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Photographs by Scott Ferguson
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Click HERE for a web-only gallery of Berger posing with celebrities during his days as a Hollywood publicist.
People crowd into the downtown Hyatt’s elevator, the men standing straight in their stiff tuxedos, the women shivering in their satin gowns. Jerry Berger steps in like he’s walking onto a yacht. “How are you?” he asks a young man next to him, then fingers the knot in the guy’s wool scarf. “I’m gonna steal that from you!” he says playfully.
Upstairs, Berger enters the glittery chaos of the Herbert Hoover Boys & Girls Club gala and holds out his arms. Ed Dowd Jr., the former U.S. attorney, walks into them. The minute they release one another, Berger takes a narrow black notebook out. “How’s the firm doing? How’s your son?” He takes out a camera, snaps Dowd and his wife, Jill. Then he moves on, scanning the crowd.
Berger approaches a tall woman, kisses her hand, asks her name. “Vivian Moore,” he repeats, sounding impressed. When she says she’s a former Rockwood School District administrator, he asks what’s wrong with schools today. He scribbles furiously as she answers. She shows no sign of stopping. As if struck by a sudden, delightful notion, Berger asks, “Is that your husband?” He takes their picture and steps away.
“Babe!” yells Patty Wente, the former general manager of KWMU-FM. She was fired in 2008. She’s got a tidbit for him: “I got a direct-mail letter today asking me to give to KWMU!” Berger’s eyes widen. He loves this kind of irony. When a photographer approaches, he hugs Wente and lets his hand hover in front of her breast until the shutter clicks. She laughs.
Wherever he is, Berger zooms in on the drama and the gossip. He’s got the right persona for it, with a wised-up voice, snappy patter, and a tough-as-nails exterior. Add it up and it says, “You can’t shock me.” So naturally, people try. Once he was a Hollywood publicist, and he remains adept at flourishes. A gossip columnist now (he prefers “people columnist”), he’s still puffing egos, but he also gleefully punctures them. Sometimes he digs to reveal hidden truths, but just as often he seems to do it just to get a reaction. People love him, but they don’t trust him—which is just the way he wants it. At 77, he’s going full steam, living the life he alone ordained.
Berger scans the Hyatt crowd again and makes a beeline for Tom Reeves, the president of Pulaski Bank.
“Jer!” Reeves exclaims. “You look great!”
Years ago, when Berger argued with St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Louis Rose, his colleague, their stomachs touched like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Now he’s trim, because he can’t eat enough to be fat. He seems gentle because he speaks in a whisper that’s no more than wind passing through a throat destroyed by cancer. People bend close to listen.
“I just want to be noticed,” he jokes as he leaves the Hyatt.
He means it.
Jerry Berger’s father, Julius Berger, was content to be a plumber. He woke up smiling, and he sang little Jerry and his sister, Shirley, to sleep with George M. Cohan show tunes. But he couldn’t find the same peace with their mother.
Julius met Rae Cohen in her flapper days, when she won a Charleston contest and was a runner-up for Miss Missouri. She was a beauty queen with a filthy mouth. When a prominent St. Louisan confided an affair to her at a cocktail party, she suggested he “cut an inch off his...” Ordering at Kentucky Fried Chicken, she asked if they had chicken backs. The kid behind the counter screwed up his face and said, “Bags of what?” After two more attempts, Rae banged her fist on the counter, yelled “Bags of shit!” and walked out.
These are stories Jerry remembers.
Terrified of physical dirt, Rae washed not just vegetables and fruit, but also raw meat. She’d refuse to shake a man’s hand, saying later, “He probably peed and didn’t wash his hands.” She rarely hugged or kissed her kids. She called her sister regularly for parenting advice.
Rae could cook, though. Jerry loved it when the aroma of her stuffed cabbage, matzoh-ball chicken soup, or grilled pork chops (she told Julius they were veal) filled their first-floor apartment. They lived at 1292 Hamilton, just south of Page Boulevard. Jerry went to Soldan High School, where he was in the drama club. He loved movies—their glamour, and the way audiences reacted to them. His prom date was a cool blonde named Virginia, who went to University City High School. He’d already lost his virginity—at 15, in a whorehouse on Sarah Street, he says. “C’mon, Berger, I’ll get you laid,” said one of his dad’s friends, a police detective. He turned Jerry over to a pro named Judy.
Berger didn’t have sex with a man until two years later. “It was rape,” he says, “at knifepoint.” Berger’s car had stalled downtown in a blizzard, he says, so he’d hitchhiked. He broke free and ran home, blood dripping down his legs. Humiliated, he told no one about the assault. “It’s a strange wound,” he recalls the family doctor saying as he stitched it. “Probably constipation,” Berger said, knowing the doctor knew.
He’s not sure how long it took him after that to want sex with a man, although in time, he did.
He never thought of himself as gay or bisexual, he says.
He refuses to label his pleasures.
Berger wanted to be a doctor at one time, but when he found out it would take 12 years, he decided he’d be a pharmacist. He worked part-time in his cousin Harry Sandler’s U. City drugstore, so naïve he rummaged through drawers when his cousin asked him to fetch some fallopian tubes. Berger watched Sandler pour elixirs and mold suppositories. He enrolled at St. Louis College of Pharmacy, but proclaimed it “a bust” after one semester. Then he wrote letters to every branch manager on what was then Film Row, three blocks of Olive Street in midtown.
In 1953, MGM hired Berger, 20, to book films in St. Louis. On his breaks, he hung out in the back of the MGM office at 3300 Olive, listening to sixtyish spinsters gossip about Robert Taylor and Greta Garbo as their gloved fingers patched the nitrate films. One day, he had lunch with a publicist at Mom’s Cafeteria on Grand Boulevard. The guy talked nonstop about how to light a fire in an audience, make them desperate to see a movie. By the time Berger left, he could think of nothing else.
He’d been working nights at the marble-lobbied Loew’s State Theatre on Washington Avenue. Loew’s soon had him managing other theaters. Then the chain sent him to New Orleans to run one of its flagships. He found an apartment in the French Quarter, owned by a former nun who ran a breakfast café. Truman Capote lived upstairs.
In 1955, Ray Murray of Columbia Pictures called Berger and asked him to tour with Joan Crawford, who was staging a comeback. He says she demanded a case of her favorite vodka in every hotel room and made her maid dust the light bulbs and sanitize the telephones. What most impressed him, though, was the way she took control of her public image, editing press releases, correcting grammar in her bio, and insisting that no photo be used without her approval.
After that, Berger went to Twentieth Century–Fox, which sent him to London, Paris, and Rome to learn about international distribution and publicity. He lived almost two years in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he had an affair with an Afrikaans woman. “As we were about to reach climax,” he recalls, “she screamed, ‘Oh, Jeddy, kiss me titties proper!’” Then, he says, “It was all over for me. My erection turned into putty. I dislike conversation during sex.”
When Berger returned to New York, Paramount Pictures offered him a marketing job. One morning, he was sitting in his cubbyhole tallying the ticket grosses from theaters when a man stormed in and screamed at him for not touting the Oscars a movie had won. Without looking up, Berger snapped, “Who the f—k are you?”
He was the chairman of Paramount.
Berger stayed in New York for seven years, from 1961 to 1968. He loved the late dinners and clubbing, the mix of people, the weekends on Fire Island or in the Hamptons. He paid $185 a month for a rent-controlled five-room apartment on West 67th Street. His neighbor Vinnie ran a male prostitution ring. He gave Berger a long, appraising look, taking in the curly dark hair, the cherubic smile, the brows that curved in amused surprise and never knitted in judgment. “You want to work a stretch of Central Park West?” Vinnie asked.
Berger did. He liked the buzz and unpredictability of hustling, he says, and the reassurance of being desired. Even more, he liked seeing people when they were vulnerable and learning their secrets. One night, he says, Vinnie asked him to call on a blonde movie star. When she opened the door to her apartment, she took one look at Berger and said, “Oh, shit! He was supposed to send me a black guy!”
On his free nights, Berger worked his way into New York’s cocktail party circuit. Truman Capote, he says, was like a little clown. Leonard Bernstein seemed to shun his fans, showing up at one party with his arm in a sling so he wouldn’t be asked to play the piano. Berger collected such stories like trading stamps. For Paramount, he devised publicity stunts for pictures that needed a splash: Becket, the reissue of The Ten Commandments, Alfie. Then Paramount asked him to move to Hollywood and work with film director Otto Preminger.
Berger wasn’t thrilled at the idea of the West Coast, he says, but he liked the raise, the perks, and the promise of working closely with the studio. He also liked Preminger, who terrified people with his temper, but in private was very funny. Berger invented pretexts for Preminger press conferences, even arranging a one-on-one interview by Gypsy Rose Lee. Preminger surprised him by refusing to do it, he says. Only later did Berger learn that Preminger and Lee had an illegitimate son.
Berger had a son, too. He’d gotten three women pregnant, he says; two had had abortions, leaving him feeling guilty. The third he describes with feeling: “Gorgeous. Very thin, big tits. Grapefruits! Cantaloupes! She was genteel, soft, pliable.” His hands draw curves in the air. “Her mother told me she was pregnant, then hung up on me.” Later, Berger hired a private investigator to find her and his son. He traced them to Phoenix, flew there, and discovered they’d moved again. He never did see his son.
He fared better with movie stars. Being a publicist often meant protecting them from the press. As he shepherded celebs, he learned their quirks and foibles: Gloria Vanderbilt told risqué stories, he says; Cary Grant regularly had wax scooped from his ears; Michael Caine really liked bargain-hunting at big-box stores.
And then, in 1968, at the age of 35, Berger came home. He’d gotten a job as operations director for The Muny. The move made perfect sense: He wanted to eventually run The Muny. Meanwhile, he handled all of the high-maintenance stars. (He recalls Rudolf Nureyev eliciting gasps at the Chase Hotel by lounging poolside in a gold lamé bikini. “People with children are shocked,” Berger says he told Nureyev’s agent, whereupon the agent laughed and asked, “Did they like it?”)
For night life, Berger would fly back to New York. He became a member of The Mineshaft, a gay S&M den in the Meatpacking District. He loved power, not submission, he says—and for Berger, the real power was in watching. He remembers seeing a woman who looked like a young Sophia Loren lead a man on a leash fastened to the most tender part of his body.
It was hard to shock Jerry Berger.
Berger had managed to get in on the end of the golden age of movies and the end of the golden age of musicals. Now it was time to join the last golden decades of the American newspaper.
In 1978, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat hired him as a society columnist—which, to their readers, meant gossip columnist. He hung around bars, restaurants, and government offices, talking to busboys, cops, bartenders, lawyers. Every morning, he stopped by Globe publisher G. Duncan Bauman’s office to have coffee and a Danish. (“I loved that guy. He was right of Attila the Hun, but we bonded,” he says.) He stood at the bedside of Mafia boss John Vitale at the old Faith Hospital. He often called on Sorkis Webbe Sr., a lawyer with alleged mob connections—and one day he heard from the FBI about it. “The following conversation was recorded in Sorkis Webbe’s office,” he says an agent told him before playing a tape: “Sorky!” Berger was heard exclaiming. “There’s a plainclothesman downstairs taking license-plate numbers!”
Berger was as intrigued by Catholicism as he was by crime. He begged Bauman to arrange a private audience with the pope. Berger wound up one of 250 people in a room with Pope John Paul II, “which to me was a very private audience,” he says. “We chatted for a second and I said, ‘Shalom.’” That evening, Berger dined with a handful of envious seminarians from St. Louis. “Mr. Berger, which parish are you a member of?” one asked. “Tom!” Berger exclaimed. “I’m a Jew!”
When the Globe folded, in 1986, Bauman wrote in a letter, “It is my conviction that Jerry Berger was probably more widely read than any other factor in the paper.” Berger had the letter framed. And Joseph Pulitzer snapped him up for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Editor William Woo winced at the idea of a gossip columnist, but Pulitzer overrode him, counting on Berger to boost circulation.
Berger listened and jotted everywhere he went, even on trips to Dierbergs or Schnucks. He loved the coziness of chatting and handing out his card in the cereal aisle. He developed Bergerisms, linguistic mash-ups modeled after those of columnist Walter Winchell, 40 years earlier. People who left a job “ankled,” an executive was a “topper,” TV folk were “tubelings,” a publicity tour was a “tubthumper,” a marriage was an “aislewalk,” an expecting couple were “infanticipating.” If their marriage was ending, they were “getting separate mail.”
Berger made mistakes, but they were usually small. If readers liked the ink, inaccuracies slid. If they called to blast his accuracy, it was usually because an item had scorched their marriage or tarnished their reputation. His column soon ran four days a week. He broke national news more than once, but it barely mattered. Readers wanted to know which
St. Louisans were getting divorced or having an affair, who was bankrupt or had been diagnosed with a brain tumor. He got good at finding out. He’d write that “a certain officeholder” worried his chums because of his relationship with his secretary. The officeholder would call early the next morning raising hell. “Oh!” Berger would gasp. “I didn’t know you were doing anything with your secretary!” He tricked people into telling him things; he’d call someone and say, “This is what I’ve heard, and this is what I’m printing. You got a comment?”—thus forcing an admission.
For years, Berger had coddled and cajoled celebrities. His column could seem red-carpeted, too, full of coy references to “sightems” and the nuptials of those he called “the bold-faced people.” But he also disclosed corporate mergers and layoffs before press releases could be approved. He pointed out that the pet charity of his friend Donna Wilkinson had received a low rating from a national charity evaluator. He broke people’s personal news before they were ready.
“William Woo came up to me and said, ‘Stop spreading rumors that I’m going to Palo Alto,’” he recalls. “Where did he go? Palo Alto. So it was not about the truth—it was just, ‘Don’t talk about it.’”
Berger touched enough nerves that it became politic to say, “Oh God, Berger. I never read that column.”
Everybody read Berger.
“What he might present was actually, if you stood away from it, innocuous,” says his longtime attorney and friend Thomas Guilfoil. “But back then, we were so anxious to stamp ‘secret’ on everything.”
At the Post, berger again circled close to power. He used to meet Michael Pulitzer’s wife, Ceil, at Balaban’s—secretly, he says. Her hair slanted across her face; he imitates her brushing it away with a single dramatic flip and saying, “I hate
this city.”
Joe Pulitzer, he says, “loved gossip. He’d run into me and say, ‘Tell, tell, tell.’” Berger pauses. “He said, ‘Call me Joe.’ I could never do that. Why?” He breathes out the question, filling it with angst. But his eyes are twinkling.
Berger loves drama.
In her days as a Post investigative reporter, Carolyn Tuft once tried to walk with Berger the two blocks from City Hall to Savvis Center for the hockey playoffs. “We missed almost the whole initial ceremony, and I’d gotten there two hours in advance,” she says. “People kept stopping us: ‘Did you know public defender so-and-so is having an affair with so-and-so?’ I couldn’t believe the stuff they would say!” Tuft went to lunch with Berger almost every day for five years, she says, because it got her out around people and gave her quick rapport. “He said hello to everybody, I don’t care if it was the guy cleaning the floors, and we got the lowdown.”
In 1992, Berger got a tip that George Peach, then St. Louis’ circuit attorney, had been busted in a vice-squad sting at an airport hotel. Berger burst into managing editor Dave Lipman’s office yelling, “Stop the presses,” thus fulfilling every other journalist’s fantasy.
Peach, who had crusaded against porn and prostitution, had offered an undercover female police detective $150 for sex.
Post reporters spent the rest of the day struggling to confirm Berger’s tip.
That afternoon, Berger was on a gurney at Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, waiting to get a malignant polyp on his vocal cord zapped. “Mr. Berger?” a nurse said. “There’s an emergency call.”
It was the acting city editor. “Jerry, we have to know your sources,” she said.
“I cannot reveal them,” he said, and returned to the gurney like Napoleon to his camp chair. (Late that night, the reporters finally got
confirmation.)
Richard Weiss edited Berger’s Post column for roughly 10 years. At its peak, it ran Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays. “Tuesdays and Thursdays were really good days for me,” Weiss says. “Editing Berger wasn’t my favorite thing to do. I didn’t know all these people he was writing about… Ninety percent of his column was innocuous, but you never knew when an item would leap up and grab you.”
Most of Berger’s inaccuracies come because he has such confidence in his memory. He’ll say something with utter certainty, and just a cheerful “whoops” later to correct it. For years, he’s been storing away bits of people’s pasts, flattering them by tossing out the names of their children and asking with warm interest about their work, their friends, their ailing relatives. With that much raw data, glitches and transpositions are perhaps inevitable—but rather than question himself, he lets the assertions tumble out as truth.
Besides, fact-checking is plodding. Berger’s brain dances a jitterbug, not a minuet. He’ll start a story, hit a tangle or blank, pause for half a second. “No! Wait! I remember now. Vividly.” Besides, if he called to check, it would have spoiled the surprise when his subject opened the morning paper and saw his own name in bold.
In 40 years, the man’s never been sued. He’s made a few whopping mistakes, though. Weiss still remembers the day Berger burst into Lipman’s office and said breathlessly, “Stan Musial’s on his deathbed. He could go anytime.” Lipman came out into the newsroom and yelled, “Nobody goes home.”
“This has got to be 20 years ago, and of course Stan’s still with us today,” Weiss says. “We must have paid $10,000 in overtime.
I always tell Jerry that when Stan Musial does go, I will tell everybody Jerry had it first.”
Weiss also remembers, with a sigh, the times Berger was really right. In 1996, for example, Berger got a tip that Leonard Slatkin was leaving the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra to conduct the National Symphony Orchestra in D.C.
“Jerry, how do you know this?” Weiss asked.
“Dick, I just know.”
Weiss sought counsel. One classical-music expert told him, “There’s no way that’s going to happen; the National is too far down on the pecking order. It would be incredibly stupid for him to do that.”
Weiss spiked the item.
The Washington Post broke the story. Slatkin was taking over the National Symphony.
Berger stalked out and had T-shirts silk-screened “Never trust an editor.”
Berger recalls telling Post reporter Peter Hernon that a book had to be written about the Busch dynasty, assuming they’d co-author it. Hernon, now at the Chicago Tribune, says he’s sorry Berger thought that: “I probably discussed that topic with every reporter I respected at the Post-Dispatch.” Hernon wrote the book with reporter Terry Ganey—and asked Berger for background.
“I took my revenge,” Berger says. “Subtly.” He had lunch with someone at the PR firm that represented Anheuser-Busch. “I understand a missive went out. A lot of people at A-B got lockjaw.”
Ellen Soeteber took over as editor of the Post in January 2001. The week she arrived, Berger told her he was retiring.
“That made me nuts,” she says now. “I figured I’d be St. Louis’ equivalent of ‘Who lost China?’ So we went to Crown Candy and had chili and sweets, and I got him to stay.”
Had he been threatening her?
“Well, not so much threatening, but maybe a little test,” she says.
She didn’t offer him a raise, “just affection and a lot of attention. I love Jerry, I really do. He’d drop by my house and keep me up on the latest gossip.” She chuckles. “At first, you think he’s giving you a piece of gossip, and then you realize he’s trying to get something from you! He’s a little devil, no question about that.”
People love to hear gossip from Berger. And because he blurts out so many indiscreet and off-color comments, they think they know him. Soeteber talks about “his little shuffle way of walking that I think is cute and distinctive,” as though he developed a penguin stratagem to disarm people.
“Yeah, I had a shuffle,” Berger says. “Then I had a knee replacement.” Now he takes stiff, short steps—whatever gets him through
the crowd.
“If you were going to invent a gossip columnist in a novel, you couldn’t do better than Jerry Berger,” says Post columnist Bill McClellan. “Everything about him was perfect for it, even being gay. That gave him an ability to talk to a lot of women without their husbands getting nervous. And the fact that he didn’t drink, even when the newsroom was filled with a lot of hard-drinking people, made it possible to do his job.” McClellan laughs. “Jerry would see me and say, ‘Billy! I got something for you, but you’ve gotta swear not to tell anybody.’ And about 10 minutes later, I’d see Harper Barnes and say, ‘I gotta tell you something, but don’t tell anybody.’ And Harper would go, ‘Jerry told me that two days ago!’”
“He’d be on the phone talking to somebody and go, ‘Thanks, sweetheart. Thanks, sweetheart,’” McClellan recalls, “and he’d hang up the phone and go, ‘Bitch!’”
In later years, “some of the younger reporters were turned off by what they thought was an act,” says Post reporter Todd Frankel, “and it just made them want to throw up. But he wasn’t one of those guys who just dodder off on their own orbit. He still had the game.”
He just played it by his own rules.
The first scandal came in 2001, when then-Mayor Clarence Harmon took a series of hits in Berger’s column during his campaign for re-election and blamed them on Richard Callow. Harmon said Callow, a former campaign consultant whom Harmon had found first disloyal, then vindictive, was “ghostwriting” at least part of Berger’s column. When D.J. Wilson noted the firefight in the Riverfront Times, his phone started ringing. All of the callers echoed Harmon’s allegation.
“I don’t know a good publicist or a bad waiter who wasn’t one of Mr. Berger’s sources,” Callow emails now, no doubt using the formality to inject a little distance into what’s actually a long, easy relationship.
Of tips and influence, there’s no doubt. But write the whole column?
“If that was the case, then I’m the fool,” Weiss says slowly. “I’m sure Callow was a good tipster, maybe so good that whatever he wanted to see in Jerry’s column got into Jerry’s column. But it was just too much of Jerry and his flaws and foibles for me to believe Richard was writing it.”
Reminded of the rumor, Berger laughs and shakes his head. Then he leans close. “Everyone’s a tipster,” he whispers hoarsely.
The other scandal about berger was that he expected, even demanded, freebies. But now the Post newsroom was filled with earnest young reporters schooled in scrupulous impartiality. “There were people who thought what he was doing was bad for the newspaper,” says Frankel, “trading on its good name. The world had changed.”
Soeteber had developed an ethics policy the minute she arrived, and she reminded Berger of it frequently. So did Weiss.
“Usually the complaints were secondhand,” Weiss says. “Maybe someone who’d been in the next booth would say, ‘Berger didn’t pay for his lunch.’ He’d say, ‘Well, they didn’t want me to pay.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, you need to pay, don’t do that.’ It all seems very tame now.”
In one sense, Berger did his job well because he never stopped trading tidbits, flattering and cajoling his tipsters, leveraging bits of information or entrée to get even better information and access. The freebies were part of his matrix of favors. The Post tsk-tsked his methods even as it relished the readers he brought. It was all a little like Claude Rains’ character in Casablanca, shocked that there was gambling at Rick’s Café.
In 2004, Berger went to Soeteber’s office. “It’s time, babe,” he said heavily. “It’s time for me to go.” She could tell he meant it. He’d been feeling lousy, had a sore throat he couldn’t shake. He was tired. And he wasn’t about to insult people by changing his MO, he says. Instead, he left the Post altogether.
There’s a machismo to Jerry Berger that a lot of people fail to recognize. The freebies weren’t about money; they were about power. He’s generous when he chooses to be, and when he feels entitled, he swaggers. Favors are to be traded; refusing one is an insult. Splitting a check is cold. Privilege is power.
SLM food editor George Mahe remembers an incident years ago, when he was co-owner of Harvest and managed the front of the house. “You’ve got the mayor calling up on one line and Jerry Berger on the other—who gets the table? Jerry Berger got the table. And it couldn’t be some back-row table, either. He had to have a see-and-be-seen table.” Berger walked in five minutes after he called, holding a cigarette as he paraded through a no-smoking dining room. “People are all looking at me like, ‘What are you going to do?’ You don’t want to piss him off. People would come in with the Post in their hand and say, ‘I want the beef tenderloin with the mushrooms,’ pointing to what Jerry Berger said,” not what the paper’s restaurant critic said.
In the past four years, Berger’s had various things put into his body—a heart stent, a new knee joint—and various things removed: a blocked section of his prostate, a hernia, his epiglottis. He’d been cancer-free after the polyp removal in 1992, but in 2007, that persistent sore throat turned out to be cancer of the epiglottis.
Surgeons removed the epiglottis. The subsequent radiation destroyed his voice. He took an antidepressant for a while, started gardening. He bought a Sig Sauer semiautomatic pistol and began target shooting at the Bull’s Eye range on Manchester Road, taking aim at paper targets he imagined to be intruders or “a contemptible editor.” He fired straight into their hearts.
In August 2009, Berger resurrected his column online. On his own. “No f—g editors.”
Three months later, he was banned from the Post newsroom.
“It’s a great story,” he says, eyes half-closed, like a turtle in the sun.
He’d been dropping in at the Post regularly, stoking up on the adrenaline and chitchat. He’d also taken a few shots at the paper in his online column, mentioning its budget crunch and layoffs in the same breath as an expensive redecoration of the publisher’s office. And now, he’d been “inappropriate” with a male reporter.
Post editor Arnie Robbins told Chad Garrison of the Riverfront Times, “After a recent newsroom visit, we received several complaints from staff members about inappropriate behavior directed at them from Jerry. I love Jerry. We’re friends. But we cannot tolerate that type of behavior in the newsroom.” Garrison wrote that a Post reporter, who’d asked not to be identified, had mentioned groping and
lewd comments.
“I never inappropriately touched anyone,” Berger emails. “Hugs and kisses to both women and men—yes. I believe the whole thing was cooked up in retaliation for items about the publisher.” A minute later, another email appears: “And probably pecked him on the cheek.” A third email comes with only a subject line: “So you see, the whole thing is nonsense.”
His old friend Tuft agrees: “Everybody knows how Jerry was. He was huggy, touchy-feely, all that crap, to everybody. He licked my face when I first met him! That’s his shtick, like Bill McClellan and his unmatched tie. But 90 percent of the people who knew him were gone.”
Before the banning, reporter Frankel says, “You heard a lot of ‘What business does he have here, especially since he’s launched a competing blog?’ And everyone has his suspicions about who really runs that blog—they think it’s still Callow. ‘Who takes the photos? Who pays for the website? He’s even got ads!’”
Berger takes the photos himself; he often did so even in his days at the Post. Young Post reporters don’t go to galas, or they’d know. “True, I have an administrator for my website,” he says.
He sounds amused by the speculation his column has provoked. At other sites, like Drudge Report and The Huffington Post, individual writers “carry very little clout,” he observes. “The constant availability of so much free material leads site owners to conclude that no individual writer has all that much more value than another. Except for bergersbeat.com.”
Berger wants to meet for lunch at Bici Café. Screw the feeding tube; he still loves food, even though it doesn’t go down easily anymore. Without that tiny flap at the root of his tongue, he’s had to learn swallowing techniques, because his body has no way to steer food to the stomach, air to the lungs. Soon after the surgery, he aspirated food into his lungs and developed pneumonia and a staph infection that nearly killed him.
He looks eagerly at the menu. He orders, and when the meal arrives, he makes his way resolutely through each course. It’s not easy. After a particularly violent coughing fit, he excuses himself. But instead of seeking a private moment in the men’s room, he heads straight for the only other occupied table in the restaurant. He introduces himself in his now-trademark whisper.
“Really?” he says. “That’s fascinating!” He exchanges cards with everyone at the table. Then he returns, leans close, and whispers, “Professor at Washington University. She’s doing research on white-collar crime. What a story!”
He resumes his stream of anecdotes, recounting his life like he’s reading a publicity poster: “I was young! I loved it!”
Asked how he defines gossip, he insists again that he is not a gossip columnist: “That infers rumors. Occasionally, I will report a rumor, but not often. I try to get two confirmations.” And if he can’t, but it’s too good to pass up?
He runs it and adds a caveat: “I hope no one tells me it’s not true.”
Berger knows exactly what draws his readers: “Schadenfreude! People love it! I can break the biggest scoops, people don’t remember. But when I wrote that Joe and Ann Buck were separating, that August Busch [IV] was going into sex rehab? Tremendous response.”
There’s a meanness to some of Berger’s conversational asides, a cold realism in his assessments of big shots, while there’s a warmth to his tireless interest in other people’s lives. None of it lasts more than a few seconds. In the face of others’ misery—or his own—Jerry Berger is as buoyant as a rubber duck. Rarely introspective about his life’s work, he senses people’s hunger and fills it. The hardest decision he ever made was to write about a friend forced into rehab by law enforcement. But he did it.
As he talks, a personal code begins to emerge: Never doubt yourself. Be blunt and graphic and funny; shock whenever possible. Never let yourself think you’re part of the crowd you’re covering. Play favorites, trade favors—but owe no one.
“It was I who approached Columbia,” he says, his whisper strained with emotion. “It was I who got the job at MGM. It was I who got the job at Loew’s.” The crescendo builds, until his “I” is a silent roar. “I owe everything I’ve done to myself.”
When Berger hands over his scrapbooks, he places a framed photo of Victor Isart on top of the pile. Isart grew up in Barcelona. They met 13 years ago at a piano bar, started dating.
“We have 39 years’ difference. I’m 38. He’s 77,” Isart says evenly. “People still say things like, ‘Oh, what’s Sugar Daddy giving you for Christmas?’ And I’m like, ‘Go f—k yourself.’ I understand the question; I just don’t understand the assumptions.”
Isart is a senior manager in risk management at Citi. He has none of Berger’s craving for social interaction, and loathed accompanying him to parties. “Finally I told him, I’m not being paraded around. You have your work; I have my work.’ Jerry likes society, and I couldn’t give a shit.” He remembers going to an out-of-the-way restaurant, The Mad Hatter, on Florida’s Sanibel Island. “The place was as remote as the Argentinean Pampas.” Then he heard a voice from the next table: “Jerry? Is that you?”
Even their humor’s different, Isart says: “He’s very kidlike. I’m kind of caustic, and he’ll laugh at that, but he’ll also laugh at somebody falling on his ass. His sense of humor is very broad. I wish I had it. Some of it is a little infantile to me. But I enjoy him enjoying it.”
They live separately, because they’ve found they appreciate each other’s company more that way. They talk many times a day. Both stubborn, they fight about details. “One time he got mad at me because my shoes were positioned the wrong way in his bedroom,” Isart says. “I get mad when he starts doing the dishes—I say, ‘Can’t you do them after I leave?’ And he says, ‘Oh no, babe, no, no, no, we can’t have that.’”
Their fights don’t get much more heated. “One thing that surprised me is, he’s very even-keeled,” Isart says. “He’s very passionate, but he is actually one of the most stable people I’ve ever met. I’m the mercurial one, circling the edges.”
If you watch closely, Isart says, “You can see Jerry’s personalities dividing. The public persona is ‘I don’t give a shit what people think about me.’ Very nonchalant, very methodical.’” The private self?
Not tough at all, he says. Isart is struck by the way people defer to Berger.
When he announced his retirement, Isart said, “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, I’ve had enough,” Berger said.
“Just be cognizant,” Isart said, “that for the last 25 years, 8,000 people have been kissing your ass.”
On the evening of the Hyatt gala, Berger has two more parties scheduled, but he decides to forgo them. He’s catching a cold, which after the pneumonia is a terrifying prospect, and he got so busy earlier, he forgot to eat lunch.
He leads the way into Tony’s. The dining room is lit softly, filled with dark suits, low necklines, red wine swirling in goblets.
Owner Vince Bommarito comes up. “How’s Sis?” Berger’s sister, Shirley Starr, isn’t doing well.
Berger orders his Caesar finely chopped, but still chokes on the lettuce bits. A waiter brings a neat pile of linen napkins, and Berger moves them to the chair so they’re less conspicuous. Every time he crumples one, a waiter appears to take it from him.
Asked how he’d psychoanalyze himself, he says, “Very complex” and stops there. Pressed, he finally says, “OK, this is hokey. Like the old song: sometimes laughing on the outside, crying on the inside. So much surgery! To not have a voice: That’s the biggest curse I have. Flying to Boston, building up my hopes that the Harvard surgeon could restore my voice, then him telling me he could only give me a loud whisper, and he’d have to cut the base of my tongue to do it. No!”
He says he wishes he could fly to Madrid or South Africa one more time, eat ice cream, not have a damned feeding tube in his stomach. Talk.
Wracked by another coughing spell, he wipes his streaming eyes. He goes out for a cigarette, waves at someone on his
way back.
“Why was I so drawn to authoritarian people?” he asks. “I was fascinated by their power. And I tried to emulate it, in my own way.” He swings his fist up, the gesture sudden and tough.
Does it ever depress him, how easily manipulated people are?
“I love it! But I never pander. I never say, ‘You are doing a great job,’ ‘You have a high profile in the community.’ Bullshit! It’s like, ‘Jerry, everybody reads your column.’ Bullshit. Everybody doesn’t read it. But I smile.”
Bommarito comes by, removes another crumpled napkin.
Berger is never judgmental, he says—an odd claim from a man who just whispered, “The couple that greeted me earlier? He’s her gigolo.” But in point of fact, he doesn’t judge, at least not with morality’s usual labels. Even when he talks about a man who once stood in his way, a man he considered a ruthless bastard, he says he thinks it’s “tragic!” that the man never got the chance to live with “the only woman he ever truly loved,” in an affair Berger unearthed but never disclosed.
What determines which secrets Jerry Berger discloses?
Weiss saw no principles at work other than Berger’s gut. He protected those who could help him later, those he felt loyal to, those he pitied, and those whose children would be hurt. But “if he got mad,” Tuft says, “he’d put it in his column.”
At the notion that St. Louisans once feared him, Berger raises his eyebrows high.
“I never noticed the fear,” he says. “I figured only people feared me who had something to hide.”
He excuses himself and makes a quick circuit of the room. People seem delighted to talk to him. They lean close to catch every word.
“Nice people,” he announces when he returns. “They don’t fear me. Cautious, but they don’t fear me.” He pauses, not willing to end it there.
“You know, now that I think of it, some do get lockjaw.”
