Biography
In the show's backstory, Pete Campbell was born in New York City to an upper class WASP family. In the show's pilot episode, he has just turned 26, which makes his birth year 1934. His mother, Dorothy Dyckman Campbell, is a member of the elite Dykeman family /ˈdaɪkmən/, owners of most of upper Manhattan prior to 1929. Pete's great(x10?)-grandfather was the Dutch immigrant Silas Dyckman. Pete's grandfather loses most of his property in the stock market crash of 1929, and his father Andrew Campbell eventually squanders the remainder of the family fortune before his death, yet Pete's upbringing is in line with many children of his social status. As a youth he attends The Buckley School and Deerfield Academy and spends summers at his parents' estate on Fishers Island, as well as at exclusive country clubs in the Hamptons and Newport. Pete was in a fraternity during his college years at Dartmouth College that had a rivalry with Psi Upsilon.
In the show Pete has a constantly strained relationship with his parents, who are emotionally distant and who disapprove of their son's decision to go into advertising. In Season Two, after his father dies in a plane crash over Jamaica Bay, Pete is unable to cry. Upon their father's death, Pete's older brother Bud examines their father's finances in relation to their inheritance from the family trust. Bud discovers that their father depleted the money put into the trust through years of a lavish lifestyle. When Bud tells Pete the news, they both seem unsurprised by their father's actions. Following this, Pete states that he in fact hated his father.
Later in Season Two, Pete reveals that he also hates his mother. Bud also resents his parents, but is treated and regarded by both parents as the favored son. Displaying a mutual resentment of their mother, Bud and Pete reminisce over Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope, loosely based on the story of Leopold and Loeb. When Pete's mother suggests that any possibility of Pete and his wife adopting a child would be unacceptable and lead to his being disinherited, Pete retaliates by telling her that their life savings have been squandered by his father. This originally was intended as a secret that Pete and Bud meant to keep from her. In Season six, when Pete's mother is forced to live with him in his apartment, he takes pleasure in exploiting her developing Alzheimer's disease to control her.
In the first season, Pete often expresses a desire to be treated seriously in business and displays a genuine knack for it but is unwilling to put in work and seems overly willing to get by on his family name. He can also appear spiteful and cold to people he feels have mistreated him in some way.
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