January Jones’s Very Un-Betty Draper Quarantine
One day in June, the actress January Jones posted a picture of herself on Instagram, standing in her swimming pool, wearing an oversized straw bucket hat, cat’s-eye sunglasses, and a two-piece Lemlem swimsuit the color of ripe cantaloupe. She is waving at the camera over her shoulder, flashing a broad, toothy smile.
There is nothing unusual about the image, or even the caption: “Series: ‘Out of work actor needs attention.’ ” Many actors have found themselves unemployed during the coronavirus pandemic, and poolside swimsuit photos are standard Hollywood social-media-feed fodder.
But coming from Jones, who is best known for playing the frosty, platinum-bobbed, depressed, and often desperate mid-century housewife Betty Draper on the AMC television drama “Mad Men,” the image produced a certain welcome kind of whiplash.
Betty Draper, as a character, was a glutton for attention, and she was consistently starved of it. A former fashion model, she hated being stuck in the suburbs while her husband, the charismatic but damaged advertising executive Don Draper, dashed off to his glamorous Manhattan advertising job and his clandestine, bohemian lovers. She became increasingly petulant and vain in her isolation.
She was aloof, manipulative, more or less disinterested in her children, addicted to nicotine and melancholia. In the first season, Betty gets Don to help her start modelling again, and she looks elated when given a fresh chance to sit in front of flashbulbs.
When the modelling gig ultimately falls apart, she quietly walks out onto her lawn, in a white housedress, carrying a rifle, which she uses to shoot at a neighbor’s nattering pigeons. The scene is iconic (and, these days, much memed): a bored, beautiful, Hitchcockian blonde with a cigarette dangling from her lips, wreaking havoc in a place she cannot escape. An out-of-work model badly in need of attention.
Jones seems to cherish, and even sometimes milk, her lasting connection to Betty Draper in the cultural imagination. Although she has worked steadily since “Mad Men” wrapped (she appeared in sixty-three episodes of the Fox comedy “The Last Man on Earth” and recently starred in the Netflix figure-skating soap opera “Spinning Out”), Jones’s Instagram feed seems honest about—one might even say fixated on—the outsized shadow of the role that made her famous. In early 2019, she put up a picture of herself as Betty in restrictive mid-century lingerie, with the caption “Just put on your fucking girdle and go grab Wednesday people.”
Later that year, she posted a screenshot of Betty on her beloved puffy, pink Victorian fainting sofa, writing, “I wish I let myself faint more . . . really dramatic fainting spells need to be socially acceptable again.” She will often post grainy clips from “Mad Men” that she films directly from her television, implying that she regularly rewatches herself in the show, just for kicks.
