The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
A new movie revives interest in ballplayer, spy Moe Berg
A quarter of a century ago, Nicholas Dawidoff emerged from three years of deep research and stressful writing to tell the world about the amazing life of Moe Berg, the only man to play professional baseball — for 19 years — and go on to be a spy for the U.S. government in World War II.
“The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg” won critical acclaim in 1994 but still few people recognized his name.
However, now Dawidoff’s character study is becoming more widely known with the release, finally, of a movie, starring Paul Rudd as the elusive Berg.
“The Catcher Was a Spy” also has in its cast Paul Giamatti, a childhood friend of Dawidoff ’s from the East Rock neighborhood of New Haven. Giamatti is the son of the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, a professor of English Renaissance literature at Yale and eventually its president.
“It was so gratifying and exciting to look up at the screen and there’s Paul (Giamatti),” Dawidoff said last Thursday afternoon as he sat outside East Rock Coffee Shop. “We played Napoleonic war games as kids!”
Dawidoff saw the movie last winter when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah. He declined to tell me what he thinks of the film, saying: “I’m not going to go there. I think it’s their business. I didn’t write it (the screenplay). For me to start talking about it would be wrong.”
But he grinned and said, “I consider myself incredibly fortunate that they made it.” He also said he appreciated how much effort the filmmakers and actors put into it.
Dawidoff met twice with the film’s screenwriter, Robert Rodat, but noted: “He knew what he wanted to do. It’s his take on Moe Berg. A cat is still a cat; maybe a slightly different breed.”
Dawidoff also spent several hours talking about Berg with Rudd, whom Dawidoff describes as “warm and inquisitive.” Dawidoff said Rudd’s depiction of the man was “boyish and charming.”
Rudd and Rodat certainly needed to pick Dawidoff’s brain about what made Berg tick and why he was so odd despite his accomplishments. Berg spent his entire life deliberately being secretive, an enigma.
Dawidoff wrote in his book: “Berg’s was a life of abiding strangeness. The secret world of Moe Berg was charming and seamy, vivid and unsettling, wonderful and sad. And unlike the caricature, it was resonant with ambiguity.”
Berg was quite welleducated; he studied at Princeton, NYU, the Sorbonne in Paris and Columbia University, where he obtained his law degree. He spoke eight languages. But Dawidoff wrote the man’s life had many ironies: “Moe Berg never married, fathered children, took vacations, learned to drive or owned much of anything besides the black, white and gray clothes he wore on his back and the books he stacked in his brother’s house.”
While playing for the Boston Red Sox, Berg wandered around the city, stopping in at museums, coffee shops or lectures at Harvard University. He began each morning by walking to a newsstand to buy at least 10 newspapers. Dawidoff wrote: “Berg craved newsprint the way some people yearn for coffee or tobacco. Walking along a city sidewalk, he cut a distinctive figure, with a stack of papers cradled under his arm and stuffed into his pockets, protruding like reeds from a marsh.”
It’s not surprising that Ted Williams called Berg “Secret” and “the Mystery Man.” None of the other ballplayers on Berg’s assorted teams knew what to make of him either. But he was a great storyteller in the bullpen.
Although he lasted for
nearly two decades in the game, he hit just six home runs in his entire career and his lifetime batting average was, as Dawidoff termed it, “a feeble .243.”
But when I spoke with Dawidoff, he defended Berg’s talents as a catcher. “He was a very good baseball player until he was injured.”
Then, Dawidoff added, “He was probably a better intelligence officer than a baseball player.”
Dawidoff describes his subject as “part Babe Ruth, part James Bond.” Warming to the subject, he exclaimed: “Major League Baseball! Being a spy! Two incredibly interesting, dynamic occupations. And he was in both of them.”
His mission, assigned to him by the Office of Strategic Services (a precursor of the C.I.A.) was this: shadow the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, arrange to attend his lecture in Zurich, Switzerland, in December of 1944 and if Heisenberg said anything to indicate he was working on an atomic bomb for Hitler, Berg was to shoot him right there in the auditorium.
But when Berg listened to the lecture, he heard nothing of the sort; he kept the gun in his pocket. Based on the intelligence work he did in that period, he concluded the Germans were nowhere close to building that atomic weapon.
“This was a really important thing to know, whether a dangerous dictator was building an atomic bomb,” Dawidoff said during the interview.
But after Berg’s all-important work on that front, his career began to decline. After the war ended, he did some work for the CIA, trying to find out information about Soviet atomic scientists. But he was so odd and secretive, even with his supervisors, that they did not renew his contract in 1954. “He was difficult to get along with,” Dawidoff said.
In his later years, as Berg slipped into even more secrecy and obscurity, Dawidoff noted, everyone wondered what had happened to him. “To me, that was the most compelling thing about his life. The rest of his life was interesting to me as a writer.”
Dawidoff was so fascinated by Berg that he quit his job as a staff writer at Sports Illustrated to do the book. “It was a stressful and exciting thing to do. I grew up with a single mom in New Haven, so it was really important for me to be self-sufficient and earn a salary. But I wanted to write about things beyond sports. Writing books was what I’d wanted to do all my life.”
During his research, Dawidoff traveled to Japan, Italy and other places Berg had been. “I tried to see and walk across what he had seen and walked across.”
Dawidoff also did at least 200 interviews and dug through many documents. “I spent months in archives looking at intelligence documents. I discovered little bits of gold after spending weeks looking at papers. That’s exciting to somebody who’s deeply engaged.”
Dawidoff said Berg’s complex character was “a great gift to a young
writer.” He added, “If you can’t approach it with enthusiasm and compassion, you shouldn’t do it.”
He realized Berg was “a sad figure,” even tragic. Although he craved his father’s approval, his dad spat on the ground when baseball was mentioned. He never once came out to see his son play a game. But
“But I wanted to write about things beyond sports. Writing books was what I’d wanted to do all my life.” Nicholas Dawidoff
Dawidoff noted, “Moe Berg had such resourceful ways of dealing with his unhappiness.”
Berg died in 1972, a lonely man.
In his book, Dawidoff said that in the early ’90s, a Moe Berg baseball card was worth about $150. I asked Dawidoff if he has one, and he replied, “I do have his baseball card! Somebody gave it to me.”
Dawidoff has no idea what it’s worth today. Nor does he care. He would never sell it.