The family used to be loaded, he says, but Pete’s “grandfather dropped it all in ’29.” The Campbells have, however, managed to hold on to their social connections. Much later in “New Amsterdam,” when Don and Roger unsuccessfully try to get Pete fired for pitching an alternative campaign to Bethlehem Steel without permission, Bert Cooper fills in more details. The Campbells are upper-crust by name but not by tax bracket. We’re given to understand that while Andrew controls his household’s purse strings, the purse actually belongs to his wife’s family. They can’t afford it without the help of Pete’s father, Andrew (Christopher Allport), an embittered blowhard. Trudy (Alison Brie) swings by to show Pete an apartment that she hopes will be their first home as a couple. He even came up with the concept of direct marketing: “Turns out it already existed, but I arrived at it independently!” He says that when he arrived at the agency, his bosses assigned him to wine and dine clients because he was “good with people.” Nobody had ever told him that before, and now he wonders if it’s true. Pete tells Don he used to carry a notebook full of ideas. He keeps hearing his father’s voice telling him it’s not a job for a white man. In a scene where Don jumps on Pete for failing to prepare the Bethlehem Steel rep to accept their campaign, Pete wants to be accepted as a creative person, not just a man who wines and dines clients. That’s funny, because Pete is a WASP whose people have owned the United States since the 1600s, but still he wants everything: women he’s told he can’t have titles his bosses don’t think he deserves. ![]() He is, so to speak, a man without a country. ![]() ![]() Pete Campbell doesn’t seem comfortable anywhere: not on Sterling Cooper’s main floor, not in his own office, not at home with Trudy, not with his parents or hers.
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