Located in the stern of the ship, cabin class was less spacious than first, but definitely not cheap. At a minimum of $230 (or about $1,900 in 2012) per person one way during the 1952 summer season, the 524 berths in cabin class were pitched toward upper-middle-class professionals and their families, as well as the privately wealthy who wanted to avoid the formality and high visibility of first class.
Cabin class enjoyed the use of an open-air promenade and gaming area on the promenade deck fantail, with a view of the wake churning behind the ship. In warm weather, a temporary outdoor swimming pool could be set up on top of the raised roof of the lounge below. Descending one level below to Upper Deck, a passenger would enter the cabin-class lounge, a pillared space flanked by two enclosed promenades. This room boasted comfortable black and red armchairs, set in arrangements for reading or card games. The center portion of the room had a raised ceiling, which gave its dance floor a sense of space. A large red carpet covered the floor during the day, and the walls had a golden hue.
One deck below on Main Deck was the cabin-class smoking room, essentially a smaller version of its first-class counterpart. Colorful, harlequin checkered curtains shaded the windows, and Lewis E. York’s mural of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American glassware and pottery hung above the bar. Two putty-green leather banquettes ran the length of the room, providing additional seating. It was intimate and clubby in feeling, a good space for late night cocktails and card games, although a slight rumbling from the propellers below might shake highballs and ashtrays perched on the glass tables. Descending the main staircase one more level, the passenger would reach the cabin class dining room on A Deck. Sharing a galley with the first-class dining room, the space spanned the full width of the ship, and had midnight-blue walls adorned with aluminum line sculptures depicting the season and constellations by Michael Lantz and Seymour Lipton. The chairs were covered in green leather and the tables set for groups of two, four, and six diners. Many who saw the cabin-class dining room for the first time thought it a “friendlier” place than its first-class counterpart.31
The décor in cabin-class staterooms resembled that in first class, although the rooms were much smaller. In addition to twin beds, two additional bunks could be pulled down from the ceiling, a setup ideal for families traveling together. All cabin-class staterooms would have private bathrooms, unheard-of in comparable staterooms aboard Queen Mary or Queen Elizabeth. Washbasins were located in the cabin itself.
Tourist class, located in the forward part of the ship and accommodating 544 passengers, was utilitarian in décor. With one-way fares priced about $175 per person (about $1,500 in 2012 terms), tourist class was almost as expensive as cabin class, but within reach of budget travelers, students, young families, and immigrants from Europe. Tourist class aboard United States was much more spacious and airy than the foul steerage areas of the great liners of fifty years before. But because of its location far forward, it was still subject to the heaving and pitching that had made life miserable for millions of European immigrants.
Public rooms included a small movie theater and a lounge on promenade deck, both of which had gray-blue walls and bright curtains. The lounge, which featured large windows overlooking the bow, had a small dance floor in the center, but dancing was made a bit unsteady by the upward sheer—or slope—of the deck. Two decks down on Main Deck was the tourist-class smoking room, which was somewhat cheerier than the lounge because of its bright red leather chairs and barstools. The dining room, located on A Deck, had beige walls decorated with eighteenth-century nautical motifs and was furnished with maroon curtains and chairs. Tables were set for groups of four or six, an improvement over long “boardinghouse” tables found in tourist class aboard older ships.
The tourist promenade areas included a small patch of deck between the bow breakwater and the curved base of the superstructure, as well as a couple of narrow strips on the bridge deck. Because of their proximity to the bow, both tourist promenade areas were windy and uninviting in all but the best weather.
To allow the shipping company to adjust to market demand, the plans also called for gates that could be moved up and down stateroom corridors. They were known as “crash gates” because a passenger could knock them down during an emergency, giving everyone regardless of class quick access to the lifeboats. Forty years earlier, a maze of locked gates kept hundreds of Titanic’s steerage passengers trapped below until it was too late. This would not happen on United States. These gates were also adjustable. During the high summer travel season, cabin and tourist class berths could be turned into first-class ones to meet demand, and vice versa during the stormy winter months. Regardless of class, cabins would be equipped with two luxuries that would have been unimaginable before the war. One was a telephone, with a connection controlled from a central switchboard manned around the clock. And they could be used for more than ordering a martini at three in the morning or nagging a family member in the next stateroom about being late for dinner; ship-to-shore phones, an expensive novelty when first installed aboard Leviathan in 1929, were now a reality aboard United States. By using the ship’s radio transmitter, a passenger could make a call to anywhere in the world. The second luxury was individually controlled air-conditioning, adjusted by using a thermostat next to the cabin door. Gone were the days of stifling summer crossings and primitive forced-air ventilation. The trade-off, however, was that cabin portholes on United States were sealed shut; if a passenger wanted to breathe some sea air, a steward had to open the porthole for him.
As the interior neared completion, many of the artists complained that the decoration of the ship was a “great headache,” and grumbled at the use of nontraditional materials such as foam glass.32 Many who came aboard to observe the progress felt that the interiors of the new superliner, although modern and sleek, felt institutional and cold compared to those of older ships.
Marckwald, although proud of her work aboard United States, was also somewhat defensive and qualified about the results. “The United States is a ship, not an ancient inn with oaken beams and plaster walls,” she shot back at one critic. “The best we can say is that the ship’s decor is modern, American, that it is functional, and that color plays a most important part.”33
As Marckwald supervised the interior work, Gibbs’s longtime electrical engineer, Norman Zippler, and his team oversaw the installation of the ship’s electrical and navigation system. To avoid electrical fires and short circuits, Zippler used many of the lessons he learned when rehabilitating Leviathan. If a bomb or torpedo hit the ship, and one part of the electrical system failed, alternate feeders would reduce overall voltage load. All lighting and power had emergency backup systems. The double electrical system was arranged in such a way that “the failure of one branch circuit or feeder will not leave any living space in darkness.”