“Writing does not come all that easily to me it is, for me, the hardest thing I can possibly do. Maybe it’s an innate desire to impose order, feeling more comfortable knowing just how far I can go… “They expected a lot from us but made no demands that I remember. Where does this love of rectitude come from? “Certainly not from my parents,” Berg says, copping to a bit of facetiousness about the whole strict thing. Biographies that keep the word magisterial from dropping out of the dictionary. I told you, I like strict.”īerg eventually taught a class in biography at Princeton, assigning parts of three or four biographies a week. “Because I was not making a living, I felt I was not really entitled to do anything but work. I always responded to strictness as a student.”ĭoes he, by any chance, think highly of strictness? “I was in the house I grew up in all through my twenties writing Max Perkins,” says the erstwhile boomerang child. “I loved his strictness,” he says of Wilson. “Strict” isn’t generally thought of as a compliment, but Berg uses it as one, albeit sheepishly. Slide show: Biographers and Their Look-Alike Subjects.What was it about Woodrow Wilson that inspired the teenage Scott Berg to enshrine that old campaign flyer above his bed like a crucifix? To attend the institution that Wilson himself not only attended, but led as its president until a mere two years before he walked into the White House? To spend a decade studying Wilson, living with him, “waking up to him”?
He admits that he applied and was accepted into Williams College as well-tempted by its strong theater program-but his decision didn’t exactly hang on a coin flip. In short, Scott Berg got into and out of Princeton but never got over it. The college’s library also houses the papers of Max Perkins, whose biography started out as Berg’s senior thesis, and sits no more than ten miles from the Lindbergh estate. And the college he was thinking of had schooled not only Wilson but Scott Fitzgerald, whom Berg’s mother claimed she was reading when she named him. So what kind of high school freak hangs a picture of Woodrow Wilson on his wall? Jeff Berg, happily ensconced in his new entertainment agency’s corner office high above Century City, and with the pleasant guardedness of the burned-before, answers the question with one of his own: “Who starts thinking of college at 13?” He read a presidential biography and became so besotted that his brother Jeff gave him a campaign poster of Wilson, which Scott tacked up and still keeps. Somewhere between Shirley Windward and Pali High, Scott Berg discovered Woodrow Wilson.
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