Originally appeared on E! Online
When January Jones gave birth to her son Xander Dane Jones in September 2011, she wasn’t mad at the men in her life. But she still didn’t want them in the room.
“My brother-in-law and my dad were next door. I only wanted women with me,” the Emmy-nominated actor told the U.K.’s Red in 2017. “Female energy. And I was embarrassed — your body does all these crazy things.”
Not part of the process, in either room, was Xander’s biological father, whose identity Jones has never revealed.
Crossed off the list of possibilities at the time was her ex Jason Sudeikis, whom she had dated off and on in 2010 after meeting when she hosted “Saturday Night Live.”
Asked if he had any comment about Jones’ pregnancy, Sudeikis told the Washington Post at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April 2011, “Yes, but no.”
The guessing game didn’t end there, but as Jones stressed to the New York Times in 2013, “That’s my son’s business. It’s not the public’s business.”
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Invoking one of the most famous-yet-private stars around, she added, “Jack Nicholson once told me: ‘You should never give your personal life away, otherwise people will pick you apart. They’ll never believe in your character.'”
And “Mad Men’s” Betty Draper was nothing if not discreet.
“Women should have lots of secrets,” Jones said. “It’s our right to have secrets. Otherwise, what would we write in our memoirs?”
The speculation eventually quieted down, though not before Jones left Los Angeles for a more remote canyon enclave in the San Fernando Valley. “Photographers don’t follow us up there,” she noted to Red, “so Xander has a pretty normal life now.”
And the now-47-year-old has stayed the course when it comes to protecting her family’s privacy.
Jones shared the rarest of photos of Xander on her Instagram July 28, two days after she brought the 13-year-old to the 18th Annual SeaChange Summer Party benefit for Oceana. And even though mother and son stepped-and-repeated for pictures at the event, she still used a heart sticker to shield his face on social media.
While she considered hiring a “manny” in 2017 to up the male energy quotient in Xander’s life, Jones — who at the time was a couple years removed from dating her “Last Man Standing” costar Will Forte — said he was around plenty of guys.
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Xander “has a lot of bro time with the neighbor dads and my dad, who is super young,” she told Red. And her male friends “want to be around him because he’s such a fun kid.”
But really, Jones said, “It’s good to have strong women around a man. To teach him to respect women.”
Needless to say, she wasn’t holding auditions to fill the role of Xander’s dad in her household, noting that people were always trying to set her up and she wasn’t interested.
Though Jones admittedly didn’t originally envision being a single mom.
“I thought I would marry the boyfriend I was with in my early 20s and we would have loads of babies,” she told Violet Grey in 2018. “But then he cheated on me, and I was like, ‘Oh.’ After a series of disappointments, I’ve just gotten more and more comfortable with myself, where I don’t need a partner to be happy.”
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