A pair of bachelors—Milton Richman, who covered the Mets for UPI, and his brother, Arthur, a baseball reporter for the Daily Mirror—also liked hosting Berg, and so did their mother, who made huge breakfasts that Berg enjoyed immensely. “We were Mama’s boys and he loved my Mama,” says Arthur. “When he came into your house, it was like he belonged there.” Sometimes after a ball game, Arthur would take Berg out to dinner. He wouldn’t let Berg pay. “I looked upon him as a member of my family,” he says. “I wouldn’t let my brother pay, why should Moe pay?”
Of all Berg hosts, for length of service, none rivaled the Chicago baseball writer Jerome Holtzman. Berg and Holtzman met at the Polo Grounds in the late 1950s and enjoyed a pleasant conversation. Holtzman was covering the Cubs at the time, and when the team was next in New York to play the Giants, Berg telephoned Holtzman at his hotel room and asked if he could share it with him. Holtzman said that was fine, and from then on, whenever he was in New York, and sometimes when he was in Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Washington, Holtzman asked for twin beds, one for himself, and one for Moe Berg. “He knew my schedule,” says Holtzman. “I’d no sooner get to my room when the call would come from downstairs.” Berg would arrive with his ditty bag, excuse himself, and take a bath. Later, Berg would carry Holtzman’s briefcase and they would travel to the ballpark together on the subway. Berg would usually take a seat beside Holtzman in the press box. After the game, when Holtzman’s story was finished, they’d take the subway back to midtown Manhattan. “Never walk in the middle of a crowd,” Berg would always admonish Holtzman. “A crowd can turn ugly.” Every night in New York they shared a snack at the Stage Delicatessen. Berg followed Holtzman’s lead. If Holtzman ordered a fried bologna and egg sandwich, that is what Berg ate too. After two years of this, Holtzman said, “Moe, I need some money.” Berg’s wallet was out in a flash, and he handed Holtzman $200. When they got back to the room, Berg washed his underwear and shirt and took another bath. Sometimes he even left games early to go back to the hotel and bathe. The nomadic life of the baseball beat writer wore on Holtzman, and having Berg around comforted his loneliness. He says that Berg saw him as “a nice young man he could do business with who might want the company. I didn’t want to stay three days alone. I was also delighted when he left.” After Berg’s final bath, the two men would stay awake at night talking, with Berg telling Holtzman stories about the OSS and the countesses he’d known. Holtzman says Berg was a real ladies’ man, though he never saw him with a woman.
After the talking subsided, Holtzman would lie in bed, thinking about his companion. “I never thought he was a big spy,” says Holtzman, who also believes that Berg “was not an intellectual. The only book I ever saw him with was a Sanskrit dictionary he was having rebound. I don’t think he liked intellectuals. He preferred baseball players.” Old baseball players such as Joe Cronin, Joe DiMaggio, Heinie Manush, and Tommy Thomas he liked especially. One of the reasons Berg enjoyed baseball was that he never saw the game change very much. Change, the passage of time, was difficult for him. Once in the hotel lobby, Holtzman asked Berg if he’d like to meet some of the Cubs players. “Hell, no,” said Berg. “They think it all began with them.” Holtzman says that “he didn’t ever want anybody to say, Who is that guy?” Berg had similar distaste for many young sportswriters, or “chipmunks,” as he called them. He resented modern journalistic innovations, such as interviews with the manager in his office after games. To Berg, the thought of people questioning John McGraw or Connie Mack about strategy was as unthinkable as women attending Princeton. The younger reporters, in turn, were baffled by Berg. They wondered what he did with his time, snickered that he was “a freeloader,” and behind his back referred to him as “the world’s greatest guest.” About that, Holtzman was more circumspect. “People used to call him Mysterious Moe,” he says. “I told him after five years, ‘Moe, the only mystery about you is that you don’t work, and nobody knows it.’ Moe said, ‘These people travel an hour to work, wasting their lives.’ He didn’t want to waste his life like these people, scurrying to and from trains every day. He lived his life the way he wanted. He didn’t see any need to be working like that. He beat the game.”
In the morning, Berg was up by 7:00 AM, hours before Holtzman. He’d have “a coffee,” as he put it in his European way, and read the newspapers. At a prearranged time, Holtzman would get a wake-up telephone call from Berg. Holtzman liked to swim laps at the New York Athletic Club during the day before leaving for the ballpark. Berg would lounge at the poolside with a towel circling his waist and another one wrapped like a turban around his head, looking, to Holtzman, “like a Roman senator.” Above Berg’s waist towel was a grotesque umbilical hernia. Holtzman never said anything about it, but other people urged Berg to go to a veterans’ hospital and have the hernia treated. He refused, saying that he wouldn’t let the army do anything for him.
Holtzman spent fifteen or twenty nights a year for a dozen years in hotels with Berg, hosted Berg once at his home outside Chicago, and never told a soul. “He showed different people different faces,” says Holtzman. “He was a man of many sides. I knew one of them.”
After he left Holtzman’s room or, indeed, anybody’s room, Berg would prowl about the city before going to the ballpark. He might poke around used-book stalls in Greenwich Village or a coin shop downtown on Nassau Street. He attended meetings of learned societies like the Linguistic Society of America, where he was a member of long standing, the American Physical Society, or the American Philosophical Society when he was in Philadelphia. He was also always game to spend a few hours with the aeronautical engineers from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute or New York University he met through Antonio Ferri.
Berg did his best to keep up with the men he’d met during the war. He sent Nelson Rockefeller postcards with Latin American motifs, and liked to telephone him. Berg was in Toots Shor’s with Jimmy Breslin on the day in 1958 when Rockefeller was elected governor of New York. Berg went over to a telephone booth, leaving the door open so Breslin could hear the conversation. He dialed a number, waited a moment, and then said, “Hello, Nelson! This is Morris. How are you? Congratulations.” Whenever Rockefeller met up with Berg in public, either at a Dartmouth football game or on the streets of New York, he was affectionate with Berg, greeting him warmly and saying that if he were ever elected president, Berg would be his secretary of state. In 1954, Rockefeller gave Berg some work to do with one of his business concerns, but it didn’t last long. Mostly, he was distant with Berg. Rockefeller’s secretaries didn’t always put Berg’s telephone calls through—they tried to satisfy Berg with tidbits of news about the governor—and after Berg died, when Rockefeller was asked to serve on a committee charged with organizing a Moe Berg Memorial Scholarship, one of his assistants wrote and signed a letter for him, declining.
Berg also made strenuous efforts to stay in touch with some of the men he’d met through the OSS, by sending postcards and paying visits, often to people who barely knew him. Henry Ringling North would take Berg to sweat in the Turkish baths at the Yale Club, where he wondered about Berg’s hernia. Henry Hyde, whom Berg had met at the OSS bureau in Algiers, says he was baffled when Berg telephoned him to schedule dinners with Hyde and his wife. “He seemed like a lonely man living a vagabond’s life,” says Hyde. “I can’t imagine why else he’d come to dinner. I didn’t know him well. I never knew where he lived.” North and Hyde were wealthy men, but Berg never asked them for money, and he didn’t take much of their time, either. “Easy man to entertain,” says Hyde. “He didn’t stay long.”
No summer went by without Berg disappearing from New York for his forays to Boston, Washington, Paris, Cuba, and the rest. He’d send back an occasional postcard that gave no hint of what he was doing. And then, one day, he was standing at the bar at Shor’s again, raising a Bloody Mary. “I’d say, ‘What were you doing?’ ” says Breslin, “and he’d say, ‘Now, James!’ ”
Wherever he went, Berg did his
best to arrange matters so that he was free for the World Series and then, later, the divisional playoffs, too. The excitement of big games, packed ballparks, and excellent baseball was pure pleasure to him. Berg sat in the press box with Breslin during the fifth game of the 1956 World Series, watching the Yankees player Don Larsen make chattel of the Brooklyn Dodgers batters. By the sixth inning, when Larsen still had not permitted a Dodger base-runner, the possibility of pitching perfection loomed and the press box at Yankee Stadium grew tense. “Don’t worry,” Berg told Breslin. “He’s strong enough to keep it going.” And he did.
At the 1967 World Series, in Boston, a Boston pediatric surgeon, Hardy Hendron, was sitting in the Fenway Park press box, occupying his seat courtesy of a Boston journalist whose son Hendron had operated on. On Hendron’s left was a dignified man who asked him what paper he wrote for. Hendron explained, and Moe Berg introduced himself, saying, “I’m a phony too.” Hendron knew very little about baseball, and so they had a lively conversation through the game, with Hendron asking questions and Berg offering explanations. He predicted what pitches the St. Louis and Boston pitchers were going to throw, and he was always right. Afterward, as they walked out of the park together, Hendron noticed that everyone from the hotdog vendors to well-dressed Bostonians seemed to know Berg. Hendron was curious. He wanted to know more. There was a dinner party that night at his home in Brookline, and he asked Berg if he’d like to come. Berg said he would. Little did Hendron know that he was bringing into his home a man whose social skills at such occasions were unparalleled.
It was a varied assortment of people who came to Hendron’s that night. There was an Italian industrialist from Milan, a French surgeon from Marseilles, and a surgeon from Tennessee. Berg spoke with the man from Milan and his wife in Italian, and conversed in French with the Marseilles doctor. There were some brass rubbings in the Hendrons’ living room. Berg looked them over and casually translated their Latin inscriptions. At dinner, Hendron asked Berg how he’d been able to predict pitches so uncannily at the ball game that afternoon. Berg said it was because he’d been a professional catcher. Then he added, “Of course, professionals can be wrong. For example, you doctors sometimes operate for acute appendicitis and find that instead the diagnosis is a problem with Meckel’s diverticulum.” The surgeons nearly fell off their chairs. After dinner, Berg cornered the doctor from Tennessee and asked him if pediatric surgeons knew how to repair umbilical hernias, and was told that it was a routine operation.
Two months later, Berg appeared unannounced at Hendron’s office at Massachusetts General Hospital, and when Hendron arrived for work, there was Berg, waiting for him and reading the New York Times. Berg said that he had been bothered by a hernia at his navel since he was a ballplayer in the 1930s. He’d kept it in a truss for thirty years, but thought that now was a good time to get rid of it. Hendron had a look. The hernia was as big as a grapefruit. In mid-December he removed it for Berg, free of charge.
After that, Berg would surface from time to time, arriving without warning, quietly seating himself outside Hendron’s office and reading a newspaper. Hendron would discover him there and invite him to stay at the house in Brookline, and Berg always accepted. Berg slept in a bedroom above the one Hendron shared with his wife, and sometimes during the night, after everyone had gone to bed, Hendron would be awakened by a loud thump on the ceiling above his bed. Rushing upstairs, he would find that Berg had fallen out of bed. Older people sometimes grow confused during the night when they are away from home, and begin to grope around, trying to remember where they are. This is known colloquially as sundowner’s syndrome, and the well-traveled Moe Berg, now in his late sixties, suffered from it in spades.
During the day, however, Berg was the picture of lucidity. Hendron never learned what Berg was doing, but Berg gave him the impression that he was working for the CIA. In 1969 he disappeared for several months and returned to say that he’d been involved in a deal that sent one hundred American military helicopters to Israel. (This was probably true, although what role Berg played in the arms shipment, and whom he was representing, is unclear from Berg’s notes. Most likely, he found the job through his friends in the aerospace industry and worked in some form as a liaison. A persistent Berg family rumor was that Berg had met Golda Meir, and if he did, this is likely to be when it happened.) Berg also filled Hendron in on all the usual details from his life—the Japan photography expedition, Scherrer, Einstein, and Groves. He also did something that was very unusual for Berg: he brought Hendron a gift. In April 1968, Berg presented Hendron with a French manual for a young surgeon, which had been published in Paris in 1770. Berg said to Hendron that he’d found the book several years before and had been keeping it ever since, knowing that someday he would find someone who would think it a treasure.
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY
Two of the people who did the most for Berg in the years after he came home from the war were his brother and sister. Berg lived on Roseville Avenue in Newark with Dr. Sam from 1947 to 1964. Then, when his brother threw him out, Berg moved the half dozen blocks to Ethel’s huge stucco mansion, on North Sixth Street, for the last few years of his life. Both Dr. Sam and Ethel were energetic professionals and devoted patrons of their communities. They gave generously to their baby brother as well, but neither of them was easy for him to live with, and they wore on him as he wore on them. The very complicated Moe Berg had a pair of very complicated siblings, who hated each other with such enduring passion that although they lived within a few blocks of each other, they did not speak for thirty years.
Dr. Sam—his preference for this appellation was unmistakable—attended New York University and then Bellevue Medical College, graduating in 1921. After a brief stint at a New York City contagious diseases hospital, he interned at Newark City Hospital, where he met his hero, the famous pathologist and medical examiner Dr. Harrison Martland. Martland made pioneering discoveries about the occupational hazards of working with radioactive materials, by studying a high incidence of “jaw rot” (cancer) in a group of women factory workers who painted radium on watch dials to make them visible in the dark. Martland found that the women were moistening their paint-brush tips to a fine point with their lips, and he proved that radium was gradually poisoning the women. This made him something of a medical celebrity, landing him in the pages of Life magazine. Martland’s popular renown increased when he titled a paper describing a series of investigations into the cerebral effects of continual blows to the head among boxers “Punch Drunk,” instantly whisking the phrase out of the gym and into the medical lexicon. The moon-faced Martland was a gruff, hardworking physician, and gruff, hardworking Dr. Sam admired almost everything about him, right down to the painting of a spectacular French nude that Martland kept in his office to inspire male patients he was treating for impotence.
In 1934, Dr. Sam became an assistant pathologist at Newark City Hospital, under Martland. During the war, the military sent Dr. Sam to the Pacific for three years, beginning in 1942, and then to Waltham (Massachusetts) General Hospital for 1946. After his release from service, he scampered back to Newark City Hospital.
For years after Martland’s death in 1954, Dr. Sam would weep when he began to talk about him, and late in his life, he wrote a biography of Martland which he published at his own expense. Martland, however, does not appear to have been so moved by Dr. Sam and did not advance his career when he could have. “There was a great deal of hero worship there,” says Dr. William Sharpe. “Sam always admired him because he thought Martland wasn’t an anti-Semite. He’d given him a job. Martland, in fact, was an anti-Semite and this told me something about Sam; he was not very perceptive.”
Besides his work as a pathologist, from the outset of his medical career in 1924, Dr. Sam also maintained a thriving family practice, out of his home. He took the unusual measure of converting his kitchen into a laboratory, which meant that he conducted blood and bone marrow tests in the same room where he cooked dreadful Spanish
omelettes every morning.
Like his brother, Dr. Sam owed his greatest moments of professional fulfillment to the atomic bomb. He was establishing an army blood bank in the Philippines on September 2, 1945, when he was sent by General Douglas MacArthur to Nagasaki, where he spent eight weeks in a converted public schoolhouse, examining burn and radiation fallout victims. Rather than finding anything wrenching or morbid about this experience, Dr. Sam was exhilarated—a typical reaction from a man who was fascinated by illness. His letters informing friends or relatives of the deaths of other friends or relatives are blizzards of medical jargon and as impersonal and devoid of sympathy as a pathology report. Dr. Sam could be a cold and inept human being. His cousin Elizabeth Shames once found blood in her urine and, worried, she brought Dr. Sam a sample. “What do you want me to do, Elizabeth, drink it?” he asked. He was also sometimes cruel. At the funeral for his cousin Frances Book Kashdan’s husband, Dr. Sam turned to his cousin, who was standing with her mother and her sister, all three of them now widows and said, “You Book women certainly can’t hang on to your husbands, can you?” At family dinners he specialized in reducing his niece Frances Book to tears. “I was frightened of Sam,” she says. “He was the stern doctor in the family.”
Dr. Sam’s sense of decorum was as eccentric as it was ramrod absolute. For twenty-five years he regularly borrowed books from Charles Cummings, a Newark librarian, and eventually willed everything he owned to the library, but he never let Cummings call him by his first name. He pursued an acquaintance with his brother’s friend the scientist Sam Goudsmit. After one of their telephone conversations, Dr. Sam wrote “Dear Dr. Goudsmit” the following mea culpa. “Several months ago, while talking to you on the phone, I inadvertently called you Mister. I realized the error at once, but was too astonished to apologize at the time. Perhaps ashamed would be a better term, if you know what I mean. But I just have to clear my conscience. Although it was an innocent lapse of mind, I nevertheless offer my apology and hope you accept it in good grace. I have the greatest respect for you.”
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