did that come from?’ And he said the set dresser was about to hang the moose head on the wall, and he came in and saw the moose head lying on the table and said, ‘Leave it there.’ When he said that, something cracked open for me. Have your plan. Know what you want. Know what your story is about. But be sure you’re open to the moose head on the table.”
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