Matthew Weiner Illustration by Tom Bachtell

At P. J. Clarke’s, the Third Avenue saloon that has bestowed its gaslit consolations since 1884, Matthew Weiner ordered the chicken paillard, then laughed. “I’ve never had anything but chicken here,” he said. “And my last drink of the night.” Weiner frequented Clarke’s when he wrote for “The Sopranos.” As the creator of “Mad Men”—whose final, seven-episode run begins next month on AMC—he brought the cast there after shooting the pilot, for a bittersweet celebration. They doubted the show would make it to air. Weiner, a watchful yet voluble man in a gray suit jacket, blue vest, and tailored jeans, confided, “Jim Croce’s ‘New York’s Not My Home’ played that night on the jukebox, and I felt like, ‘I can fake it, but I’m a bumpkin here.’ ”

“Mad Men,” of course, now stands as the definitive portrait of New York in the sixties, a giddy carrousel of assignations and Martinis that becomes a manic yet melancholy whirligig of assassinations and divorces. (Along the way, Pete and Peggy go to Clarke’s and she does the twist.) Weiner, who grew up in Baltimore and Los Angeles, but who has studied Manhattan’s folkways more carefully than Jane Jacobs, said, “My childhood, 1975, was the year the city nearly went bankrupt. So the show anticipates that—starting around 1963, it gets louder and louder, cruder and cruder, more and more jackhammers and crime and strife, the brownstones getting torn down and turned into co-ops, the coldness of capitalism. The office on Lexington where we filmed the pilot was gutted within months”—he broke off with a laugh. “All this stuff makes me sound old!” He’s forty-nine; his son Marten, who played the neighbor boy, Glen, is now a college freshman.

The waitress, motherly but no-nonsense, eyed Weiner’s barely nibbled meal: “How are you doing there?”

“Fantastic!” he reassured her. Then he remarked that viewers, too, resist change. “At the end of Season 3, when Don gets kicked out of the house and Betty is on the airplane with her lover and her baby to go to Reno, the audience was asking, ‘Are they getting divorced?’—it’s like, ‘How much clearer could I be?’ And people said a lot of things about Megan, and I realized, a year later, Oh, it’s not about her—they just wanted Don to go back to Betty. We’re all childlike when it comes to entertainment.”

So what was the show really about, in retrospect? Weiner threw up his hands: “I could never sum anything up, but . . . human privacy and loneliness and distance, and trying to overcome that with love? Most successful, powerful people have the problem Don has—they give us a lot, because they want to win us over, but they never fill the hole.” He looked up. “What do you think it’s about?”

Bad parenting. “Oh,” he said, crestfallen. “No. No. That certainly wasn’t the focus.” He frowned. “Pete and Trudy are trying to be good parents. Are Don and Betty bad parents? I don’t think Betty should have had kids, but I think Don is actually a pretty good dad, if you allow for his generation. That was a comment I’d get a lot—‘Don reminds me of my dad. I never know what he’s thinking.’ ”

“Still picking, dear?” the waitress asked, and Weiner put a protective hand over the flattened chicken. He went on, “Look, there is definitely some bad parenting in the show, but there’s no drama in good parenting. And plenty of the bad-parenting moments didn’t come from me. You hear the stories in the writers’ room—they laugh when they tell them—and you realize, Oh, you became a writer because you told a joke when you were five and everybody stopped hitting you.”

He talked about other matters for a while, the clamor thinning as the regulars began to depart. Then he said, “I’m always going to be defensive when I hear the word ‘bad.’ Also, I’ve talked a lot about how the show is autobiographical, but I did not have the same childhood as Don Draper, thank God.” A busboy reached for Weiner’s plate. “No, I’m still eating,” he declared, not eating.

“Here’s the glimmers of my childhood,” he said. “When Grandma Pauline babysits Sally and says she’s going to send her to bed without any dinner, and ‘You’ll watch the sunset from your bedroom window. It’s the saddest thing in the world.’ I was punished a lot as a child, and I remember being in trouble, in the summer, and looking out my window and seeing all the other kids running around . . . ” He laughed softly, and when the waitress came by again he smiled up at her. “Yes, I’m done now. Thank you.” ♦