Yu Tsai

Published in the March 2012 issue, with a special fold-out cover — like so

Little-known fact: Jon Hamm owns four eagles. They sit on separate perches in his backyard. Four species of eagle: golden, tawny, Spanish Imperial, and short-toed snake.

Previously unknown: Every morning, these eagles are fed, then rotated by a robed assistant whose sole duty is to judge which of these regal birds looks most like Jon Hamm on that particular day before placing said eagle on the left-most perch. The remaining eagles are also ranked by their resemblance that day, from left to right. This puts the eagle that looks the least like Jon Hamm on a given day in shadow once the sun goes behind Hamm's enormous seven-story garage. Amazingly, in the twelve years Hamm's lived here, the same eagle has sat in the shadows on consecutive days only three times. Incredible.

Incidentally, rumors that The Music Man was based on the early life of Jon Hamm are entirely untrue.

Partially true fact: Jon Hamm once taught high school English at the John Burroughs School in St. Louis, his alma mater. Reputedly, Hamm was known for reading-lists comprised exclusively of Ukrainian lit (leaning heavily on Prokhasko's The UnSimple and Volodymyr Drozd's Everything All Over Again) and for a grim insistence that students embrace a system of writing he developed called "think drafting," which was later adopted by both Otterbein and Bard.

Surely you already know this: After one year of teaching high school, Jon Hamm left his hometown. In a letter to this author, Hamm described the departure thusly:

I left St. Louis with $150 in my pocket and a wallet full of dangerously overdrawn credit cards. I drove out from St. Louis over the course of four or five days (staying on friends' couches in various western states, as well as on the side of the road in Carlin, Nevada) in a 1986 Toyota Corolla that would regularly blow a radiator-fan fuse and overheat.

What you may not know: This Corolla featured an incredible talking glove box that today is accepted as one of the world's first stand-alone nav systems. The voice? Hamm's, of course, an ironic precursor to his current role as the voice of Mercedes-Benz commercials. Reports say the primitive system featured three commands — "Get going," "Turn here," and "Better bed down for the night" — issued at specific intervals from the tinny speaker of a cassette player. Hamm is known to sometimes demonstrate the system by repeatedly jabbing the play button with his index finger. (Interesting tidbit: Jon Hamm has two index fingers on his right hand.) Everyone says it really no longer sounds like Hamm at all.

In 2007, almost fifteen long, hardworking years after his arrival in Los Angeles by way of the Corolla, he won the role of Don Draper on the surprise television hit Mad Men. Contrary to popular belief, the audition was not the one in which Hamm repeatedly field-dressed a self-inflicted chest wound as show creator Matthew Weiner callously noshed on the rugelach Hamm himself had crafted for the occasion from a Pillsbury piecrust slow-baked in an earthen oven. In truth, Jon Hamm returned to the audition seven times over several weeks. But there was no pastry.

Yu Tsai

Yu Tsai

Procrustes said "Knowledge is pain," I think. And there is nothing we do not know about Jon Hamm. The guy has no secrets. He's exceedingly polite. Generous to a fault. Big sports fan. A beer drinker. He has never wounded, libeled, bilked, conned, swindled, double-crossed, misled, counterfeited, fleeced, or shanghaied anybody. Not according to the Internet, anyway. Still, it's troublesome unwinding the mythology of his goodness, working to find something new or dark in the guy who's seasoned Don Draper over the course of five long years as a literary amalgam, a survey of twentieth-century professional white male protagonists, transforming Draper from a swarthy Gatsby to the jumpy, half-defeated Babbitt who ended season four, and moving onward now perhaps toward a soused Henderson the Rain King. At the same time, Hamm carved a clear-edged, distinct, almost cartoon-comic profile of himself outside the dim offices of Sterling, Draper, Whatever It Is Now — popping up on 30 Rock, rocking the stage while hosting Saturday Night Live (YouTube: Hamm Sergio), and appearing in movies as excellent as The Town and as goofily awful as The Day the Earth Stood Still. Now he's produced a movie called Friends with Kids, written and directed by one of the stars, his girlfriend, Jennifer Westfeldt. And he's wide open, up-front about all of it. No secrets. He says he's not leaving us, he's not quitting. Quite the opposite. There's still much Hamm to be had.

By the by, I just found out Procrustes didn't say that thing about knowledge. Procrustes, it turns out, was the highwayman of Attica. If you stayed at his house, which I believe was along the highway somewhere, he'd let you sleep in this special bed, which he claimed fit anyone who slept there. But once you put your head down, he'd either stretch you on the rack or chop off your legs to make you fit the bed.

Maybe you'd guess: Jon Hamm sleeps in a king-size bed. The cool part? This bed is held aloft, eight feet above the tea-soaked mahogany floor Hamm installed himself, by a grid of 144 jets of oxygen-enriched, Chilean-government-certified, Patagonian-quality breathing air. At night, for laughs, Hamm sometimes rides the bed in a crouch, in a private tribute to Disney's Aladdin. In this way Jon Hamm fits the bed.

It was Jung who said "knowledge is pain."

You have to stretch Jon Hamm. Or it's fun to, anyway, because the man is so straight-up, and what's said about him is wrapped in assumption and projection. As for what you're reading: What he says, and what I witness, is true. For the most part. I mean, it should be obvious. The rest? The more incredible stuff? Intuition. Coloration. Hyperbole. Do I exaggerate? Yes. But the character he plays is so grand, and his true self so modest and small, that you have to stretch Jon Hamm and chop off Don Draper's legs to fit the same bed.

Unequivocally true: Today, Jon Hamm and I are going to play golf.

His house sits close to the street, maybe thirty feet from the curb, maybe eighteen feet above it. It's perched way up there, so much so that you are forced to look up, even when you're right in front of the thing. Big porch. One narrow channel of shadow, his driveway, runs back along the left side. In back, there's a big, Shasta McNasty-looking Mercedes C 63 AMG, its trunk jawed open to the sunlight. His golf clubs are already in there.

It's a regular old house, maybe not that old, a little isolated, though it's on a pretty firmly packed boulevard in Los Feliz, houses pressed against houses, tiny, well-manicured courtyards, patches, and patios tucked into the mountain base. The light in the windows? Coolly eastern, like Connecticut. The art? Like anyone's house, really — some of it is nicer than a lot of it. There's a pile of newspapers on the couch. You can tell a woman left them there because they are stacked just so, like on a movie set. Jon Hamm was not reading the paper. He hasn't looked at a paper since he left St. Louis. The shocking fact is Jon Hamm cannot read.

When Hamm answers the door, he is an engine of the moment — grabbing a quick handshake, finger dangling a pair of golf shoes, searching the room first for a hat, then for his glasses, then for paper to write his girlfriend a note. He asks, "You want anything? Water?" then produces a three-quarters-full glass of L.A. tap in a Depression-era kitchen cup before disappearing for a pen, sock-sliding the hardwood. Etched in the cup, in letters so small they could not be properly captured by a camera phone, there seems to be a tiny phrase: Jon Hamm's lips were here. Turn the glass and more letters appear to flash in the sunlight, shooting indifferently past the rookery of eagles. And here, they glint, and here.

There is a note on the counter: Someone has taken his dog. "I have Cora," it reads. "I'll take special care of her." Jon Hamm's dog may be in danger. Then the note reads, "xxx." The effect? Chilling. There is no mention of ransom.

Hamm appears suddenly, silently, in the kitchen doorway wearing a Cardinals hat, bill properly frayed, without the least bit of tilt atop his huge head. He is calm. "You wanna get going?" he says, jerking open the door to the backyard. The golden eagle, third from the left on this Saturday, spreads its wings as if to greet him. In this way eagles thermoregulate themselves.

Standing at the trunk of his car, he asks, "You want to throw your clubs in here?" Then he looks at my hands, which are empty.

I explain that I'll be playing with rentals. Hamm lifts one heavy Draper brow and grits down on his own teeth. Sympathy. "That can be rough," he says, nestling the trunk closed, turning into full profile for me. And I'm sorry, but Jon Hamm really does look like that Spanish Imperial eagle to my immediate left. This is really more description than metaphor. He's poetry. Eagle poetry. Dark eyes, brightened skyward, shoulders flaring.

So much fable. So many lies. Surely Jon Hamm can read. How else could he have taught high school kids? The letters on the drinking glass, the dog ransom note, that pile of newspapers?

Yu Tsai

The crucial facts of Jon Hamm at this juncture:

Jon Hamm is a simple guy. His pants fit. His shirt hangs on him like a taut sail. No visible logos except perhaps on the face of his watch.

Jon Hamm would make an excellent roommate or best man.

Jon Hamm is jovial and quick with a compliment.

Jon Hamm is a decent driver, fast but not unsafe, stopping his excellent car when he needs to take a longer look at the map he's printed out. We have a twilight tee time, nine holes at the really lovely Malibu Golf Club. He makes quick work of the map. (Note to self: Jon Hamm can too read!) "I've been by here a thousand times," he says, looking back over his shoulder. "You always see golf courses out of the corner of your eye. I always worry I dreamt them there."

Normally, like from day to day, Jon Hamm plays public golf courses. No warm-up, no stretching. He is the kind of athlete who would take to a batting cage or a Skee-Ball ramp with the same dispassionate muscle he gives to golf. He rips the ball on every swing, hardest just at the very last, as if he remembers what he's capable of doing only at the very moment he does it.

Like good golfers, Jon Hamm is fast. Fast to the tee, addressing the ball without a hitch, hitting without a practice swing. He doesn't even talk much about the balls he hits, except to curse them occasionally. Good golfer.

He has scouted the course, like the good egg he seems compelled to be. We wheel onto the first fairway and he says, "Joel Murray plays with me a lot. He's been out here many times, and he said watch out for the greens." I admit I have no idea who Joel Murray is.

"He's on the show. He plays an older guy."

I tell him I know the show. Know it well. "Which?"

"Freddy Rumsen," he says.

"The drunk," I say, which is of course not enough; this is Mad Men, after all. "The guy who pissed his pants!" I say a little too loudly even here, on the fairway, 230 yards from anyone. Hamm tilts his head, as if wishing the words away. "The account exec!" I add, as if I have any idea what that really means. This is the only moment of the entire day that Draperesque disappointment — with the world and all its glories — creeps into Hamm's demeanor. Although I'm merely referencing a plot point in season two, it really does sound like I'm being hard on the guy. Me with my rentals, stealing time from Jon Hamm on his Saturday — suddenly, and strangely, I feel like one of Don Draper's doofus clients from out of town.

Jon Hamm reads every putt for me. He's good at it, too.

Further fact: Jon Hamm's willing to bet on golf. And he's perfectly willing to drill the guy playing with rental clubs. Hole after hole, Hamm does that guy one better, flat out robs the guy forthwith. Whatever Freddy Rumsen told Jon Hamm, the pants pisser was right. Hamm takes down seven skins plus a little bit of junk. Ten bucks, paid out at the clubhouse. Hamm raises the bill and waves to an imaginary crowd. He blows me a kiss with my ten bucks.

"Screw you," I say, "and Freddy Rumsen, too." Hamm pretends not to hear me. He's too busy making fake roars from a fake gallery.

Trust me: When Jon Hamm talks about the St. Louis Cardinals, his face happily divides into the components of angular male handsomeness — chin, chin dimples, ruddy jaw, cheekbones, dark black eyes like a falcon's or, better yet, an obscure snake-hunting eagle's. Oh, why describe? Why winnow toward the accurate? He's impossible, because he looks good and he looks like he is good, too. He dangles victory from his fingers, as if he had a key fob for every circumstance, as if his whole world started with an on button that works only when he is proximate. He treats good-looking the way you treat your favorite sweater: He leaves it on without thinking about it. He throws it on the chair next to his bed at night and knows where it'll be in the morning.

The thought of the Cardinals triggers an incredible chemical reaction in the ketones of his blood, which causes him to glow slightly red while forcing his eyes to roll back in his head, where his psyche allows him to watch Lance Berkman highlights on the back side of his eyelids. And yet in the aforementioned letter from Jon Hamm to this author, he responds to the question "How much do you love the Cardinals?" with a cloudy understatement for illustration.

"Someone recently made the comparison," he writes, "of saying the world's biggest Dodger fan in L. A. is pretty much equivalent to the average Cardinal fan in St. Louis. And I would only partly disagree with that exaggeration." It's funny — it's as if Jon Hamm is incapable of exaggeration or uninterested in it. He says just enough — maybe not enough — and yet you get it.

Yu Tsai

After eating our way through several small plates at the clubhouse, we drive home from the golf course through the black net of the California night. His car, his golf clubs, his watch: He's willing to admit they came gratis, gifts or promotional deals. He shrugs like a guy who took a shower by walking through the rain. "I drove a lot of lousy cars in my day," he says, and somehow it is a perfectly good explanation. He likes the AMG, naturally. Its engine was assembled by a single person, who somehow put his signature on the block. "You ever looked for the stamp?" I ask. Hamm purses his lips then; the modesty enzyme trickles into the forward part of his cerebellum, making it so that he wants to fit the bed right then and there. "It's down in there somewhere," he assures me. Then he begins talking about his work with Mercedes.

His voice, resonant and liquid, assigns itself to making me understand that he appreciates what he has. "I'm happy to be working with a company like this, where all they care about is excellence. I'm a company guy. Good company, too." Jon Hamm favors some alt-country and dusty rockabilly. He has something to say about every song. Some little review, some fact, some tweak of trivia. This stuff blends together, the seat of the car grips and releases my shoulders on the turns, some cowboy sings as we squeeze down out of the valley.

I will admit that in the dark silence I close my eyes for a moment. Not out of boredom, certainly. At first I assume it must be the cross-country flight, the golf, the crudo-and-beer pairing at the clubhouse. Or maybe it was the comforting tenor of Jon Hamm's voice. But then I realize it's that Jon Hamm already fits the bed of normalcy, so much so that I let go of the interview, stop trying to think of things to say. This is the biggest compliment I know how to give a celebrity.

"I rented a Camaro at the airport," I tell him, snapping to. "I figured we could race to the course."

The thought of this seems to make Hamm happy. "I like American muscle," he says. "I really like the Camaro."

"Great ride," I say. "Lousy rear visibility."

He concurs. We trade notes.

At a stoplight, near the freeway entrance, I ask if he wants to drive it, the Camaro, after we get back to his place. He big-smiles the thought, says he would, but there are parties ahead this evening, other obligations. Then he just turns and asks, "You wanna drive this the rest of the way?" I do. What I don't want is him thinking I was angling to get behind the wheel with my offer about the Camaro. I say no. Jon Hamm won't have it. He insists I drive the Mercedes. "Truth is, it's not my car," he says. "This car just happened to me. Drive it. Please."

At a gas station just off Highway 101, he nozzles the gas, hands me the fob, and leaves me to it as he departs to use the john. I take a picture of the car, sit in the driver's seat, nudge the satellite radio, and wait for Jon Hamm.

What would I tell people about him? People always ask if they're short — movie stars often are. But without Hamm directly in front of me, I can't really remember if he tops me at six feet. He occupies a normal amount of space on the golf cart, at the barstool, behind the wheel. Would I call him a nice guy? He certainly isn't Don Draper, not most of the time, although the Don sometimes peeks through him. Hamm's disturbances, like Draper's, feel intensely private. He's mentioned the death of his mother, whom he lived with until he was ten. And also the death of his father, who died when he was twenty. I wouldn't be the first person to say he seems pained about his missing parents in the same way Draper does. If he's such a good guy, he'll know I have to ask. I've failed to tape much of anything. We were two men playing golf; there's a lot of everything and nothing in that.

In his letter Hamm commented on the parental parallels: "I think the sort of 'misplaced childhood' sense is probably the only thing about 'Don Draper' that I do have in common. I can't really delve too deeply into the psychoanalysis of it, as I would be underqualified and oversharing, but I suppose that sensibility resonated at some point during the audition process, and may lend the character or my portrayal thereof some deeper meaning. Wholly unconsciously on my part."

In the car I think, Okay, it's all okay, I'll ask him to respond to a letter with a letter, as follow-up, as if it were part of my standard due diligence. I haven't even asked him about the new season of Mad Men.

To answer the question: Jon Hamm is a hell of a nice guy.

No exaggeration: Jon Hamm takes forever, long enough that I start to think he's snuck out the other side of the gas station for a cigarette. "I don't smoke," he told me on the first hole that day. I'd asked because, well, it's Mad Men after all, and Don Draper is one of the most prolific, most talented smokers in television history. "That's official," he declared.

I don't know what he meant by that last bit, whether that was a wink and a nod or a directive. Maybe that's just the way Hamm wants to represent Hamm. The official, smaller, neater, more risk-averse version of the younger Hamm.

Minutes tick by. I start the car, listen to an entire Rush tune, volume cranked. "Limelight." Hamm does not reappear. It's like he was never with me. I couldn't tell you what he was wearing, without looking at a picture I took of him lining up an eagle putt.

When I picture him, I realize that the world — or that part of the world that thinks about people like Jon Hamm — has edged him like a lawn: same basic space, much cleaner lines. What he is, I decide right there and then — under the sodium lights, in the throbbing clutch of his sedan, beneath the bug-laden, bat-heavy night sky — is Paul Bunyan. There's hyperbole in the way the world regards the man he pretends to be. And there's a kind of tall tale in the grinding strength of his normalcy.

Yu Tsai

Finally, Hamm emerges from the gas station. It turns out he's a giant, without the grotesquerie, who ducks and turns to clear his shoulders through the door. I think he may well be seven feet tall at the shoulder, with a well-proportioned head. In his arms? An unlikely feast: a flagon of ale, a loaf of spherical Welsh bread, and a side of roast boar, a beast — he later explains — slain in these hills by the owner of this gas station and Hamm himself that very morning, with a crossbow. He has a stewpot hooked across his elbow: carrots, yanked from the ruddy turf behind the car wash moments after the successful kill. Archer's gloves stretching to his elbows, leather apron cinched at his waist, falconer's mitt at the ready, Hamm's chest is bejeweled in the familiar ritual layering of gold pendants passed from one great actor to the next: Tyrone Power, Cary Grant, Jon Hamm.

"I got you some water," he says, once he's in the passenger seat. He is apparently versed in that part of the man code that says when you go into the mini-mart, you come out with a little something for the people in the car.

"Thanks," I say. And then, "I feel like I should ask you about the upcoming season of Mad Men."

"I can't tell you anything," he says. "I can't tell anyone. None of us can." He smiles, bites down, showing only his bottom teeth this time. It's a little like delight. Then he hooks his thumb toward the backseat of the Mercedes, upon which sits — I shit you not — a stack of scripts representing the entirety of Mad Men season five, which he has just finished shooting. "I got a phone call while I was in there," says Hamm. "I was worried you'd dig around." He widens his eyes. "Those are my only real secrets."

So, having failed in my duties as an investigator, having left myself without a scoop on so much as the comings and goings of January Jones in episode one, scene one, I'm forced to admit to Jon Hamm that I'd been listening to the radio, cranking it, really, pitching the lyrics of "Limelight" as high and hard as my throat would allow, wondering if by some miracle my working knowledge of the song might not provide me some particular window into Hamm's fame. Geddy Lee once said:

Living on a lighted stage

Approaches the unreal

For those who think and feel

In touch with some reality

Beyond the gilded cage...

Living in a fish-eye lens,

Caught in the camera eye.

I have no heart to lie,

I can't pretend a stranger

Is a long-awaited friend.

Just download it. The song fits Hamm. Hamm fits the song. Turns out even he thinks so. As if to prove it, he gently removes a dagger from his belt right there at the gas station, drawing the blade swiftly across his palm, then turns the deadly sharp knife over to me. Soon, we will be brothers.

That's when I tell him he really does look like an eagle.

THINGS ABOUT JON HAMM THAT ARE TRUE:

• Jonathan Daniel Hamm was born in St. Louis on March 10, 1971.

• He played Winnie the Pooh in a first-grade play.

• In high school he met Paul Rudd, who had a crush on a friend of Hamm's. Hamm constantly beat Rudd at Trivial Pursuit.

• Around 1995 he taught drama at his old high school. One of his students was Ellie Kemper, who plays the receptionist on The Office.

• Hamm started dating his girlfriend/producing partner, Jennifer Westfeldt, after the premiere of The Object of My Affection, starring Rudd, who was by then his good friend.

• In 2002 he appeared in the Mel Gibson movie We Were Soldiers as Captain Matt Dillon. The actual Matt Dillon did not appear in the film.

• Hamm was credited as "Writer" on Channel 4 News during a scene in Anchorman.

• Something called emotionswithjonhamm.tumblr.com exists.

• He had an early recurring TV role on The Division, on Lifetime. One of the only male cast members, he has referred to the show as "ten tits and a dick."

• Hamm auditioned for the role of Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock.

• Last fall he narrated a commemorative film about the World Series champions, his beloved Cardinals.

• He will make his directing debut on April 1 with the second episode of Mad Men's fifth season.

—Steve Ciccarelli

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