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Nancy Berg was the only child of Paul Axel Berg and Dorothy Esther (Schanock) Berg. On her father's side, she was of Swedish descent. Paul Berg's grandfather, William Bernard Berg, was born April 23, 1838, in Osa, Jamtland, Sweden. He came to the United States in 1873, settled in Maple Ridge, Isanti County, Minnesota and worked as a farmer. Paul Berg enlisted in the United States Coast Guard. In 1925, at age 20, he had attained the rank of surfman and was located at the Coast Guard Station in Kenosha, Wisconsin. He served in the Coast Guard for the next 20 years. He married Dorothy Schanock, the eldest of three daughters of John and Frances Schanock, of Kenosha.

The story of the marriage of Nancy Berg's parents is a bit unusual. According to two genealogies of which Paul Axel Berg was a member - that of the Mattson Family and that of the Harrington Family with focus on Swedish lines - Paul Berg married Dorothy Esther Shunck (her surname misspelled). The latter genealogy specified the marriage date of Thursday, April 4, 1929. The Kenosha Evening News of that date published a story headlined "True Love Ends in a Marriage. Sweethearts for 3 Years, Opposed by Parents, Will Be Married Soon". As the girl was by then 18, it would appear the boy, then 21, had been dating a 15 year-old. In the event, the girl left a note for her parents, saying she was going off to make a living for herself. The parents called the police with suspicions that their daughter had run off with her young man. Further investigation revealed that the two were living in a small room in Chicago. Their plans to marry were thwarted when they ran out of money. A police officer was dispatched to Chicago to bring the couple back to Kenosha. At police headquarters the girl's parents talked the matter over with the policewomen and the detectives. They concluded that the best course was to let the couple marry. The follow-up story, "Couple Married, All's Well that Ends Well", notes that on Friday, the day after their return to Kenosha, they were married at the parsonage.

One year later, in April 1930, the U. S. Census for Kenosha finds Dorothy Berg, married, head of a household which includes only herself, was living in the rear of 5036 Fourth Avenue, Kenosha. That address is located on Simmons Island, the site of the Coast Guard station. On a separate census sheet devoted to the men billeted at the Coast Guard station, Paul Berg, age 25, is listed as married, head of a household consisting only of himself. At that time in the history of the Coast Guard, housing for spouses of men on active duty was not automatically provided. Indeed, for assignment to a Coast Guard station located in a remote area of shoreline, married couples would be separated for long periods of time. (Valuable research assistance for the story of Nancy Berg and her parents in the early years in Kenosha was graciously provided by Melissa Olson, Archives Assistant, University of Wisconsin-Parkside Archives & Area Research Center, Kenosha WI.)

After their marriage, Paul and Dorothy Berg continued to live in Kenosha, with Paul on active duty at the Coast Guard station. In 1937, when Nancy was 6 years old, Paul was transferred to the Atlantic coast, to the Monmouth, New Jersey Coast Guard Station. The 1940 U. S. Census has Nancy, still 8 years old, and her mother living in the small town of Little Silver, New Jersey, while her father is listed with his unit at the Coast Guard station. In a lengthy interview with syndicated columnist James L. Kilgallen, Part 3 of a ten-part series on America's "most glamorous and successful models", published in various newspapers between October 31 and November 2, 1955, Nancy Berg described her early life. She told Kilgallen that her mother had started her modeling in Kenosha when she was 3 years old. At age 6, now in New Jersey, she attended parochial school until age 14, that is, until 1945. Although her parents were still listed as living together in the 1945 Red Bank, New Jersey directory, they were going through a divorce. Nancy's mother remarried in 1947. Aged 16, Nancy ran away from home. She told Kilgallen she didn't want to talk about her family, saying she was not close to them.

Now on her own at age 16, Nancy went to Detroit, where she found work modeling for television commercials about home appliances. She went to Miami, Florida, where she modeled for the famous department store Burdine's, and learned trick water skiing. On May 15, 1949, a photograph of Nancy Berg modeling a bathing suit with an outline map of Florida on the front was published in The Miami News and republished in newspapers across the country. She was then 17. It is not clear from published accounts how or why Nancy Berg made her way to Chicago, nor how she happened to meet Dave Garroway. In any event, Garroway, who had a successful television show in Chicago ("Garroway At Large"), was asked by NBC to come to New York City and lead a new network morning program, Today. In early 1951, not yet 20 years old, Nancy followed him to New York and described her big breakthrough succinctly: "I checked into the Plaza Hotel and in 6 months I was on the cover of Vogue." Following her first cover photo in 1951, offers of modeling work increased.

Later in 1951, Berg was photographed wearing an evening gown by Leslie Morris. In 1952, she modeled creations designed by Luis Estevez and by Jacques Fath, among others. Many photographs appeared in Vogue, but other publications, including Life Magazine featured her as well. By August 4, 1954, columnist Leonard Lyons, writing his column from the French Riviera and interviewing Nancy Berg at poolside, could describe her as a "high-priced model" making forty dollars an hour. She said that she was taking singing lessons, realizing that "a pretty face doesn't last long. Five more years at most" - that is, until age 28, in 1959. One year after making that prediction, she was interviewed by James L. Kilgallen, who was able to write "Nancy Berg, $40,000-a-year fashion model is at the peak of her career as a glamour girl and is enjoying every minute of it." She mentioned her social life, going out almost every night with men of varying degrees of fame, combined with work, acting and ballet lessons made for many twenty-hour days. Her photographs were used to sell everything from ball gowns to bathing suits and products from cosmetics to Cadillacs.

Berg's first role in a made-for-television series was Paris Precinct (1955). The series was unique in that it took place and was filmed in Paris, recorded in English, and made for the American public. Berg appeared in episode 7 in the first year of the series, playing an actress. The episode aired on May 15, 1955. She took two flights from Paris to New York, that year, on February 15 and on March 28, 1955. That same year, Berg got her own television show on WRCA-TV in New York. The program was titled Count Sheep and aired from 1:00 to 1:05 in the morning five nights a week. Berg, wearing a nightgown and peignoir, appeared on a bedroom set. She would comb her hair, fuss with makeup, and improvise bits of stage business. On one show, she poked a hole in a small pizza, put the pizza on a turntable, whereupon the pizza played "That's Amore!" as sung by Dean Martin. Finally, she would have her cockerspaniel jump on the bed, would get under the covers, and count the sheep in an animated overlay. The show ran for over a year and garnered much press attention. While some twenty or twenty-five people were working on the show, the names of the production staff are not available, and film or tape of the shows have apparently not been preserved. Berg appeared in episodes of one TV series in 1956 and in two series in 1959. In 1964, a time of great stress in her personal life, she appeared in two films and in three series. Her appearances included scenes with Walter Matthau in Fail Safe (1964) and a cameo as herself in Mr. Broadway (1964). She appeared in an episode of Ben Casey (1961).

Berg was a serious student of acting. She first attended the Actors' Studio in late 1956, when Lee Strasberg, the head of the Actors' Studio assured her that acting would have a calming influence on her. She made two appearances in summer stock in Connecticut in 1956, and made her New York stage debut in November 1956. As Berg's modeling work decreased, her theatrical appearances increased, such that publicity often referred to her as "Nancy Berg, actress."

Berg's last recorded acting credit was in Nurse (1981), starring Michael Learned. By 1980, Berg had already outlived the syndicated columnists for whom she had provided so much copy in the 1950s and 1960s: Dorothy Kilgallen died in 1965; Earl Wilson in 1967; Walter Winchell in 1972; and friend as well as columnist Leonard Lyons, who retired in 1974 and died in 1976.

Around 1994, Michael Gross interviewed Berg for his book "Model. The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women", Warner Books (1995). He noted that at the time of his interview, Nancy was working as a makeup artist for a local New York City television station. In fact, she received screen credit for make up for the Charlie Rose (1991) program of October 14, 1994 on which the interviewee was Quentin Tarantino. In the interviews published in "Model", Berg was far more candid about her relationship with her mother than she had been many years earlier in her 1955 interview with Kilgallen. She told Gross that when she was photographed at age 3 she realized that her mother was pleased with her. Perhaps, she thought as a child, this was the way to win her mother's approval. Instead, she describes in stark terms the beatings she said her mother gave her, including allegedly dousing her with hot coffee. Her parents had separated long before their divorce. In this telling, Nancy ran away from home at age 15 and headed directly to Florida. To her chagrin, even with her considerable success and fame as a model after arriving in New York, there was no response from her mother. She also told Gross of being introduced to amphetamines by her first boyfriend, Dave Garroway. With the pressures of work and an active social life, she said she didn't sleep "for about ten years".

Her first marriage, to actor Geoffrey Horne, ended when he reportedly abandoned her and their then 5 year old daughter and cleaned out their bank account. She said her second marriage, to physician Alan K. Elliott, ended after two months when Elliott struck her and her daughter. Finally, in 1968, she married Rick Praeger. In her interviews with Michael Gross, she related how Praeger's 16 year old son from a previous marriage, high on LSD, wanted to attack his father but beat her up instead. She lost several teeth, required plastic surgery and ruefully realized that the face that was her fortune was no more. They too divorced. Berg was interviewed by Meryle Secrest for her biography of Stephen Sondheim. The book was copyright 1997. Nancy described her close friendship with Sondheim. They both liked word games, and, of course, theater. They also had another strong bond. As Berg put it, "We both had Medea-mothers".

Finally, on July 15, 2009, William Safire, writing another installment of his New York Times Magazine series "On Language", undertook an explanation of how the word "model" evolved from its original meaning to a word denoting a person who posed for photographs. Safire noted that he had dated Berg in the 1950s, when she and only two other models were reportedly the first to break the $100 an hour ceiling for modeling fees.

Elected president of the Actors Studio Chess Club.

Named as one of 5 young stars to select the ten men most worthy of leap year attention in 1956. Their first choice was Marlon Brando.

Trivia

Nancy Berg

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