They had their work cut out for them. Gibbs told Marckwald that he had to okay every piece of furniture, bolt of drapery, and square foot of carpet. He also said that the ship’s public rooms and cabins had to be spacious, cheerful, modern, and uncluttered, furnished with lightweight and durable furniture. And there was to be absolutely no wood used in the ship’s interior. “The greatest danger in war or peace in big ships,” William Francis said, “is the danger of fire.”12
As a result, luxury would take a backseat to fireproofing and weight saving. The ship was to be comfortable, to be sure, especially in first class. But Gibbs had learned the lessons of the Leviathan project: since this ship was to be paid for by taxpayer dollars, nothing about the ship could appear frivolous, opulent, or overdone. Accordingly, all artwork and decorations had to be based on an American or nautical theme, preferably both. There were also to be no sculptures of marble or bronze, as they would add unnecessary weight to the ship.
Unlike land-based decorators, who worked with flat floors and vertical walls, a naval interior designer had to deal with a ship’s “sheer” and “camber.” Sheer was the upward slant of the decks toward the bow and stern. Camber was the downward slant of the decks away from the ship’s centerline. Because of this, door frames, paneling, and even furniture had to be custom-made for each ship. In her studio, Marckwald jokingly called a ship’s sheer and camber its “umm” and “umph,” respectively.13
Marckwald was not fazed by the demands of the United States commission. She had prospered by giving her affluent clients a sophisticated, modernist aesthetic. Business at Smyth, Urquhart & Marckwald was booming, flush with interior design work on Park Avenue apartments, Long Island mansions, and private yachts. Among recent commissions was the redecoration of New York’s lavish St. Regis hotel, built by Vincent Astor’s father, Titanic victim Colonel John Jacob Astor IV. Her interiors for America, with their polished brass, murals, and bright colors, met with near-universal praise from the traveling public. Excited about the biggest commission of her career, she and her partner whipped up color schemes even before the keel of United States was laid. “Quick and snappy,” Marckwald told a reporter when asked to sum up her ethos.14
What followed was a game of give-and-take with Gibbs, who spent countless hours making sure the ship’s exterior lines were sensuous and beautiful, but had a surprisingly utilitarian view about how she would look inside.
Marckwald and Urquhart got to work selecting furniture and color schemes. They quickly ran into trouble when it came to upholstery and draperies. Gibbs kept vetoing their selections. No sponge rubber in the seat cushions, for example; a stray cigarette could ignite it. After much haggling, the team decided to use a synthetic fabric called Dynel. To brighten the material, Marckwald decided to have metallic threads, such as real silver and gold, woven between the strands. It was nonabsorbent, and above all, fireproof. In addition, paint samples on thin metal strips were heated to 2,300 degrees to make sure they were not flammable.15
On February 17, 1950, he had Marckwald’s designs subjected to what he thought was the most important test. A full-size stateroom model was constructed at the National Bureau of Standards’ test facility. The model was furnished with all of the interior elements planned for the ship: Dynel-clad chairs, metal chests of drawers and bedsteads, flame-retardant sheets and linens, aluminum walls clad in asbestos-infused marinite panels. Finally, workers lugged in suitcases stuffed with the sorts of flammable baggage that passengers usually kept in their staterooms—clothing, perfume, cologne, books, and magazines. Testers opened a suitcase and set it on fire.
Gibbs watched through the plate glass as the fire leapt from the suitcase and began spreading. The thermometer crept up as flames engulfed the entire room, reaching 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. Reflections of the flames danced in his spectacle lenses. Finally the fire burned itself out.
The room was a mess. Marckwald’s fabrics were scorched, and the marinite-clad aluminum bulkheads blackened. But the fire had been contained, and Gibbs was pleased with the performance of Marckwald’s use of materials. “You can go into your stateroom and pile your luggage in the middle and set a match to it and when you come back in 3 hours it will have burned out,” Gibbs said. “The room will be black with smoke, but not even the curtains will be burned,” he added. “The test demonstrated,” Gibbs concluded, “that the provisions for bulkheading followed in connection with the subject vessel appear to be satisfactory but no relaxation of insulation requirements was indicated.”16
Then there were the pianos, which were to be custom-built for the ship by Steinway & Sons. Gibbs began pestering Steinway to build aluminum-framed pianos for the ship’s lounges. Theodore Steinway, president of the august German-American manufacturing firm, put his foot down, not wanting his name on them. No metal piano, no matter how well designed, would have the same resonant tone as one made out of wood. After a flurry of letters and phone calls, an exasperated Steinway asked William Francis Gibbs to come to a demonstration. Steinway trotted out a gleaming concert grand of the type that would be used in the first-class ballroom, doused it with gasoline, and threw a match on it. The gasoline burned but the piano did not. Gibbs relented and allowed several wooden Steinway pianos to come aboard.17
This helped foster a popular boast about the ship: the only wood on board was to be found in the butcher’s block and the pianos. This was not quite true. “There were a few other splinters here and there,” Thomas Buermann admitted.18 Among the “other splinters” was the Oregon pine that filled the bilge keels, and the lignum vitae lining the four propeller shafts. Native to Florida and the Bahamas, lignum vitae was often used for croquet mallets and cricket balls. Dense, self-lubricating, and resistant to rot, it had long been used to line propeller shafts. Despite all the advances in marine technology during World War II, no one had come up with a material that could match its durability. And since the bilge keels and propeller shaft linings would be soaked with sea-water, Gibbs conceded that they couldn’t catch fire.19
Now that the furnishings were approved, the shipyard workers began to outfit the interiors of the newly launched United States. Each day, as dozens of chairs, tables, and other custom-crafted furniture arrived at the outfitting pier, shipyard workers fastened big sheets of fireproof marinite board over the bare metal bulkheads and mechanical systems. To Gibbs, marinite was a godsend compared to flammable wood partitions used on earlier liners like Morro Castle twenty years earlier. In the early 1950s, no one knew about the risks of carcinogenic dust from asbestos, so workers sawed and drilled into marinite board without facemasks.
As the interior partitions were completed, a team of America’s finest modern artists arrived to install the work they had completed off-site. One reporter saw artist Austin Purves, former head of the Cooper Union School of Art and creator of murals for the 1939 New York World’s Fair, working with joiners. Purves supervised the installation of all 265 aluminum wall sculptures of state birds and flowers, as well as the United States Lines eagle insignias for the first-class grand staircase. “If you are fortunate enough to walk up unobserved,” wrote David Yonan of the Newport News Daily Press, “you would see what appeared to be five joiners instead of four. The fifth one is Purves. He is dressed like them, at ease in a thin blue work shirt, faded by many washings, and ordinary jeans. Hatless and a cigarette in his mouth, he is pitching in, working up a sweat.” To keep the screw heads invisible, workers centered the sculptures on the front side of the marinite panel and then screwed them in on the reverse side, pulling them flush against the surface. Because ordinary screwdrivers would ruin the fragile sculptures, the shipyard created special tools out of hard aluminum strips.20