Morse code

The other day I mentioned season 7, episode 7 of the great Matthew Weiner series Mad Men. If you’ve seen the episode, you know it’s a key moment for the character played by Robert Morse. From the beginning of the show, I was fascinated by the casting or Mr. Morse as Bertram Cooper, because of his earlier signature role as J. Pierrepont Finch in the 1961 musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying — as well as in the 1967 film of the same name.

In a way, the world of Mad Men is Weiner’s homage, looking back half a century, to the world of How to Succeed, except that the latter was describing a contemporary phenomenon. Morse was born in 1931 — one year after the discovery of planet Pluto — and he was a young man of 30 when he won the Tony award for How to Succeed. Now he is 83, and half a century has been framed by his two iconic roles of Finch and Cooper.

The pairing in Mad Men of Robert Morse and John Hamm, as grizzled old veteran and ambitious young up-and-comer, is well paralleled by the earlier pairing between Rudy Vallee and Morse a half century earlier, as boss Biggley and Finch. In both cases it is obvious that the older man recognizes himself in the younger one, perhaps as he was back in the day, when his soul was filled with ambition and fire.

But here’s the funny thing: Like Robert Morse, who rose to fame in his callow youth, Rudy Vallee had risen to stardom in the early 1930s as a musical idol, the first bona fide pop superstar of the twentieth century. By 1932 — when he was the same age that Morse would be when he won his Tony — young Rudy Vallee was arguably the most popular singing star in the world.

Maybe there is a code at work here, with Morse as a sort of connective tissue, a link in the “old man / young man” genre between the long distant early 1930s and now. I wonder whether, early in his film career, Vallee ever played the young man opposite an old and grizzled actor, somebody who had, once upon a time, played a young man on the stage. Perhaps the chain stretches backward through the generations.

Just maybe, forty or fifty years from now, John Hamm will play the old guy opposite some rising young actor, in a nostalgic tale about our own time. And the chain will be unbroken.

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