The better Crowley got to know Berg, the less he liked him. It was Crowley’s opinion that carrying around foreign-language newspapers was an affectation designed to announce Berg’s language skills, and he thought Berg’s habit of reading ten American papers a day was a sad waste of time. Mostly, though, Crowley was irritated by Berg because he “found him completely lacking in an aesthetic. He had no wonder of the world. I’d say most of his charge came from being a character. A unique folk hero. There he is moving through Horace, Ovid, and Virgil, but he was one of the guys in whom an education as an aesthetic experience was wasted. He might as well have gone to drafting school.” There are risks to living an unconventional life and there are lessons in it. Here it is a simple one. Nobody, not even Moe Berg, could charm everybody.
JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY
William Klein’s first meeting with Moe Berg was as casual as their friendship was complex. Sam Faerberg, a friend of Klein’s who also knew Berg, introduced Berg to Klein across a cup of coffee in the mid-1950s. A year went by, and then Klein received a telephone call from Berg. Klein was a peppy man, an amateur astronomer interested in Greek and Latin etymology, books, stamps, and coins, and gradually Berg became interested in him. By the end of the decade they were spending a lot of time together.
Klein’s job required him to meet with people at their homes and offices. He would report to his own office in Jersey City, plot the day’s appointments, and then look out the window. The neighborhood had been completely razed for rebuilding projects, and so, for blocks, all Klein could see was vacant lots squared by streets and a man in a gray suit, pacing up and down through the eerie maze. It was Berg, waiting for Klein to pick him up. For when Klein set out on the day’s round of appointments, Berg liked to go riding with him.
Day after day Berg appeared. Eventually a White Castle hamburger restaurant was built across from Klein’s office, so Berg could stop walking and read the paper while he waited for Klein. Klein would slide into the booth, across the table from Berg, and order. Berg always ordered exactly what Klein did, and during a dozen years of hamburgers, Berg offered to pay only once. He pulled a one-dollar bill from his wallet and extended it. The bill was yellow. Klein told him to put it away, and another afternoon of driving began.
Instinctively, Klein knew how to get along with Berg. Berg didn’t want Klein to introduce him to other people. “Willie, don’t mix,” he said, and Klein never did. Klein also never asked him about his private life, and never brought up baseball. Early on, Klein had asked him something personal and Berg had said, “Mustn’t ask.” After that, Klein displayed no curiosity. It wasn’t easy, because Berg all but courted demands for explanation. Once they stopped into a coffee shop in Newark, and Klein spotted Jackie Robinson. He told Berg, who walked over to Robinson, stood behind Robinson, and whispered into his ear for a few seconds. Robinson never looked up or said anything. Berg came back over to Klein, and they left the restaurant. “He never said a thing about it,” says Klein. “I never asked him about it. I think he liked that. I learned how to keep my mouth shut.”
Klein found that if he waited long enough, sometimes the answers to his questions revealed themselves. One day, Berg told Klein that Ted Lyons had given him some land and they were looking for oil. Klein didn’t say a thing. A year later, Berg suddenly said, “They didn’t find any oil.” Berg clearly enjoyed tempting his friend’s curiosity, as he cultivated questions about himself from everyone he knew. “One day, out of nowhere, he said to me, ‘No questions about Africa, Willie.’ ” No questions were offered and no explanations were ever given.
Klein once asked Berg, “Why me, Moe?” and Berg replied, “You are without guile, Willie,” and that made sense. “I wish I had a million dollars, Willie,” Berg once told him. “I could live the way I want to.” Berg didn’t have even a thousand dollars, but he did have Klein, who let Berg be and gave him whatever he seemed to need. If Berg wanted to sleep in the passenger seat, he was welcome to drowse as long as he liked. If he wanted to talk, Klein was an interesting man. If he wanted books, Klein knew every bookstore within a fifty-mile radius of Jersey City, and he took Berg to all of them and paid for what Berg selected. When Berg plainly needed a new gray suit, Klein took him to Brooks Brothers and bought him one. He made Berg feel utterly comfortable. He took Berg to dinner at the home of Helen’s, his wife’s, parents, and after a time Berg disappeared. Eventually Klein discovered him tucked into Helen’s parents’ bed. He’d taken a bath and was now fast asleep. Once Klein was holding a clipful of money that belonged to another man; Berg saw it, reached over, and helped himself to some. Klein didn’t object.
For Klein, it was easy to indulge such a man. Berg added coriander to his life. Who else took him to a luncheonette just outside the Holland Tunnel, leading into Manhattan, and told the counterman the origins of words? Berg was interesting, he was fun to be with, and he was unpredictable. One day Berg said to Klein, “Willie, I have to go to Washington,” and he was gone. Time went by, months, and then there was Berg, walking down a sidewalk with his collar up. “Moe!” said Klein.
“Willie,” said Berg. “How are you? I’ll see you tomorrow,” and Klein had his partner back. Klein never quite knew what to make of Berg, and he didn’t really try. He simply enjoyed him, and let him remain as opaque as the aphorism he was always offering to Klein. “There are no supermen, Willie,” Berg would say, and Klein would nod without comment.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
One summer day, Moe Berg took Harry Broley to a baseball game. They had passed through the turnstiles and begun to make their way through the crowd, up the runway toward their seats, when Berg said, “Stop!” He walked over to the wall at the side of the passageway, put his back to it, closed his eyes, and, speaking very softly, said, “Listen. Listen. There are no sounds in the world like these sounds. It’s a symphony to me.”
Berg also called baseball “my theater,” and there are similarities. One of the pleasures of following baseball is that every day its characters participate in an unfolding narrative of events in which there are heroes, clowns, and villains, moments of comedy and tragedy, and plenty of time during the pauses between pitches for daydreaming. Yet, much as people may become absorbed in the fortunes of a team, baseball games are devoid of the hard consequences in life outside the foul lines. There is always a new game or a new season or a new second baseman. Except for those few men who play professional baseball, the game is ultimately only a diversion, and a diversion is what it was for Moe Berg, a man who badly needed one. Discussing baseball with a young sportswriter, Fred Down, Berg “said that he loved it,” Down remembers. “There was nothing he enjoyed more. He said that ‘some people like to swim, some people like to play cards, some like to watch the horses. My enjoyment is being with people and watching baseball.’ ” After the war, when he wasn’t traveling at a dervish’s pace from city to city, Berg spent the better part of spring, summer, and fall attending baseball games, mostly in New York. They brought him pleasure, muffled some of the disappointments that nagged at his later years, and gave him a place to go every day.
Following his retirement from baseball, Berg had been presented with a rectangle of plain metal not much larger than a credit card. On one side was engraved a lifetime pass to all American League ballparks, and the other entitled him to walk in, free of charge, to any National League stadium. This gave Berg dispensation to claim any unoccupied seat in any ballpark. Sometimes he would sit by himself in the stands and, purist that he was, send out bitter reproaches to infielders who failed to call for pop fly balls.
After the war, aside from chiding them from the stands, Berg avoided current players and stayed off the field itself. There were exceptions. In the 1956 old-timers game at Yankee Stadium, Berg batted fourth for one team, leading the New York Times to comment, “Moe Berg, playing shortstop and batting in the cleanup position, probably for the first time in his life caught Allie Reynolds unaware by blasting a mighty double to left.” In 1963
, Casey Stengel, the manager of those insuperable losers, the early New York Mets, asked Berg to address the team, and Berg drafted a long and tedious speech mainly about himself. As he rambled on about the Sorbonne, Nelson Rockefeller, Bill Donovan, Japan, and John Kieran, “the great sports columnist for the New York Times who wrote about me every rainy day,” the bewildered young Mets looked at their shoes. None of them seem to remember it. “As far as I am concerned, Moe Berg was a mythical figure,” says Larry Bearnarth, a pitcher on the team.
The fact was that most baseball professionals had never fathomed Moe Berg. Berg once took Harry Broley with him to meet Joe McCarthy, who had managed the great Yankee teams of the 1930s that starred Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. They ate sandwiches, and McCarthy and Berg talked about old times. Listening to it all, Broley was saddened. “It was clear McCarthy didn’t see him as a player,” he says. “He saw him as a character.” Berg knew that and he hated it. He was always extravagantly grateful when men with long memories reflected upon the promising catcher he’d been before injuring his knee in 1929. After he hurt the knee, Berg’s position in baseball had evolved from “the coming catcher” into a man whose very presence on a major league roster was regarded skeptically by some of his peers. To journalists, however, he had been something higher. They had lionized him, made him into a legendary figure—not just an amusing reserve ballplayer but the polyglot catcher and esteemed ballpark muse, Professor Berg. It was only natural that Berg would now gravitate toward the press. After all, in a time when some people were whispering that he was a bum, in the press box Berg was still one of a kind.
He was the only former ballplayer to arrive regularly in the Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field, Polo Grounds, and, later, Shea Stadium press boxes with a copy of the Times Literary Supplement under his arm. Sometimes he stayed for only a moment. “You’d be at a game,” says New York Times columnist Dave Anderson, “and all of a sudden he’d be behind you in the press box wearing a dark suit, dark tie, and white shirt. You’d look up again an inning later, and he’d be gone.” Just as often, though, Berg would watch the entire game intently, talking over everything that happened on the field with the journalists in a restrained, sage fashion. He was especially hard on catchers. Some of the baseball writers would want to ask Berg about himself, but they never did. Sitting with Berg made Seymour Siwoff of the Elias Sports Bureau “feel sort of romantic. I’d want to know, ‘Where do you live? What do you do?’ but this man created an aura which told us, ‘Don’t ask me about anything but baseball.’ And he knew baseball. God, he knew baseball.” Ira Berkow once asked Berg if he’d ever published anything. “Only a treatise on Sanskrit” was the answer. Later Berkow happened upon the Atlantic Monthly article and the next time he saw Berg, he confronted him. “You caught me, Ira,” said Berg.
After the game, while the journalists typed their stories, Berg read the Manchester Guardian or completed the New York Times crossword puzzle. Everyone knew, as Detroit Tigers radio broadcaster Ernie Harwell says, that “he had to read a virginal paper.” When the stories were filed, he joined the writers in the press hospitality room, helping himself to the traditional spread of free food and drinks laid out on platters. Wherever Berg sat, the table filled quickly with the wizened aristocrats of the New York press box, Frank Graham, Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, Arthur Daley, and Leonard Koppett. Baseball executives would stop by and ask Berg how to say “ball one” and “strike two” in different languages, and he would tell them. Sometimes, when he thought nobody was looking, he’d stuff a couple of sandwiches for later into his coat pockets. He might then head for the hotel room of one of the journalists in from out of town to cover the visiting team. Men would check into their rooms to discover Berg in the bathtub; he’d wangled a key from the front desk to get an early start on his soaking. Later, when the journalists assembled again to take on the town, Berg was with them. At the end, Berg’s society came mostly from baseball.
In the 1950s, when the Dodgers still played at Ebbets Field, Berg would go out to Brooklyn to see them with a man named Bruce Jacobs, who wrote for 25-cent sports magazines. Jacobs’s office was in the Empire State Building, in Manhattan, and Berg would pick him up. From there, the two would walk downtown to City Hall, cross the Brooklyn Bridge, and stride out Flatbush Avenue to Ebbets Field, a distance of about ten miles.
Harry Grayson didn’t walk anywhere if he could help it, and usually he could help it. Grayson, the white-haired sports editor of Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), did everything with a certain swashbuckling style, and walking was not stylish, especially with a hangover. The NEA offices were on Eighth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, an area that was as snarled with traffic in the early 1950s as it is now. More days than not, Grayson would arrive for work in the late morning and park his car right in front of the building, which was illegal. A policeman would notice the violation and write Grayson a ticket; when Grayson discovered it, he would scrawl “deceased” across the ticket and send it in unpaid. During the day, Berg liked to stop in at the NEA offices and talk with Grayson and the other resident NEA sportswriters, like Jimmy Breslin, Murray Olderman, Dave Burgin, and, later, Sandy Padwe and Ira Berkow. Olderman considered Berg to be “a well-dressed man of leisure,” and was suspicious of him. Olderman had been an intelligence officer during the war and spoke several foreign languages. He tried to get Berg to speak with him in French or German, but Berg always demurred, just as he did when the subject of his intelligence work arose.
Grayson and Breslin were less skeptical. “Always remember,” Grayson once advised a young reporter, “when you free-load, bitch. You maintain dignity.” Grayson was a master of badinage, a loud-talking storyteller positive in everything he said who drooled slightly when he smiled, a former dentist who asked bartenders around the city to pour his whiskey into one of the dentists’ paper rinsing cups he carried with him, and a shameless filch of a journalist who amiably pumped other writers for their stories, his inevitable cigar bobbing up and down at the side of his mouth. Grayson roamed Manhattan with an entourage that included a tough guy from the Bronx named Tony, a horseplayer named Andy, and Moe Berg. “Moe seemed the last guy to mix in that company, but he fit right in,” says Olderman.
Come 7:00 PM, the ball games over, the stories filed, the press table cleared, Grayson, Breslin, and the rest headed for drops like 468 Eighth Avenue, a seedy modern horror show of a bar, where Berg spoke with the busboys in Greek; Joe Braun’s Palace on Forty-fifth Street, an ugly little dive full of prominent theater people who wanted to talk sports with Moe Berg; the Pen and Pencil; Al Schacht’s; and the most famous of all sporting life watering holes, Toots Shor’s. These were good places to be broke. “He never paid a bill,” says Breslin. “After work, anything could happen. Who the hell watched or paid attention? Christ, I never had any money either. There’d be thirty guys drinking and some rich guy picking up the check.”
Night after night Berg would be right there with everyone, standing up straight with his wonderful posture, nursing a beer or a Bloody Mary, taking it all in. “I’d see him,” says Frank Slocum. “He’d be talking at the bar in Shor’s to some woman. She’d turn around to light a cigarette, turn back, and he’d be gone. A little bit frustrating Morris was!” Occasionally Berg brought along some friends. He’d have been out to the nuclear research laboratories in Brookhaven, Long Island, to visit Sam Goudsmit, and now was returning to New York with an entourage of his own, a group of young physicists eager to raise Cain and meet women. The scientists and the sportswriters were not always compatible. “He loved the scientists at Brookhaven,” says Breslin. “Brookhaven scientists, sexual degenerates, gigolos, nuts, I don’t know who they were.”
At the end of the evening, Berg specialized in finding free places to stay for the night. He might go home with Grayson and stay at his house. “Grayson loved anybody to come home with him to take the heat off the wife,” says Breslin. When the golf promoter Fred Corcoran was in town, he shared his hotel room with Berg, and the ba
throom with Berg’s rinsed-out white nylon shirt. In 1951, Corcoran was married in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. “How’s the arm, Moe?” asked Cardinal Spellman as he walked by. When the Corcorans left for their honeymoon in Canada, Berg went with them. “Fred didn’t want to turn him down,” says Corcoran’s wife, Nancy. “What he was doing was always a big mystery. I would say that my husband was one of his best friends, but he never told him anything about his private life.”
One miserable, snowy winter night, Berg was leaving Toots Shor’s at the same time as another reticent sort, Joe DiMaggio. Berg said he was on his way to New Jersey to sleep at his sister’s. DiMaggio thought that was a long way to go and felt sorry for him. “Why don’t you spend the night with me,” he said. They walked through the snow together to DiMaggio’s suite at the Madison Hotel. Berg stayed for six weeks. “All he had was what was on his back, and all his shaving stuff and a toothbrush,” says DiMaggio. “We talked about what happened in the general day, baseball, things of that nature. His private life wasn’t any of my business.”
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