Dapper Don Draper tells it straight every Sunday night on basic cable network AMC.

“What you call ‘love’ was invented by guys like me to sell nylons,” he tells one prospective client in season one of Mad Men. “You’re born alone and you die alone, and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I’m living like there’s no tomorrow, because there isn’t one.”
There is a tomorrow for the besuited, highball-swilling fast talkers of Mad Men, but as civil rights and the hippies approach, viewers know that that tomorrow isn’t going to be as nailed down or comfortable as the white-male-dominated one of the early 1960s. Leading this cultural train wreck is swarthy ad exec Draper, played by the just-as-cool Jon Hamm, who seems to have been genetically engineered to fit into a suit.

“It’s all in the wardrobe,” Hamm says. “I put on the suit, slick back my hair, and suddenly I’m a megalomaniacal bastard.”

The biggest thrill of Mad Men is the sense of tension from the crumbling façade of the powerful white-male elite.

“If you were a white man, Manhattan in the early ‘60s was a sandbox,” Hamm has said of the period. “There was tons of pussy. There were great restaurants, great bars, great strip bars—all within a $5 cab ride. But in the end, that stuff is all soul-crushing—the way that Girls Gone Wild is soul-crushing. It’ll make you want to kill yourself.”

Mad Men earned 16 Emmy nominations for its 2007 debut season, and has won nine Emmys and five Golden Globes so far, as it prepares for a fourth season. Its Emmys for Outstanding Drama Series, which it took home in 2008 and 2009, mark the first time a basic cable channel has snagged the award. Its success has surprised critics, and perhaps even its lead actor, who was skeptical when he was first given the script.

“I picked it up and thought, This title stinks, and it’s on some cable channel that’s never done anything,” said Hamm.

The 39-year-old actor brings a classic, chiseled presence to the show, á la Gary Cooper, Robert Mitchum, Cary Grant. So when hardboiled lines like the one Draper spouted in the first season roll out of his mouth, he pulls it off. It’d be hard not to smirk if these words came out of, say, a Keanu Reeves or a Brad Pitt.

“He looked like an old-fashioned leading man, like William Holden or Gregory Peck,” said Matthew Weiner, writer on The Sopranos and creator of Mad Men. He pushed for Hamm to get the role through seven grueling auditions. “But he wasn’t just a football player in a suit. You could see that he was intelligent. He was vulnerable. He was an adult.”

Yeah, but can he do funny? Fans didn’t quite know what to expect when he was slated to host Saturday Night Live in 2008. Hamm has been friends for years with the hottest indie comics, including Paul Rudd, Sarah Silverman, Zach Galifianakis and Patton Oswalt, and he appeared on Silverman’s sitcom.

“I watch Mad Men and I cannot fucking believe that’s Jon,” Silverman has said. “Suddenly you see him as this sexy, brooding person, and this is the same guy who, like, played a cable guy on [The Sarah Silverman Program], wearing a patch on his uniform in words just small enough so you can’t see it saying: ‘Eating all the pussy since ’93.’ He has that ridiculous sense of humor that we like to employ, a chasing-the-giggle kind of fun that’s dark and weird.”

The actor was well-received by Saturday Night Live viewers, and the episode featured two Mad Men parodies. In one, the brilliant “Don Draper’s Guide to Picking Up Women,” Hamm deconstructs his character, advising men to lie, cheat, look good in a suit, and “smoke and drink constantly” to attract chicks.

Tina Fey must have liked his appearance too, because starting in 2009 he played her character’s love interest in 30 Rock. His performances in five episodes earned him an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.

Success finally came to Hamm after years of struggling with bit parts, mostly on television. He admits that if it had come earlier, at a less mature time in his life, he might have turned out much differently.

“If I were 21 and doing this, we’d be having a very different conversation,” he has said. “I see actors in this town who make it big young. They don’t understand the word no: ‘What do you mean I can’t kill this elephant, drop it on a car, set it on fire, and then snort it?’”

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The St. Louis native came into the game with a little more emotional maturity than many, however. His parents split when he was two. When he was 10, he lost his mother, age 35, to an advanced cancer even after doctors removed two-thirds of her colon. He moved in with his dad, who also passed away, from diabetes complications, when Hamm was barely out of his teens. His teachers and friends’ parents filled in as surrogate parents.

After his first audition for Mad Men, Matthew Wiener is said to have turned to the casting director and told him, “That man was not raised by his parents.”

In 1995, after teaching drama for a year at the same high school he graduated from, Hamm pointed his old Toyota Corolla west armed with a letter of recommendation from one of his college theater professors and $150 in his pocket. He was soon sharing a house with four other struggling actors, and got picked up as a client by the talent agency William Morris. He landed the obligatory waiter job and started going on auditions.

His being tall, dark and manly proved somewhat limiting.

“I came in the Dawson’s Creek era,” he has said. “It was all about tiny guys who looked like teenagers, and I haven’t looked like a teenager ever. So I was, like, auditioning to be their dads. At 25.”

After three years without a single acting gig, William Morris dropped him, and Hamm was just a waiter. Reality set in, and he faced some major life decisions.

“You either suck that up and find another agent, or you go home and say you gave it a shot, but that’s the end of that,” Hamm has said. “The last thing I wanted to be out here was one of those actors who’s 45 years old, with a tenuous grasp of their own reality, and not really working much. So I gave myself five years. I said, if I can’t get it going by the time I’m 30, I’m in the wrong place. And as soon as I said that, it’s like I started working right away.”

Sometime before he started dating his longtime girlfriend, Jennifer Westfeldt, in 1997, she called him to see if he wanted to come to New York to work on a project that would become 2001’s Kissing Jessica Stein, which they both appeared in. At the time, he’d found himself doing way-below-the-line work on a soft-core porn movie.

Hamm landed work on a few pilots that never took off, and in 2000 was cast in the role of firefighter Burt Ridley on NBC’s Providence. That was supposed to last one episode, but turned into 19, enabling him to quit the restaurant job. That same year he also scored his first feature work, in Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys.

Other small film parts followed, along with several television roles, including a recurring character on Lifetime’s The Division, from 2002 to 2004. He took a huge leap when he went from the TV-for-women network show to the chauvinistic period drama on AMC.

Hamm appeared in the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still and the Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl. He has three films in post-production as of this writing. Ben Affleck directs and costars with him in the cops-and-robbers drama The Town; in the fantasy-drama Sucker Punch, he plays a character called High Roller; he joins an ensemble cast in the comedy Bridesmaids, cowritten by Kristen Wiig and produced by Judd Apatow. He and Westfeldt have formed a production company, Points West Pictures, with three projects in development.

Hamm’s Don Draper has won critical raves. One wonders how a Generation X-er could so convincingly capture the character. He grew up around the period’s styles while living with his father.

“I remember opening my dad’s closet and there were, like, 40 suits, every color of the rainbow, plaid and winter and summer,” he has said. “He had two jewelry boxes full of watches and lighters and cuff links…. He was that guy.”

His dad was well past his prime by the time Hamm was coming of age, but he had been a salesman during the early-sixties heyday of the American male.

“My father was sort of slam-bang in the middle of that,” says Hamm. “He would have been 27 years old in 1960. And he was a businessman in St. Louis, and kind of a hard-drinking, hard-partyin’ hard-charger. By all accounts, by the time I came around, he had significantly throttled back, but when I go through picture albums, I don’t have to look too far to see people dressed very similarly to the people on our show, and behaving very similarly to the people on our show.”

Hamm’s come a long, long way from sharing a crummy Hollywood bungalow with a bunch of other actor/waiters. With all the trappings of success—like the homes he shares with his girlfriend in L.A. and the Upper West Side—doors are opening, and Hamm is on the verge of being the next screen great. [HS]