Berg had no wife or child and maintained strained, distant relationships with his brother and sister. There was no particular agent with whom he shared the close friendship McCarry describes, but he was franker with people like Earl Brodie and Howard Dix than he was with anyone else. The real truth, however, was that he was married to the work. This being said, it is true that, besides playing the intelligence operator in Washington, Berg did once propose marriage to a woman there. The woman was vivacious, had blue eyes and chestnut hair, and, predictably enough, she was part of his intelligence past.
If Berg rarely confided in men, he was even more skittish around women. Some women found him very handsome. Many others, like Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, thought his manners debonair and his store of arcane knowledge impressive. More still were fascinated by the life he described to them over a well-chosen bottle of wine. There are many photographs of Berg seated with attractive women at restaurant tables. Estella Huni told her son, Paul, that, although Berg liked to have his picture taken with pretty young faces, it was just for show. Nothing was happening. Even if no relationship was developing, Berg does seem to have been quite experienced—and somewhat crude—in the art of seduction. “Nobody knew what he was doing with women, but he’d always end up with them,” says the New York talent manager Murray Goodman. “He had a quaint way. He always told them how beautiful they were, and they believed him.” One of Goodman’s clients, Berg’s old baseball traveling buddy Al Schacht, took a dimmer view. “Never let him near your wife,” said Schacht. It was good advice.
In the late 1950s, the New York Herald-Tribune sportswriter Caswell Adams suffered a bad stroke, and was hospitalized on Long Island. Adams was a lively man, and he and Berg were friends. They attended boxing matches together in New York and met up in bars with other sportswriters, like Jimmy Cannon and Damon Runyon. It was a casual acquaintance, like the ones Berg had with many New York sportswriters, and he and Adams could in no way be described as close friends. So Adams’s wife, Mary, was taken aback when the most frequent visitor at Caswell Adams’s sickbed besides his own children and herself was none other than Moe Berg. Besides the strange act of regularly attending a man he didn’t know very well, Berg’s behavior was odd for two other reasons. The stroke had left Adams incapable of communication. In a year he uttered only one word—“goddammit”—and he was paralyzed except for the feeble use of an arm. One of Adams’s son’s girlfriends surveyed the situation and asked Mary Adams, “Mrs. Adams, have you any proof that Moe Berg knew your husband before he got sick?”
Why was Berg there? One answer is that there was something about human crises that appealed to a prurient side of Berg. His notebooks are full of information about friends’ divorces, and Berg could sometimes be talked into investigating women whose husbands hoped to divorce them. When people like Diane Roberts, whose lover had died in Washington, or Marjory Sanger, on the verge of divorce in Cambridge, were vulnerable, he liked to see, and to know the details. Perhaps it felt like intelligence work, knowing something you weren’t supposed to know. It’s also possible that a man whose life has gone awry achieves comfort from assisting people in worse straits than he is. Another motive was lust. Berg fancied Mary Adams.
After some time, Adams was moved from the hospital to a rehabilitation center, where Berg kept up his hectic visiting schedule. One night, instead of going home, he asked Mary Adams if he could stay at the Adams home on Long Island. They got back, and she sat down on a living room couch and began weeping. Berg opened a book and read to her until she calmed down and fell asleep on the couch. She awakened there to find Berg beside her. He had not removed his clothes, yet he was exposed. She pushed him away and headed for the telephone. Berg looked terrified. “What are you going to do?” he asked. “I don’t know,” she said severely. She did nothing. There was a reconciliation, and his visits continued.
Several months after his stroke, Caswell Adams was moved again, from the rehabilitation center to a nursing home in Westchester County. One day Berg telephoned and invited Mary out on a date, and she accepted. She was taking classes at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, and suggested that Berg meet her there. He said he would prefer to meet her in the middle of a block, a short walk from the school. She agreed, though she wondered why on earth he couldn’t just go to the lobby. It was a clear night, and Mary drove a convertible, so as they headed out to Long Island, Berg unraveled the stars for her. At the house, Mary put on some opera music, which Berg thought was silly and said so. Then he moved toward her. “He knew what he was doing,” Mary says. “I’ll tell you one of his predilections. The floor.” Afterward, she offered to try to find Berg a toothbrush. He stopped her. “Oh, no. I always carry one,” he said. They saw a little more of each other. Once, when they were riding together on an uptown bus in Manhattan, Mary turned to say something to Berg, and he was gone. Another time, he offered to take her out to dinner, met her, and began walking. Fifty blocks later they were at Lüchow’s. Mary thought he was broke and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu. After a handful of encounters, it was over. “Lord knows why I was attracted to him,” Mary says. “He just was charming.”
Caswell Adams died in 1957. Some five hundred people attended his funeral, but Moe Berg was not one of them.
IN 1963, JUNE McElroy, a former CIA analyst, was introduced to Berg in Washington by a mutual friend, a Connecticut congressman. Instead of maintaining his usual Washington digs, at the swank Mayflower, Berg was staying at a third-rate establishment on Eye Street when McElroy met him. He looked third rate himself. Berg was now sixty-one years old, with a large umbilical hernia—an intestinal protrusion in the area of the belly button—bulging within a rumpled pair of gray suit pants, and spots spattered down the front of his white shirt. Still, McElroy found him “charming, effervescent, and very interesting. He was a genuine raconteur. He held everyone’s attention.” She also thought Berg was handsome, and the next time he was in Washington and called to ask her out, she was pleased. McElroy invited him over to dinner, and they talked.
Berg told her war stories, and even CIA stories, leaving her with the firm impression that he still worked for the Agency. About other aspects of his past, he said nothing. “He preferred to be the mystery man,” she says. She thought Berg was being modest, and was not unintrigued. McElroy had an eight-year-old daughter, and Berg entertained her, too, telling her about rabbits. Over the next three years, McElroy and Berg saw each other occasionally, with Berg telephoning when he came to Washington and McElroy always responding with a dinner invitation.
One day in 1966, Berg was in Washington, and McElroy made dinner, put her daughter to bed, and began washing the dishes. Berg was standing with her and asked, “Do you ever miss being married?” She laughed and deflected the question, but she wondered about it. Was he making a pass at her? McElroy might not have minded if Berg had been, yet he’d never expressed any romantic interest in her before, and she was certain the question was to another purpose, one born not of lascivious intent but of a wanton curiosity.
The moment passed, and a little while later Berg excused himself. After ten minutes McElroy noticed that he was still gone. That was a long time to be in the bathroom. When she looked down the hall, she saw that her daughter’s door was shut tight. The door was never closed at night. As McElroy approached, she heard giggling. She opened the door to find Berg sitting beside her daughter on the bed. “What’s going on in here?” asked McElroy. “He’s tickling me,” her daughter said. McElroy didn’t know what to think. The closed door frightened her. “Moe,” she said, “I’d better take you back to the hotel.” Berg’s manner didn’t change perceptibly. She drove him where he asked to go, to the Mayflower this time, dropped him off, and never saw him again. She did hear from him once, though. Or her daughter did. One day a package arrived, postmarked from Africa. Inside was an American Barbie doll.
McElroy doesn’t think that Berg had done anything improper to her daughter
. He had not had the time, and her daughter says that all he did was tickle her. Nonetheless, it was strange behavior, just as it was odd that he made Susie Makrauer break away in fear from his embrace and then chased her into her father’s bedroom; and it was also peculiar that at a small party in Princeton, he walked up behind an attractive young woman, who was married, and hugged her in a way that she found objectionable. Irene Goudsmit, the wife of Berg’s friend Sam, says, “If I’d met him without my husband I’d have been extremely cautious. I don’t know why. Instinctively.” Around some women, Berg seemed not quite in control of himself. Blue-eyed Clare Hall would come to a similar conclusion.
CLARE HALL MET Berg in London in 1944, when he offered her a ride in his chauffeur-driven sedan from a party at Soames House. In 1947, Hall quit her job at the CIA and married a physics professor from the University of Illinois. By December 1949, she and her husband had separated. Hall was back from Illinois, alone in Washington with a young child and working at the Pentagon, when she received a telephone call from Moe Berg. She had not told Berg about the separation, but somehow he had heard about it and now was asking what her plans were for the holidays. He said he didn’t want her to be alone on Christmas. She told him that she had plans and that she was fine. That was the only time she remembers him calling long distance. In 1950 she was divorced, and in 1951 she began dating Berg. Sort of.
Hall thought Berg “a handsome lad, rugged, not pretty,” and they got along very well. They talked “about everything under the sun,” except, of course, Berg. “He talked about himself constantly, but he never spoke of his early life,” she says. Hall “knew” Berg was working for the CIA, but he never directly said that he was. They would go to dinner, sometimes out in Maryland, and then sit around for hours afterward, lingering over coffee. Berg’s favorite word was “marvelous,” and Hall says that he was constantly looking at things and saying “Isn’t that marvelous,” in his low, nasal voice. At a restaurant with a picture of Adam and Eve behind the bar, they noticed that the artist had given both Adam and Eve belly buttons and wondered about this, since Eve was supposed to have come from Adam’s rib. At a Japanese restaurant in New York, Hall admired a sake pitcher with a bird on top that let out a whistle when you poured the hot rice wine. She tried to buy one of the pitchers, but Berg stymied the purchase, saying, “No, no, no. I’ll get you one sometime.” He never did. Although Berg always paid for dinner and the baby-sitter, in twelve years of dating he never once bought Hall flowers or a present.
Nor did he ever do anything more than kiss Hall good night. If Berg asked for more, she declined, saying she still felt numb from the failure of her marriage. He always said he understood. When he came to Washington, Berg would telephone Hall, never giving her any advance notice. They saw each other perhaps seven times a year this way and exchanged letters, Hall writing to him at the Parker House in Boston. She doesn’t know whether Berg was dating anyone else. She thinks he must have been.
Both were fond of Poe’s poetry, and several times, at Hall’s suggestion, they went to the Adams Memorial, an eerie spot in Rock Creek Cemetery that seemed appropriate to the macabre poet, and recited “Annabel Lee” and some of Poe’s other poems together. The Adams Memorial is a Saint-Gaudens statue commissioned by the historian Henry Adams in memory of his wife. The androgynous statue is enclosed in a holly grove, which makes it a secluded, romantic spot. Saint-Gaudens’s son once said that his father had intended his ambiguous figure “to ask a question, but not to give an answer.” It was there, one day in 1954, with a gentle snow falling, that Berg turned to Hall and asked her a rather unambiguous question. “When are we going to get married?” he said. She was dumbfounded. Eventually she gathered herself and they talked about it. Hall didn’t trust her judgment after the first marriage, and said she didn’t want to marry a second time. Berg was understanding, and never brought the subject up again. “When he proposed to me, I took it seriously,” she says. “I don’t think I would have considered marrying him. I think he wanted children. I think he wanted a son.”
In 1962, Clare Hall changed her mind and married Paul Smith. Berg still took her to lunch when he came to Washington, and sometimes he even went to dinner with Clare and Paul. He liked Paul, and would talk with him about used-book stores around the country. In the mid-1960s, after a lunch at the Mayflower, Berg said casually to Clare, “Come up to my room.” She went upstairs with him, and the conversation continued for a while. Then Berg suddenly began undressing. By the time he’d finished, Clare was out the door and gone. “He never said what his intentions were,” she says. “I thought they were obvious. I haven’t the vaguest idea why it happened.” When Paul heard about this, he was upset, but eventually he got over it too, and the Smiths continued to meet Berg for lunches and dinners whenever he was in Washington. The last they saw of him in Washington was in the late 1960s, when they dropped him off at a cheap rooming house, out near the highway in southwestern Washington.
WASHINGTON IS A big city, and it pulsed with people Berg knew, from President Kennedy—slightly—to his old wartime boss, Bob Furman. For some men, life during peacetime can never equal their memories of war, but Furman, the man whom Sam Goudsmit dubbed “the Mysterious Major,” was eager to put the war behind him and get on with establishing his building business. Between 1947 and 1949, Furman was sharing a large house in Georgetown with a few other young bachelors when Moe Berg arrived, unannounced, for a visit. Furman knew what it was like to walk through life crammed full of secrets and terrified that one might leak. The habits of war stayed with him into private life and, for a time, even the thought of talking about his work on the Manhattan Project made him ill. Even so, Furman found Berg’s methods of comportment astonishing. “All of a sudden he was at the door,” says Furman. “We had a nice time, talked, and all of a sudden he was gone, disappeared. I never knew where he lived or where he went.” And he never saw Berg again.
One reason that Berg kept people like Furman from knowing very much about himself was his penchant for what Clare Hall calls “compartmentalizing his friends.” Hall had met H. P. Robertson during the war, when Berg did, and liked him very much. Yet, when Robertson and Berg were in Washington at the same time and Hall would propose that they all go out together, Berg’s response would be curt. “No,” he’d say. “I’ll see him tomorrow.”
On his own, Berg saw all kinds of people, and liked nothing better than lunching with men of influence. He filled his notebooks with references to General Groves, and meeting Groves for a meal at the Mayflower Hotel found Berg purring happily as he dispensed stories and dined on Groves’s honeyed words. “If it wasn’t for you,” Groves said, “we’d have wasted a lot of time and money on the German heavy water.” In New York, they once attended a baseball game at Yankee Stadium, where Berg introduced Groves to Casey Stengel. In a photograph of the three men, Berg looks blissfully happy, and he was. He enjoyed serving as the conduit, bringing together interesting men who had stories to tell, and then sitting back and watching them talk to each other.
Most of the time, though, Berg was doing the performing. In Washington, his stage of choice was Duke Zeibert’s bar and restaurant in downtown Washington. Duke’s was noisy and well lit, with photographs on the walls, and a man could find company there from noon to closing. There were times in the 1950s and 1960s when Berg was there every day. He’d talk for hours with the bartender and the regulars on their stools, making one drink last the whole day. Skilled in the art of beverage nursing, Berg was even better with food. Through years of afternoons, he never once ordered a thing to eat.
One day at Duke’s in the mid-1960s, Berg was introduced to Joseph Crowley, a former CIA officer now working at a brokerage house. Crowley strolled up to the bar to find Berg in the midst of telling a story about Walter Johnson, the Washington Senators pitcher from early in the century who had been known as “the Big Train” for the speed of his fastball. Crowley could see that Berg had told the story many times before. “It was late on
e afternoon and Johnson was pitching,” Berg was saying. “The umpire said ‘Strike!’ and Johnson yelled back, ‘I haven’t thrown it yet.’ ” Crowley looked over Berg’s shabby clothes and decided that Berg looked like “a déclassé seminarian.” When Berg’s joke was done, everyone laughed, and Crowley introduced himself to Berg. They talked, and Crowley invited Berg to his home on Wisconsin Avenue for dinner, the first of four times that Berg would eat supper with the Crowleys.
Crowley wasn’t impressed with Berg so much as he was intrigued. The truth was that Berg annoyed him. “ ‘Somebody recommended he see me because I’d read a book or two’ is the sort of thing he’d say,” says Crowley. Crowley found Berg’s dinner table conversation “desultory.” It was the same fraying potpourri he shared with most people, and the repetition must have showed. He told a few baseball stories, there was an occasional foray into linguistics, a bit about Lise Meitner, a modest aside that it was because of him that the U.S. could put aside its fears of a German bomb program, and a not so subtle allusion to the CIA, which Crowley assumed Berg was working for. “He husbanded his material very carefully,” says Crowley. “There were no coherent or sustained accounts of anything. He was free form, and anything I can think of that he said was more or less designed to impress. I don’t think he was interested in most people except as they were interested in him.” Berg never told Crowley when he was coming to Washington or where he stayed when he was in town. He simply called and accepted dinner invitations. On one of the visits, Crowley decided that Berg was not very brave. Crowley’s eight-year-old daughter showed Berg her pet gerbil, and Berg recoiled in fear and wouldn’t go near the cage. “He was really spooked,” says Crowley.
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