Barbara Walters: The Original Peggy Olson
By the time a bright-eyed secretary named Peggy Olson walked through the fictional doors of the Madison Avenue advertising agency Sterling Cooper in 1960, one very real female pioneer was already hard at work down the street.
Like her Mad Men counterpart, the 84-year-old broadcasting legend Barbara Walters, who retired from television this week, got her start as a secretary for a Manhattan advertising agency. And though Walters' rise from the secretarial pool began much earlier and took much longer than Peggy's, it was no less dramatic.
It was 1951. Fresh out of Sarah Lawrence College, the 21-year-old daughter of a millionaire nightclub owner did what many bright, privileged female graduates of her generation did: Enroll in speedwriting school. But, as Walters confesses in her memoir, Audition, her shorthand skills "didn't get me my first job. My legs did."
Her first boss was the head of a small advertising firm who, after following her up the stairs at an employment agency, sized her up and hired her on the spot; "standard operating procedure in the 50s," according to Walters.
For a year, like Peggy Olson (Mad Men's Elisabeth Moss), Walters typed letters and took dictation as a young, single secretary in New York City. From the start, she, too, had to fend off the unwanted advances of a "pink-faced" boss, which, in her case, resulted in her leaving the firm after he became too "amorous."