Bye-bye, Bert! Or: RIP, Bert Cooper [CAUTION: like-mad "Mad Men" spoiler alert]

The stars in the sky,
the moon on high,
they're great for you and me,
because they're free.

The moon belongs to everyone.
The best things in life are free.
The stars belong to everyone.
They gleam there for you and me.
The flowers in spring,
the robins that sing,
the sunbeams that shine,
they're yours, they're mine.
And love can come to everyone.
The best things in life are free.
The moon belongs to everyone.
The best things in life are free.

-- lyrics by Lew Brown and Buddy DeSylva,
music by Ray Henderson (1927)

"The moon mission connects to the story in various ways. People are reaching, and technology is reaching, but it's also become this kind of ironic turn that we're all sharing that together and yet it's also a sign of how separate we are."

-- Mad Men mastermind Matthew Weiner, about "Waterloo,"
Episode 7 of Season 7 (the "midseason finale")

"It was just a lovely way, a sweet way, for dear Matt to send me off."

-- Robert Morse, about Bert Cooper's unusual Mad Men adieu

"Finch is very smart, but let's not forget that he's now in advertising, and that does something to men's brains."

-- Bud Frump, about his nemesis J. Pierrepont Finch, in How to
Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (see clip below)

by Ken

I knew when I wrote about it originally that eventually we would have a clip of Bert Cooper bursting into song and dance in "Waterloo," the Season 7 "midseason finale" of Mad Men. And while I did my best to tiptoe around the crucial reality of the charming little production number that ensues, the crucial reality being that Bert has died -- shortly after watching with rapt fascination as Neil Armstrong landed on the moon -- and poor Don Draper, for whom things are not going at all well, is hallucinating this parting message from his now-departed boss-and-partner.

In an AMC blog Q-and-A posted following Bert's passing, Robert Morse tells how he got the news of his impending demise.

Matthew Weiner came to me and said, “Bobby, I want to talk to you… You’re going to pass away in this episode. I’m sorry.”

I said, “I perfectly understand.”

And he said, “By the way, I’ve always wanted to have you sing. That’s what I remember you from, all your Broadway and theater days. When I hired you, always, in the back of my mind, I wanted you to sing a song, but there was never a place to do it.” And then he came up with this idea. He said, “I am going to make you come back in the last shot in the picture and sing a song to Don.”

[Morse sings] “The moon belongs to everyone. The best things in life are free.”

They had this wonderful choreographer, Mary Ann Kellogg, whom I knew very well, and hired four or five beautiful dancers who would play secretaries… I dance with them and also sing to Don, and it’s a whole production. I went and learned the song, and I went into the studio and we recorded it with a huge orchestra. Then we rehearsed it on the set for a couple of days, away from everybody else.

Nobody knew what was going on… It was just a lovely way, a sweet way, for dear Matt to send me off.

Robert spoke in more detail in a Vanity Fair interview, including this (with the interviewer in boldface):

. . . We shot it on a Sunday, for six or seven hours. And I must say watching Jon Hamm watching Bobby—me—was incredibly touching.
Hamm was there while you were shooting it, for the reaction shots?
Absolutely. He was on the other side of the camera. He was who I was singing to. You’re singing the song to somebody, not just a warm body.
For me, it came across in the performance. I felt you connecting to Don—and to me, and presumably lots of other people in the audience.
Well that makes me feel good. [Laughs] Because that’s what it’s about—connecting. I really felt like the whole thing was a love letter, from Matt.
Maybe this is a silly question, but was it hard dancing in socks?
I wasn’t concerned about it, but other people were. They said, “Are you going to be able to dance in socks? That’s a pretty slippery floor up there, blah blah blah.” I said, “No problem.” I went up there one day and just walked around, slid, and it was not a problem.
Did they put some kind of no-skid material on the bottom of your socks, just in case?
They brought some, but I didn’t need it.
I particularly liked the last wave you gave, kind of a salute, as your office door shut. That was a sweet bit of business.
I must say, that was my touch. [Laughs]

There's an interesting "inside look" at "Waterloo" from Matthew Weiner and the Mad Men cast (it's the source of the "moon" quote from MW at the top of this post. I tried to embed it, and as happens often when I try to embed a non-YouTube clip, it proceeded to destroy the draft of this post, stripping out the line breaks. I once found a workaround for this, but I don't remember it, so you can catch it at the link, and while I try to fix the wounded post, I'll be cursing everyone involved, wishing them the most hideous, lingering deaths available to members of our species.


THE AMC INTERVIEWER FOLLOWED
UP WITH A GREAT QUESTION

Q: What’s it been like keeping Cooper’s death a secret?
A: For the past seven years, I haven’t been able to come home to my family and say anything about the show, because I’m not allowed and because they do not want to know! They want to see it every Sunday night. So think of this, my wife is going to be watching it this coming Sunday night with no idea and she’s going to see me pass away and she’s going to wonder what I’ve been doing for the last few weeks since we filmed it! Actually, I’ve been going down to visit the set because Matt said, “Please do. You’re going to get a script every week. You’re going to keep coming to the readings.”

Asked whether he's ever had an acting job last as long as his seven-year Mad Men run, Robert is momentarily taken aback.

Ohmygosh, you know, I never thought about it. But I doubt it. I’m very fortunate that I’ve had long runs on Broadway and dinner theater and stages across the country and at the Old Vic. But I’ve never had what might be called a seven-year run in any of it.

Asked about his own memories of the moon landing, Robert says:

Q: Do you remember watching the moon landing yourself? A: I think I was in New Hampshire at a friend’s cottage on Newfound Lake. We watched it on TV, just like everybody else. You know, I am the oldest one, I think, in the cast. I lived during all those years. At 80-plus years [if we go by Wikipedia, Robert turned 83 last month -- Ed.], I go back to the ’40s, the ’50s and the ’60s. I remember Madison Avenue. I remember all the advertising. I remember all of that.

IT'S HARD NOT TO BE HOPELESSLY
SENTIMENTAL ABOUT BOBBY MORSE

He has had what is by any standard, I think, a terrific career, and Matthew Weiner should be blessed for creating such a glorious late-career role to sort of book-end that career. But incredibly he was already 30 -- and hardly unknown in theatrical circles -- when How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying opened on Broadway in October 1961 and made him an instant megastar.

"Incredibly," because he looked maybe 20, as he did in the 1967 film version of How to Succeed, and as he did for maybe the next 30 or so years of that career. I could have seen him How to Succeed on Broadway, in the sense that it would have been physically possible, since we had just moved to NYC. But, well, I didn't. (Who knows that at age 12 you're going to make foolish decisions you'll regret all your life? When the film version opened, at Radio City Music Hall, you better believe I got to it. I loved Radio City Music Hall as a movie theater.) Luckily, the film captures a good deal of what must have been one of the immense performances since, well, since there have been theatrical performances.

We already saw the film rendering of the stupendous "Brotherhood of Man" production number in my earlier post -- and heard more of Bobby Morse as J. Pierrepont Finch in an April-May 2011 series of tributes to the great Frank Loesser (start with "Frank Loesser pays his distinctive sorts of tribute to the brotherhood of man"). You would have thought that Bobby-as-Ponty would be one of those performances that would intimidate future contenders, but that combination of eerie innocence sitting atop all-consuming corruption turns out to be easier to make work than I at least would imagine; Matthew Broderick and Daniel Radcliffe have made a fine thing of the role on Broadway.

But it's not the same. Bobby M was a superhero of a stage performer and also a great singer, not an actor who can sort of get through a tune, and Loesser bequeathed Ponty a handful of great songs. So I thought we'd go out with this one.

FRANK LOESSER: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying: "I Believe in You"


Robert Morse, vocal; Original Broadway Cast recording, Elliot Lawrence, cond. RCA-BMG, recorded Oct. 22, 1961

Now I've done some blunt editing here, though by "editing" all I mean is that I've isolated the song from its context. And I don't think there's any question that it's a stupendously great song, and a uniquely inspiring one. Except that, as written, it doesn't aim for quite the sort of inspiration one might imagine. Here it is from the film:

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