Berg and Wagner also went out together at night in Boston. Backup infielder Boze Berger, Berg’s roommate for a time, once joined them. “He was very fastidious when he ate,” says Berger. “He ate everything on his plate in a certain order.” That night the idiosyncrasy was taken to an extreme. First the three men ate spaghetti at an Italian restaurant. Then they moved to the Union Oyster House for oyster stew. Finally, it was on to a steakhouse for beef. Berg paid for everyone. “When he’d invite you out, he paid for dinner,” says Berger. “He was generous.”
These men were exceptions and they knew it. Although he didn’t bluntly say as much, Berg’s demeanor made it implicit that he discouraged invitations from his teammates. “None of us would ever think of saying to Berg, ‘We’re going to see Gary Cooper in a show, do you want to come?’ ” says Billy Werber. During the afternoon, Berg was a ballplayer. What happened after that wasn’t anyone’s business, something he made clear in the jocular, unflinching way that is appreciated in clubhouses. “Tom Daly and I ran into him on the street one night with some girl wrapped up in silver fox fur,” says Jack Wilson. “He said ‘hello’ and kept right on going. The next day in front of Berg’s locker Tom said to me, ‘How are you, Mr. Wilson?’ I said, ‘Just fine,’ and walked right on by. Berg said, ‘You sons of bitches. I have to put up with you until six. After that, I don’t have to put up with you.’ ” Wilson took it in stride. He often joked with Berg about such behavior. “I used to kid him that he was a spy,” he says.
Not that the Red Sox were scratching their heads in unison, wondering what Moe Berg was doing with his time. Most ballplayers were accustomed to Berg’s ways and didn’t think much about them. But Ted Williams noticed. “Secret,” Williams called Berg, or “the Mystery Man.” Neither nickname stuck. With Moe Berg, nothing did.
EVEN WITH A patron like Cronin, it was a tenuous time for Berg. He was a man nearing forty, trying to hold on in a boy’s game. That old chestnut about needing to lose something to realize how much you liked it didn’t apply. Berg knew, had known for years, that baseball was the life he wanted. Now in Boston he’d found the ideal place to live it. Boston was a refined city dense with bookstores, colleges, and newsstands. Compact in scale, with crooked streets, lancet windows, gas lamps, and lush public parks, Boston had a reserve, and, of course, so did Berg.
He was liable to turn up anywhere, but at least part of the time his days began at the Parker House, a stately Boston hotel. Berg liked to begin his morning in the bathtub. He perspired easily and, besides, believed in the therapeutic powers of hot water. Whenever possible, he took three baths a day. Finished with the first, he clothed himself in black, white, and gray and stepped out into the day. His first stop was usually the Old South News Stand, a venerable establishment in business since 1909, at the corner of Washington and Milk streets. Arthur Weisman, who worked at the stand, remembers Berg buying ten New York, Washington, and Boston papers a day. If there was a big local story, his take increased, and he carted away all six major Boston papers. Berg was friendly with Edward Bernstein and his partner, Larry Rosenthal, the owners of the Old South. While Weisman watched, Berg would sometimes walk a block away from the stand, where he would have whispered conversations with Bernstein or Rosenthal. It all looked very intriguing to Weisman, who, of course, wondered what was being said. The answer? Very little. “We were friends, but not close friends,” says Rosenthal. “It wasn’t necessarily deep. It was about movies, baseball. I wasn’t anything particular to him. Just somebody who liked him.” Bernstein had the same experience with Berg. “Nobody knew his business,” he says.
For at least part of his life Berg fasted one day a week. It’s impossible to say how many years he did this, because he didn’t stay in touch with anyone on a consistent enough basis for them to recognize his eating habits. On non-fasting days, newspapers in hand, Berg repaired to a coffee shop, where he read through the morning. He liked coffee, and when he ate, he did so with relish.
If he wasn’t going to the ballpark, Berg might turn up anywhere. He traveled Boston like a June bug, skimming from point to point, pausing long enough to lend it his imprimatur, and then on to the next. Wherever he went, people described him as a kind man, witty, gregarious, and … gone. He liked to take trips into Cambridge. At a newsstand in Harvard Square he could find the international newspapers that the Old South didn’t stock. Cambridge was dappled with secondhand bookshops, and Berg was on good terms with the inventories—and the proprietors—of most of them. If his feet needed a rest or his mind wanted an infusion, he strolled into the rear of a Harvard lecture hall and sat in on a class. Berg helped Takizo Matsumoto gain admission to the Harvard Business School. They met occasionally, but not often enough for Matsumoto. He was lonely and in the winter wrote Berg plaintive notes, telling him he missed him.
Berg didn’t miss anyone. He was too busy for that. He knew the waiters at the Ritz and the secretaries of women’s clubs. You might glimpse him at a demonstration on Boston Common or in the main reading room at the public library. Some of his old classmates from Princeton had settled in the Boston area. They all told Moe Berg stories and would have been eager to spend time with him, but Berg was hard to find. Marjory Bartlett of Baltimore, then a Wellesley undergraduate, wrote him once, care of the Red Sox, requesting baseball tickets. Back in the mail came an envelope containing four passes to a Sunday afternoon game. There was no note. At the ball game, when she waved, he tipped his hat solemnly, and thereafter avoided her eyes. She wrote again anyway, thanking him for the tickets and inviting him to dinner at Wellesley, and this time managed to pry a note out of him. “I was happy to repay an old favor” was all it said.
Margaret Ford had better luck. A young and attractive feature writer for the Boston Sunday Herald and a contributor to the New Yorker, Ford lived at her parents’ home in Brookline, and that is where Moe Berg came to call. Most of the Fords were rabid baseball fans, so he talked first about the Red Sox, and then deftly turned the conversation elsewhere when it seemed to him that Margaret’s mother might be bored by the subject. A week later, Berg returned to present Mrs. Ford with an old-fashioned bud-rose and violet nosegay. Margaret and her sister were each favored with a fleeting kiss on the wrist. Mr. Ford watched all this with a mildly puzzled expression on his face. Margaret thought her date was somewhat calculating, a player of social chess, “moving slowly, cautiously, making correct decisions, more meditative than coldly analytical.”
Berg took her dancing on the roof of the Ritz. It was an elegant spot, with tiny yellow lights shining everywhere like forsythia, the splash of the fountains in the public garden audible below, and the houses on Beacon Hill glowing in the distance. They danced, and here Berg’s movements were also slow, his decisions again were cautious, but this time, alas, they were decidedly not correct. “I, though no Ginger Rogers myself, had nevertheless a sense of rhythm, which bore not the slightest resemblance to Moe’s,” says Margaret. “What Moe was doing was indescribable. He wasn’t running, he wasn’t jumping, but he certainly was not dancing.” Berg’s lack of grace was not confined to the foxtrot. He indulged in some flattery (he’d read Margaret’s work), some gossip (she thought him a conversational voyeur), and then, of course, at the end of the evening he was running, after all. None of this surprised the man Margaret eventually married. John Kieran was as baffled by Moe Berg as everyone else.
ASIDE FROM THE ties of his contract with the Red Sox, which bound him to Fenway Park for a few hours a day, Moe Berg lived as a peripatetic in Boston, a nonstop walker in the city. When the team took to the road, the names of the ballparks and the hotels changed; Berg’s habits did not. With the Red Sox in Philadelphia to play the Athletics, Berg might hurry up to Princeton for a look at an exhibition of Islamic miniatures and calligraphy, to listen to Thomas Mann lecture on Goethe’s Faust, or to visit one of his former professors’ Greek classes. In New York, wending north toward the Bronx for a game against the Yankees, he sometimes stopped in at Columbia. St
. Louis could mean Washington University in the morning and the Browns in the afternoon. In Washington, Cleveland, and Chicago, where he’d lived as a player, there were familiar haunts, from a newsstand in the lobby of a fancy hotel to a favorite side street café with a menu of red meats and red wines. He liked art museums, antiquarian bookshops, and public libraries with well-lit main reading rooms. And always he was game for an outing. He once went from Washington to Baltimore, where he recited Poe’s “Raven,” standing beside the poet’s grave. Berg rarely drank much alcohol, and never smoked, but he liked people who did, and there were evenings when he set his elbow to oak, nursing a lone Bloody Mary amidst the fighters, molls, stars, and spenders. He listened for a while-he’d overcome some of his feelings of prudishness, so now bawdy stories pleased him—and then was out the door before anyone noticed he was gone. No “See you next time around” for this man.
Berg met people everywhere. They would say afterward that they knew him, but what did they know? Only what they saw. When Berg wasn’t telling stories, he was asking questions. People liked to confide in him, were flattered that he was interested, and were too cowed to ask anything in return. Typical of the sort of person Berg liked was I. M. Levitt, director of the Fels Planetarium at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
One day in the late 1930s, a tall dark man attended one of Levitt’s shows and came up to talk with him afterward. Levitt thought the man’s questions were intelligent. A few months later the man returned and introduced himself. Levitt liked baseball, and learning that Moe Berg of the Boston Red Sox was interested in the galaxies pleased him very much. After the show, they went out to dinner. Berg ordered a strip steak and ate every morsel, including, Levitt couldn’t help but notice, the slivers of fat that marbled the edges of the meat. They had a grand time talking astronomy and linguistics. After that, whenever the Red Sox came to town, Berg left a pair of tickets at the “Will Call” window for Levitt and his wife. Before the game, they’d walk down to field level and talk with Berg while he warmed up the Red Sox starting pitcher. Berg looked at the pitcher and spoke to the Levitts out of the corner of his mouth. Never once did the Levitts see a game where Berg was in the lineup.
Levitt had been a semi-pro ballplayer in his youth and then had gone on to take four university degrees, including a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. Berg’s marginal career in baseball made sense to him. “It left him time to do what he did best, and that is read,” he says. In this respect, Berg reminded him of Benjamin Franklin. Franklin, Levitt felt, had provided himself with a superior education by reading, and Berg was doing the same. He’d taught himself astronomy, for instance, and to Levitt’s mind, “he knew a hell of a lot about it.” For years, Levitt tried to cajole Berg into giving a guest lecture on constellations. He never succeeded. Aside from the scheduled games with the Athletics, when Berg was certain to be at Shibe Park, Levitt couldn’t be sure when his friend might turn up. One Saturday night, Berg walked into the planetarium with a tall, attractive, black-haired woman. They watched the performance and then left without a word or a wave to Levitt.
BERG PLAYED IN 38 games for Joe Cronin in 1935, hit .286, and smacked 2 home runs, a full third of the 6 he would hit in his career. One of his rare appearances came on September 22, when he emerged from the bull pen, not to catch, but to participate in a throwing contest against the Yankee catcher Bill Dickey. Promotions have always been popular in baseball, and match races were a prime publicity staple in Berg’s time. Some of them were intriguing. In 1946, George Case, a speedy member of the Senators, barely lost a dash across the outfield to the Olympic gold medal sprinter Jesse Owens. Others were plain bizarre. Hans Lobert of the Giants once finished second—by a nose—in a race around the bases with a black pony ridden by a Mexican cowboy. On the twenty-second at Fenway, there were five events: a relay race, a 100-yard dash, a circling the bases race, a fungo hitting contest, and an accurate throwing competition. For the last, a barrel was placed on second base, and catchers rose from their crouch and tried to throw a ball into the barrel. It was always a delightful moment when a ball went shooting across the infield and then, blup! disappeared into the void. Berg lost to Dickey on this day, which was an upset. He was well known as the master of the barrel throw.
The season over, Berg moved his base of operations from a Boston hotel to his brother’s home in Newark. Back in his old neighborhood, he was the same elusive figure he was everywhere else. He could sometimes be seen handing out the grass-stained balls and splintered bats he’d cadged from the Red Sox to local children, fixing them a stern look while cautioning them to always keep their eye on the ball. In the morning he might go for a jog through Branch Brook Park or for a long walk. Wherever he went, he always went alone, sometimes carrying a briefcase. He boasted that nobody in Roseville knew him. One night he turned up unannounced in East Orange, at the home of his old friends from childhood, the Jenningses. He had with him the films from his trip to Japan and asked if anyone would like to see them. The Jenningses said yes, they would. When the footage shot from Saint Luke’s appeared on the screen, Margaret Jennings Gahan says that Berg “intimated that this was an insight into the fortifications of Japan.” Other than that somewhat cryptic comment, Berg didn’t say anything. “He was a very shy man,” says Gahan.
Roseville was still a bustling, fairly prosperous community, but for Berg, who had seen Tokyo and Bangkok, and who traveled first class during the season, it was dull in comparison. His family was many things—hardworking and bristling with opinions were two—but the Bergs were not relaxing to be around. Two years earlier Berg had invested with two partners in the formation of Novelart. Things seemed to be going well with the business. Even so, perhaps because he was still sometimes short of ready cash or maybe because he didn’t want to make the effort, Berg didn’t buy a house of his own. He was further constrained by his refusal to learn to drive. Berg relied on trains to get him out of Newark. His flat feet took him everywhere else. As for the law, if people he knew asked him for advice, he gave it. But his days of reporting to an office were behind him. He lived with his parents, spending as little time there as possible.
One of Berg’s favorite winter pastimes was attending the six-day bicycle races at Madison Square Garden in New York. He knew Willie Ratner, who covered the event for the Newark News, and Ratner could always fix him up with a press credential. According to Ratner, Berg liked to stroll among the foreign riders, chatting with them in their native languages, and sometimes gathering information for his host. Once, with the Belgian team ahead late in the race, Berg told Ratner that he’d heard one of the Belgian riders say in French that he was injured and would soon have to retire. Ratner filed a story to this effect, and came the afternoon, the newsboys outside the Garden were hawking a Newark News exclusive.
THE SUMMERS OF 1936 and 1937 were mournful periods for Red Sox aficionados. Although hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent to buttress the lineup with expensive veterans like Cronin, Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx, Doc Cramer, and Eric McNair, the “Fenway Millionaires,” as everyone now referred to the Sox, skulked to sixth and then fifth in the standings. Berg faded too, from .355 in June 1936 to .240, in the 39 games he had appeared in by season’s end. After 9 games in June 1937, he was hitting .367. By the close of that season his mark was down to .255.
Between 1938 and 1940, the Red Sox began to rely on their own minor league system. What they found there—Bobby Doerr, Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Jim Bagby, Jr., and Jim “Rawhide” Tabor—hoisted the team into annual contention with the Yankees. Amidst all this nubile talent, Berg, husky now with a nascent pair of jowls, suddenly became known as an exemplar. Down in Washington, Clark Griffith declared him the best handler of pitchers in the league, while Cronin, purring as usual when Berg was the subject, praised him as “an excellent example for young catchers.” Well that he could hang his cap on that, because, as the third-string catcher behind Desautels and Johnny Peacock in 1938, Berg played in 10 g
ames and batted only 12 times all season. He would have remained the best-known third-string catcher in baseball anyway, but that winter something happened that turned him into a national sensation, the epitome of brains meshed with strength, even for people who always turned past the sports pages. There are many means of establishing a broad reputation for genius, but few can match Berg’s for economy. He simply entered a radio studio in New York, answered a few questions, and emerged thirty minutes later a certified quiz show king.
In contrast to some of the other, more popular prewar national radio programs, “Information, Please!” seemed banal. “Truth or Consequences”—the great rival of “Information, Please!” for a time—lured its audience less with its questions than with the outrageous slapstick situations, the “consequences” that followed an incorrect answer: a blindfolded couple had to keep up a conversation while feeding each other blueberry pie; an unfortunate soldier was forced to telephone his girl while an actress sat cooing on his lap. With “Information, Please!” the gimmick was intelligence. People sent in trivia designed to stump a highbrow panel of experts, and were given cash rewards if they succeeded.
Moderator and New Yorker book critic Clifton Fadiman—billed as the Toscanini of quiz—delivered the week’s questions to three permanent experts: humor columnist and roundtable wit Franklin P. Adams, pianist and composer Oscar Levant, and John Kieran, who, Fadiman liked to say, “carries so much information around with him it’s a wonder he isn’t round-shouldered.” Each week there was also a guest expert, the likes of whom included Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Parker, Orson Welles, Arthur Rubinstein, George S. Kaufman, Moss Hart, and Ogden Nash. “Information, Please!” was unrehearsed and spontaneous as the wind, so listeners came to rely upon Adams’s and Levant’s clever repartee, Fadiman’s penchant for sly puns, and the always looming potential for embarrassment. Rex Stout, for example, got plot details from one of his own Nero Wolfe detective books wrong. Still, the real fun of it was hearing brilliant people reveal the breadth of their learning. Kieran, Adams, Levant, and Fadiman knew a great deal. For a guest to keep up with them was no mean feat.
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