Jon Hamm's generosity in this anecdote may overwhelm you

Jon Hamm, "Mad Men's" Don Draper, was recently sitting at a table at the Beverly Hilton's restaurant with me, fascinated with his cola. The wait staff had done the paper-on-the-straw thing ass-backwards - the top of the straw was exposed; the wrapper was on the part of the straw in the drink and rapidly disintegrating into pulp.

Hamm didn't complain; he didn't even send the drink back for another one even though he was being charged a couple of bucks for 3 cents worth of beverage. Instead, he seemed sort of amused, like he was on a little fishing expedition, using his straw to retrieve the soggy, shredded paper and depositing it on his bread plate. He marveled at how much of it there was - "How many straws are in this thing?" he pondered, fishing out some more wet paper. "I think I got most of it. The rest will be duly ingested."

Toying with his drink may have been more interesting than fielding my questions, I suppose. (The full story will appear in Sunday's Daily News and, depending on how adventurous the folks at LA.com are feeling, maybe even there, too.)

Hamm compared/contrasted working on "Mad Men" to just about every other project he had worked on. "You hope to think that everything you do is going to be above average, and a lot of the stuff is out of your control - there are many cooks who come together to create a show," he said. "The difference with this, I guess, was that from the pilot script and then talking to Matthew, I had a sense that that this skews much more closely to what I personally find exciting and this happens to be shared with everyone down the line.

"Everybody's on the same page, and it's that kind of perfect storm that rarely if ever happens, because of the nature of the business. There are just too many people who have to have an opinion. We were very fortunate that AMC doesn't have four levels of bureaucracy that develops television shows that everyone has to sign off on, where everyone has to have a note and not having a note means you're not paying attention - it doesn't mean that you like it; it means that you're expendable, basically. It's been very lucky so far."

When the interview was over, Hamm stood and, with a generosity rare in successful Hollywood types, pointed to the pile of wet tissue and drolly said, "You can have that - take as much as you want."

- "Mad Men" returns for its second season Sunday at 10 p.m. on AMC.