Bio Engineering

It does sound preordained, or prescribed, as A. Scott Berg says. But then again, biographers are used to pulling order out of the seemingly random events that make up a life.

Berg, biographer of the great editor Max Perkins, Samuel Goldwyn and now Charles Lindbergh, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize last week, does not say it this way, but it is clear that he feels the inspiration to write these books comes not only from his own well-prepared mind but from the universe as well. Trim, very neat, with his precise gestures, Berg looks, frankly, as though he could make order from just about anything.

Except his own desk.

It’s a mess. Well, half of it is a mess. The other half, he claims, took him three weeks to clear. A bust of Lindbergh, a model of the Spirit of St. Louis and Berg’s 600-page biography of the famous flyboy perch on the edge of the desk. A top hat and a New Yorker baseball cap dangle from a hatrack. A framed facsimile of the control panel in the Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh’s plane on his famous 1927 flight from New York to Paris, makes a mockery of the computer keyboard. A Post-it on the computer screen shouts “SO WHAT?”--a reminder, Berg explains later, to stay focused and resist the temptation to use every hard-found fact about a life.

On this windy spring day (if L.A. had a mistral, this would be it), German television is interviewing Berg in his home of 10 years in Beverly Hills. One of the many dramatic moments in Lindbergh’s life (besides, of course, the flight to Paris and the kidnapping of his first child) was his flirtation with Nazi Germany, a phase that there are a variety of explanations for. (“Why are you writing about that man?” Berg’s grandmother Rose asked him. “He was very bad on the Jews.”) Berg does that thing people who are used to appearing in public do: He fusses and is nervous about what he’s wearing (“is it too casual, I guess I am the official biographer, maybe I should wear a jacket, what do you think?”), interviews the interviewer and then, when the camera is rolling, relaxes utterly--is charming and flexible and articulate and enthusiastic.

But the eyes give it away. They are a little wild. When he is particularly delighted, which is often, they actually roll back in his head, a feature hardly seen in real life, even on writers.

He Chooses Subjects He Can Live With for Years

How does he choose these subjects?

“I had the idea when I was still in college to write a series of biographies of American 20th century figures who reflected different wedges of the American cultural pie,” he says in the luscious bar of the Four Seasons Hotel. “If you think about it, Perkins and Goldwyn are really flip sides of the American dream--Goldwyn the son of Jewish immigrants, and Perkins with his East Coast, upper-class heritage. Then there’s Lindbergh, a boy from the Midwest who became the greatest icon of the American dream before or since.”

The Lindbergh story was rich in metaphors and drama.

“I believe a biography should be dramatic and yet tell the story using as many facts as possible. I like to choose people through whose lives a bigger story can be told as well about American history. Goldwyn’s life, for example, illuminated 60 years of Hollywood history.

“The big question for me in choosing a subject is: Can I wake up with this person every day for several years?” (In the case of the Lindbergh bio, eight years.) “Lindbergh really surprised me,” Berg says. “He was an autodidact whose interests changed every five years, allowing me to learn about aviation, medicine, politics and environmental issues. There were plenty of archives and a family that was willing to talk to me, in part because they liked the Perkins bio.”

Max Perkins, says Berg, was the warmest and kindest of the three men. Lindbergh was not especially warm, but he had a strong set of values. As for Goldwyn, “the more I learned about his anger and his rages, the more I liked him. My job is not to judge these men but to explain them.”

Writing Bios Is the Perfect Job for Him

Writing is, in fact, the only job Berg has ever had, unless you count the season he and his brother, Jeff (now the head of ICM), sold the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in front of the Westwood Bullocks (“It wasn’t hard--Liz Taylor and Eddie Fisher were divorcing”), or the summer sweeping at Universal Studios, or the stint as a parking lot attendant. Writing biographies is the perfect job for him, he says, a combination of utter isolation and socializing with people he admires.

“Look, I know Anne Morrow Lindbergh!” he grins. (Eyes roll back.) With each book, he says he interviews somewhere between 100 and 150 people, many of whom remain friends.

Berg was born in Westport, Conn., in 1949, where his father ran an art supply store and a gallery. On the side, he wrote television scripts. For the summer of 1957, MGM brought the family out to Los Angeles. They returned for good in 1958. On his first day of school that year, Berg remembers exactly, March 24, 1958, his mother dressed him in corduroys. The teacher at Paul Revere Junior High told him politely to tell his mother that he didn’t have to wear such long, hot pants to school. “My first impression was of blue skies and palm trees and space and air.” Berg went on to Palisades High, where he was class president in 1967 and, more important, wrote an author report in Mr. Drury’s English class on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

At this memory, Berg’s entire body, eyeballs and all, sinks back in his chair. “I wrote it at my mother’s urging, because her favorite book was ‘The Far Side of Paradise.’ I was absolutely swept away by Fitzgerald. By the time I graduated, I’d read everything he’d ever written. I used to sleep with ‘The Far Side of Paradise’ under my pillow.”

Fitzgerald Led Him to Write About Perkins

Following Fitzgerald’s lead, Berg went to Princeton. “I was only the second person from Pali ever to go there,” he says, “and the first one hardly counts because he was a mathematical genius.” On his second day, Berg marched into the main library and found Fitzgerald’s papers. “There was the first draft of ‘The Great Gatsby’! There were the pages he was writing when he had a heart attack and the pencil line trailed down the page!” The drama of this, for Berg and his audience, is very Hollywood.

By the end of 1968, his freshman year, Berg had uncovered the Perkins-Fitzgerald correspondence and, with the help of Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway’s biographer, had decided to write a book about Perkins. There were already too many new bios of Fitzgerald. “Everything fell into place,” Berg says, with a sigh. “As if I had been called to write this book.” With one small hitch. Berg was the star attraction in the Triangle Club, which staged several productions a year, ending the season at New York’s Lincoln Center. Three agents approached Berg after the show to tell him he could be a star. Berg discussed it with Baker, who warned him not to drop out as Fitzgerald had done but, instead, to become the star of the English department and write the book on Perkins as his thesis.

Which he did.

In 1971, after his graduation ceremony, Berg’s parents pulled out of the driveway in the car they’d rented to drive up from the New York airport. After a few seconds, his father backed the car up and rolled down the window.

“Wait a minute,” he called out to Berg, waving from the driveway of the Cottage Club (the eating club where Berg lived). “Aren’t you coming with us?” It took Berg a few more years to finish the Perkins bio and then, sure enough, he came home to L.A.

“I’ve written every word since right here,” he says, “and it’s a wonderful place to write. The hyperactivity of New York would keep me from finishing anything. In L.A., with the weather so mild, you can really forget the passage of time. You can really get lost in a subject.”

Spielberg Plans to Make a Movie From the Book

Berg turned the final draft of “Lindbergh” in to Putnam in March of 1998. Steven Spielberg, who has long had a fascination with Charles Lindbergh, stepped in that winter and bought the movie rights before it was finished. Berg has met several times with Spielberg and Paul Attanasio, who wrote “Quiz Show,” to discuss the movie. “I told him I thought Leonardo DiCaprio would be good for the young Lindbergh,” the author says, “followed by Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood. Spielberg said, ‘OK, we can do that.’ Then I told him Gary Cooper in his 30s would really fit the bill. He said OK to that, too.”

Berg thinks he’s found someone new to write about, someone he believes he could wake up with every day for the next eight years, and he is antsy to begin working on it but doesn’t want to reveal his subject until negotiations are final.

During the interview with the Germans, Berg describes, with great admiration, the inner compass that kept Lindbergh on course during that first flight from New York to Paris, even as his instruments had given out. He found himself after 30 hours off the coast of Ireland, only three miles off course. Something similar leads Berg to his subjects. The inspiration of grandeur, the sense of glory, the feeling of an age is usually apparent in his first paragraphs, as though he has actually breathed in the winds that blew behind his subjects, hands on the controls, eyes on true north.

Times staff writer Susan Salter Reynolds may be reached by e-mail at susan.reynolds@latimes.com.

Pulitzer Prize winner A. Scott Berg is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Prize for biography. Winners will be announced at the ceremony on Friday. Berg will also participate in the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday and Sunday at UCLA.