Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
For years, staff writer Jeannette Cooperman pestered Jerry Berger: “When are you going to let us do a profile about you?” The longtime gossip columnist had always dished about others’ lives, but he’d rarely offered a glimpse into his own. Even when writer Joe Bargmann penned an entertaining profile of him for SLM 20 years ago, Berger managed to reveal little of substance about himself.
Then, July 15 of last year, an email appeared in Cooperman’s inbox. The subject line read, “I respectfully submit the interview to you for consideration.” She opened it to find a Q&A, one in which Berger interviewed himself as Cooperman. Rather than ask softballs, he’d scripted questions like: “What was your greatest disappointment?” “How do you handle criticism?” “What about rumors of your lifestyle?” (His response began: “Some of your readers may think, ‘Yuck.’”)
When Cooperman asked, “Why now?” he replied simply, “More of life is behind me than ahead of me.”
Then he proceeded to answer, over the next four months, every real question she asked. Some of the answers revealed so much, she had to ask if it was all true. Berger swore on his “beloved parents’ graves” that every word was factual. We checked as much as we could anyway. The result can be found on p. 74.
It’s an accident of fortune that the profile of Berger appears in the same issue as a cover feature that sounds eversoclose to his last name: “The Best Burgers in St. Louis” (p. 58). Dining editor George Mahe and his team of food critics spent weeks visiting restaurants and bars across the region, stuffing themselves to the point that Mahe later said, “I never want to see another burger in my life.” (He ate a burger within the week.)
Naturally, in a city where the beloved sandwich purportedly made its world debut more than a century ago, Mahe and company had to be selective in naming the best burger joints. They couldn’t (and wouldn’t) include just any establishment that serves up a hunk of meat between two buns, though there are surely others that deserve a visit, such as the White Barn in North County and Michael’s Bar & Grill in Maplewood, not to mention Sportsman’s Park in Ladue, where you can find burgers with some familiar names: the Jack Buck Burger, the Larry Wilson Burger and—at one time, during the ’80s and ’90s, Berger claims—the Jerry Burger.
Still, when Berger learned of the cover coincidence, that the profile about him would appear in the same issue as the best burger joints, he responded with a grin.
“I’m not a big fan of burgers.”
