The assignment went from mid-May to late July, 1958, and Berg managed to squeeze plenty of activity—and plenty of visiting—into the two months. Von Karman appears to have asked Berg merely to listen to what people were saying about AGARD. It was the ideal assignment, since the lines between business and what Berg would have done anyway for pleasure were vague. Berg worked most effectively when he had a broad mandate and was left alone to carry it out. He nosed around Europe, talking with people who covered him with banalities—AGARD was “doing things,” one general told Berg in hushed tones over lunch—and reporting them, somewhat breathlessly, to his boss. In late June, Berg went to Copenhagen for three days to present a letter to Niels Bohr from Von Karman, inviting Bohr to speak for twenty to thirty minutes on “How physics became the key science on planning of the defense sciences.”
The AGARD job gave Berg a chance to revel in his past. In Zurich, he had fondue with Paul Scherrer; he lunched in London with Bob Robertson, and walked around the city with the publisher/spy Paul Rosbaud. Excited, Berg filled his diaries with cryptic notations. “Can’t go with this bastard—black marketeer,” decided one. “Goldfinger,” said another. He sent postcards from Paris that said only “X marks my spot,” and signed one to Goudsmit as “Meaux Beurregue.” He met ambassadors in elevators, and in Paris he attended a party hosted by the American deputy chief of mission, who just happened to be Cecil Lyon.
Twenty-five years earlier, it had been the birth of Lyon’s daughter, Alice, at Saint Luke’s hospital in Tokyo, which Berg used as a ruse to enter the hospital and pan the city with a movie camera from the top of the building. Alice was at her father’s party in Paris, and Berg was thrilled to tell her the story of how he’d taken advantage of her birth. Not content with that, he used a full page of his report to relate the story to Von Karman. According to Berg, his films “may have been interesting later to our air force.” After implying that he’d provided the source material for the Doolittle raids, Berg also suggested to Von Karman that only a squall had come between his films and Trinity. “Incidentally, on that same Japanese tour, I was able to photograph the fortified harbor of Shimonoseki, which I believe was the target of our first atomic bomb, but shifted to Hiroshima on the account of weather.” Storytelling was not without preparation. In his notebooks Berg copied Elsie Lyon’s maiden name, Grew, over and over again, without further comment, like a prayer.
As he became older, Berg became a creature of lists, at times recording names to no apparent purpose. Just after he returned from Paris, he sat down and wrote out sixty-three of them. Sometimes he named people he knew well. Just as often, however, there were names of people he’d scarcely met, like Eugene Fubini, the electronics specialist whom Berg had consulted with briefly in Washington during the war. In addition to appearing in some of Berg’s American lists, Fubini received postcards from Berg when Berg was abroad. “I don’t know why he did it,” says Fubini. “I have no idea.”
Whenever Berg was out of the country, he conducted mass mailings of postcards to friends and acquaintances. Before writing out the cards, he made lengthy lists of possible recipients, sometimes copying out more than one hundred names in his notebook before writing out several revised versions of the list. What was odd was that the people he wrote to were often accessible to him for visits, which Berg avoided. As soon as he left their town, however, he got in touch. The messages could be very witty and a little bizarre as well. Sam Goudsmit received a postcard from Cuba that read, “Fidel Neroes—Mo Burns—Cuba Libre?”
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Boston was Berg’s favorite American city. He liked New York for its glamour and moxie, Washington meant intelligence work, but Berg loved Europe, and Boston was as close to Europe as the United States got, with its rows of elegant, corniced town houses, the Public Garden’s duck pond full of children astride swan boats, the dimly lit old shops and narrow thoroughfares with names like Milk Street and Louisburg Square, the gentle timbre of streetcar bells, and educated people who remembered—certainly they did!—the brilliant old Red Sox catcher. In the 1950s and 1960s Boston had the feel of a town. Wherever Berg went, people were stopping him on the sidewalk to talk. When he was in the pink financially, Berg liked to stay at the Parker House, hard by the Boston Common. As his bank account wasted to nothing, he moved over to the Vendome, a once grand hostelry on Commonwealth Avenue that had slipped considerably and now let some of its rooms by the month. There were rumors that Berg stayed there for nothing.
Berg’s life in Boston in the 1950s and 1960s resembled his days there as a member of the Red Sox, except, of course, that there was no baseball to fill his afternoons. On a typical Boston morning Berg would go to the Old South newsstand to buy as many newspapers as he could carry. He lugged them to a café on Washington Street, where he drank coffee and tore out articles he wished to save. Nearby was the Goodspeed Bookstore, and when the papers were dead, Berg might walk in, greet the owner, Arnold Silverman, and spend a few hours poking through the shop’s dusty aisles. Once he’d filled up a carton with books, Berg would pay for them and, invariably, arrange to pick them up some other time. His reading tastes were eclectic. He liked books on linguistics, he read romantic poetry, he was interested in Heine, Napoleon, etymologists, and humorists. Novels he seems to have resisted. Silverman never knew what Berg was doing in Boston. “Every time he came up to town he was always on a confidential mission of some sort,” he says. “We suspected he was probably working on a divorce case.” Silverman noticed two other things about Berg. He had huge, spread fingers, and as the years went by, his appearance was increasingly seedy and his suits were never pressed.
A few blocks from the Goodspeed was the Brattle, the oldest antiquarian book shop in the country. Plenty of book collectors visited the Brattle, but to the Brattle’s owner, George Gloss, Berg was something different. Berg was in the habit of setting aside Tyrolean piles of books and then, finally, after hours of consideration, opting to buy perhaps two of them. Gloss might have been vexed by this shopping practice, but he wasn’t. Berg fascinated him.
One of the attractions of the trade for Gloss was the inevitable stream of characters who populate used-book stores. Berg was his favorite. Who else claimed, as Berg did, that he bought dictionaries to see if they were complete? Whenever Berg came to the store, Gloss would take him out to lunch or invite him to the family house. Berg would repay the hospitality with stories. He told Gloss about Heisenberg, he told him about Einstein, he said that during the war he had memorized full pages of German telephone books, he explained that he’d been called home from the war because he knew too much about the Manhattan Project, and he told Gloss about Japan, hinting that the government had encouraged his filming stunt from the hospital roof. “He talked about himself all the time, going to France, Germany, Japan,” says Gloss’s widow, Dorrit. “He wasn’t interested in other people. He was more interested in talking about himself.” In front of Gloss, Berg played his games with foreign customers or foreign waitresses, listening to their voices and telling anyone who was around where the person came from. At a French restaurant, he spoke in French to a waitress who asked him, “What part of France are you from?”
In 1965, in a fit of temper, Berg stopped talking to Gloss. Gloss was at pains to understand what he’d done to cause a fissure in the friendship, and to fill it, he wrote Berg a note at the Vendome, saying that he’d like to take him to lunch and was giving him the four cartons Berg had filled with books but then left behind the counter unpaid for, “as a small token of my regard for you and the great pleasure you have given my family and customers.” The friendship resumed, as always, on Berg’s terms. Gloss, for instance, always wondered what Berg did for a living, but he knew he wasn’t supposed to ask him, and so he never did.
When Berg did haul away his books from the Goodspeed or the Brattle, they often went no farther than the Old South newsstand. “He used my stand as a repository,” says Larry Rosenthal, who accepted letters and packages addre
ssed to Berg and routinely held them for six months, until Berg appeared to collect them. In exchange, Berg went for lunchtime strolls with Rosenthal on the Boston Common and told him stories about baseball, about Japan, about women, and about the war. He tended to embellish. Rosenthal learned that Berg had posed as a Swiss professor during Heisenberg’s talk, that he gave lectures in German to the Germans, and that he worked with a partner until one day the partner disappeared and Berg found him floating face down in a ditch full of water. “The conversation wasn’t particularly deep,” says Rosenthal. “I wasn’t anybody particular to him. Just somebody who liked him. George Gloss was the same. George had the books he needed. [Berg] didn’t have any close friends. He never spoke about anybody, never mentioned anybody else. I guess he was a loner.” Rosenthal noticed something else. Berg always had plenty of time.
He killed it in a number of ways. People would encounter him loping across the Common, a book about thirteenth-century French grammar in his hands. He spent hours telling stories to spellbound off-duty waiters at the Ritz, and hours chatting with Joe Cronin in his office. Cronin was the American League president from 1959 to 1973 and kept his offices in Boston, in the IBM building. Having Berg drop by was especially nice for Cronin, because his old teammate seemed to know everyone and, always fancying the role of the conduit, was delighted to put Cronin in touch with people.
At a coffee shop on Newbury Street, Berg met young Richard Gurner, who worked for a classical music station. During Gurner’s break time, he would come in and talk with Berg, who told him stories about baseball and Japan. “He seemed to have all the time in the world,” says Gurner. Jean Makrauer, the wife of his Princeton classmate S. Lang Makrauer, would be on errands and spot Berg in a telephone booth, look again, and he’d be gone. Once she was buying a paper at a newsstand and somebody said, “I’ll do that.” Berg paid for the paper and disappeared.
Sometimes he eschewed hotels and stayed with the Makrauers in Wellesley, arriving with, at the most, a toothbrush, a canvas bag full of used books, and the dirty suit he wore on his back. When Jean went into the bathroom during the night, she found the suit, freshly washed and hanging from the shower nozzle to dry. The Makrauers’ twelve-year-old daughter, Susie, had an upsetting experience with Berg. One day he put his arms around her and hugged her in a way she didn’t like. She ran away from him, up the stairs, and, with Berg in pursuit, hid under her parents’ bed. Berg knelt beside the bed on his hands and knees, and began asking her questions about herself. Finally he got up and went away. After that, whenever she heard that Berg was coming to visit, she made herself scarce. If he frightened Susie, he seemed to have special fondness for the Makrauer’s young son, Fred. When the Makrauers were heading north to Maine for a visit with Fred at his summer camp, Berg came along. “I would see him walking through Boston,” says Fred, “and he’d appear out of an alley, say ‘Hello, Freddy,’ and he’d give me $100. He would do it on my birthday, ten years in a row. I think it’s because he loved Dad.” Possibly. Yet, when he talked with other people about S. Lang Makrauer, Berg referred to him cuttingly as “Slang” and derided him for hiding the fact that he was part Jewish.
It was at the Parker House, just after the war, that Berg again came upon Marjory Bartlett and her father, Kemp Bartlett, the Baltimore Orioles lawyer. Marjory had worked for Vannevar Bush at the Office of Scientific Research and Development during the war. Now she was running a natural history camp for children, editing a wildlife magazine, and writing books. She had married a Princeton man, Ted Sanger, and was living with him in Boston. Up for a visit from Baltimore, Kemp Bartlett had taken his daughter to the Parker House dining room for breakfast. Now, gazing across the room, Mr. Bartlett told his daughter that a man at another table had been looking at them through the entire meal. Just then, the man came walking by and passed their table with no sign of recognition. Marjory exclaimed, “Mr. Berg!”
“Miss Bartlett,” he said, without skipping a beat. “Mr. Bartlett.” He bowed gravely over an armful of newspapers. There were two empty chairs at the table, and at Marjory’s urging, Berg settled his newspapers into one and took the other for himself. He stayed for a few minutes before making his excuses. Marjory told Berg that she was living in Boston. She hoped she would see him again. Berg nodded, smiled, and left. Marjory admired Berg, but from the start he unsettled her, in the same way that he had Ted Williams. “His smile was a bare uplift of the mouth,” she says. “I never saw him laugh.”
This was not for lack of opportunity. Three years later Tommy Thomas, the manager of the Orioles, and his wife, Alice, were in Boston, and asked Marjory Sanger to join them for lunch in the French Room of the Vendome. The restaurant was one of Boston’s finest, with a skilled chef, an imposing maître d’, and a huge salad bowl set on a pedestal at the center of the dining room. A light scent of fresh garlic drifted through the room. Besides Mrs. Sanger, Thomas had invited Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey and his wife, Jean; Joe and Mildred Cronin; Ted Lyons; and Moe Berg. At one point, Thomas said to Marjory, “I hear you met Moe in Washington.” Marjory thought to respond by telling the story of the taxi ride to Griffith Stadium, but she caught an icy glance from Berg and said “Yes, I did” instead. As she got to know Berg better, Marjory came to believe that he was as conscious of appearances as anyone she had ever met. She had the feeling that everything he said had been carefully measured first, as if to see how it would look in print. There was something unnatural about that, she thought, for such self-consciousness made him seem perpetually on edge.
After an extravagant meal of pressed duck, the waiter presented the bill to Thomas. Thomas pointed to Berg and said, “Give it to him.” Marjory gasped, but everybody else was laughing. Berg said, “That’s a very old joke, Tommy.” Thomas pulled out his billfold and paid. “In the beginning of our friendship, that’s the sort of thing that would make Moe turn pale,” he told Marjory. “Now no one ever expects him to pick up the tab.” Marjory didn’t know what Berg did for money. He once told her that he had his shoes made in Europe, but “that is my only extravagance.” You needed good shoes to walk as far as Berg did on bad feet. In the French Room, Marjory noticed that the cuffs of Berg’s white shirt were filthy.
The Sangers spent the warm months living in a seventeenth-century house in the Massachusetts countryside, some twenty miles outside Boston, and it was while they were living there that they heard from Berg again. Ted owned a music shop, The Listening Post, and he would go into Boston by train to work there while Marjory wrote at home. One day the telephone rang. It was Ted, asking Marjory to meet him in Boston for dinner at the Athens Olympia restaurant. He had a surprise for her. The surprise turned out to be Berg. Berg had some newspaper clippings with him, which he presented to Marjory. They were reviews of her books. He asked her if she’d seen them. “Yes,” she replied. “If I’d known him better, I’d have said no,” she remembers, for Berg seemed hurt. “He was very disappointed and sulky all evening,” says Marjory. “He wanted to be the one who showed them to me. He regarded most people as living in a kind of vacuum until he enlightened them.” Ted was enthralled by Berg, and while Berg indulged him with warm conversation, Marjory had the feeling that she had offended Berg and was now being shut out. The Sangers paid for Berg at the end of the meal, as they did the many times they dined with him after that.
The Sangers moved into Boston when the weather cooled, and saw Berg from time to time. He would turn up without warning, and they would take him out to dinner at the Union Oyster House or another restaurant that he selected. Berg never seemed embarrassed about his status as the perpetual guest. “I think he felt he earned it,” says Marjory. When the Sangers proposed inviting some of their other friends, Berg would never allow it.
All this time, the Sangers had no clear idea what Berg was doing with himself, although he led Marjory to believe he was working for the CIA. In Boston, he always said he was staying at the Parker House, which was expensive. But about personal details Berg was vague, alwa
ys deflecting. Ted Sanger didn’t mind. Berg fascinated him. “We just clicked right off,” he says. Marjory liked Berg’s Old-World courtesy, admired his brains, and appreciated the clever postcards he sent now and then. But she was growing weary of his stories about the photographs he took from the top of a hospital in Japan, and tired of hearing about Paul Scherrer and Lise Meitner and Werner Heisenberg. He talked endlessly about Meitner, whom, he said, he’d assisted in her escape from Nazi Germany to Sweden. This wasn’t true, but Marjory didn’t know that. All she knew was that Berg seemed infatuated with Meitner. “He saw himself as a knight in shining armor come to rescue her.”
Berg told very few people about his life in the OSS, but Marjory Sanger he told too much. His sluices had no controls. “He talked about his missions until it got to the point where he said so much you stopped listening. You couldn’t eat. He demanded full attention. I saw a whole filet mignon grow cold on his plate. He was exhausting. His stories were awfully involved. Full of foreign places and people with foreign names. There was a lot of physics and chemistry that I couldn’t follow. In his stories he was always cunning and brilliant, and nobody ever got the better of him. My part of the war was over. I wanted to move on. I thought he was living in the past. He never talked about the present.” Her husband’s business was music, but Marjory never heard Berg talk about music. Hers was writing, but her books and articles were never discussed either. Berg’s stories dominated all conversations, and Marjory began to feel suffocated by them. “It was an event to know him,” she says. “You can’t say that of many people. He was brilliant and memorable, but he was like a sponge. Little by little he absorbed you. You began to feel diminished. I admired Moe, but I found him fatiguing. There were times when I almost feared I was going to be quizzed.”
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