"Broadway's Dirty Secret: How to Turn Costumes From Riches to Rags"

by Erik Piepenburg 

[From time to time, I post articles on Rick On Theater that illuminate work in the theater about which most theatergoers don’t know.  In the past, I’ve republished articles on stage managers (30 January 2017), dance captains (6 May 2020), wig designers (30 June 2014), and whole series on arts administration (2, 5, 8, 11, 14, and 17 December 2020) and sound design (25, 28, and 31 March, and 3, 6, and 9 April 2021). 

[Erik Piepenburg’s article below, from the New York Times of 18 August 2016, is another in this occasional series, focusing on costume designing.  You’ll see, however, that its emphasis isn’t so much on the conception of the garments the actors wear on stage, but on one aspect of the costume process: distressing. 

[Distressing, says Piepenburg, is making “costumes look beautifully bad” or, to be more precise, making them “look as if they’d been dragged through the mud or bloodied in a fight.”  This is a very particular skill, and you’ll meet Hochi Asiatico, known, appropriately enough, as a “distressor,” the artist who accomplishes this effect.]

Hochi Asiatico gives Broadway costumes the appearance of having a long (and soiled) history. Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

The nicest thing you can say to Hochi Asiatico is that his work looks like hell. 

That’s because Mr. Asiatico is one of a small number of Broadway distressors, artisans who make costumes look beautifully bad. In the play “Eclipsed,” he turned a “Rugrats” T-shirt, worn by Lupita Nyong’o, into a sweaty rag that looked as if it had spent weeks forsaken in Liberia, where the play is set. Clint Ramos, who won a Tony Award for his “Eclipsed” costume design, said that Mr. Asiatico created “a history for a garment” that came across onstage as “organic and inherent.” 

                                                    

Mr. Asiatico turned the “Rugrats” T-shirt worn by Lupita Nyong’o in “Eclipsed” into a shirt that looked as if it had been worn for weeks. 

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times 

“In his mind, he can picture how the character goes through his or her day,” Mr. Ramos said. “He has a relationship to the clothing and how it interacts with the environment in a physical way. It informs everything.” 

Mr. Asiatico does more than make clothes look as if they’d been dragged through the mud or bloodied in a fight. He’s mostly a costume painter, whose brush strokes can be seen on the unitards in the Broadway revival of “Cats.” In “The Color Purple,” his painting and silk-screening add elegance to the kimono worn by the actress Heather Headley.

Hiring Mr. Asiatico, who also designs costumes, isn’t cheap. The cost can range from $3,000 to $140,000 per production. Perfectly ragged clothing doesn’t just come off the rack.

“Producers say, ‘There’s no fabric out there that can do the part?’” said Mr. Asiatico, who has been in the business for some 22 years. “But costume designers know that what I’m going to give adds finesse to the show.”

Distressing for the stage requires exaggerated painting and destruction techniques, such that color, shadows and “damage” can be read under the lights and from a distance. Recently, Mr. Asiatico added subtle variations of “blood” and “sweat” to costumes in the revival of “The Crucible,” and made uniforms in the musical “Doctor Zhivago” look as if they had gotten wet from fresh snow.

The New York Times recently asked Mr. Asiatico to modify some of his techniques to turn a jean jacket into a wearable, distressed, chic-looking garment that anyone can make. Here, in four relatively easy steps, is Mr. Asiatico’s guide to D.I.Y. distressing.

Step No. 1: Shred

Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

Distressing a garment requires a combination of washing (to break down the fabric), painting and working it over with tools, like scissors and sandpaper. Mr. Asiatico begins with a shredder, a hand-held, spiky comb that looks like a torture chamber device. In short, quick strokes, he breaks down the fibers, pulls down the shape and trims the edges, giving the garment the appearance of everyday wear.

“You don’t want it to look fake,” Mr. Asiatico said. “It has to look lived in.”

It’s a workout to distress a fabric as tough as denim, but the result can be almost delicately soft. And expensive-looking, like “Ralph Lauren, what you’d find in a vintage store,” Mr. Asiatico said.

Step No. 2: Paint

Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

After shredding, Mr. Asiatico applies layers of paint, usually with an airbrush. Here, he uses a spray bottle that can accommodate attachable jars, each with different colors of thinned-down, Setasilk paint (about 25 percent paint and 75 percent water). He applies thin layers of gold, brown and black on the chest and arms, spraying more heavily around the collar and the sides, “where the garment tends to get more of the dirt.” He then uses a small brush to apply black low lights, or shadows, on the sides of the denim. This “blocking” technique creates depth and gives the garment dimension.

Step No. 3: Dry

Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

After he paints the garment, Mr. Asiatico uses a hair dryer to make the paint permanent. (For Broadway, the costumes are usually heat-set in a clothes dryer.) When dried, the paint will appear on the garment in a lighter shade. And it’s not going anywhere.

“If you don’t heat set, you can wash and remove the paint,” Mr. Asiatico said. “It’s hard to remove paint when it’s dry.”

After drying, he adds more accents of paint here and there, and dries those areas again.

Step No. 4: Sand

Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

After the paint is dried, Mr. Asiatico sandpapers parts of the jacket, a technique that returns highlights to the garment by forcing the paint into the fabric. “It brings back life into the garment,” he said. “It was becoming too painted. Now it has shadows and light.” Mr. Asiatico does the sanding on a dress form, which helps pull down the garment and naturally distresses the denim. (It can also be done on a table.) He also cuts off some excess threads on the hem. The finished look is about a six on a distressing scale of one to 10.

“For the theater, they would buy a jean jacket that costs $30 and charge me a couple hundred to do this,” he said. “A full jacket for a Broadway show would take probably four hours. We did this in about 90 minutes.”

The original denim jacket, left, and the finished version, completed by Mr. Asiatico in about 90 minutes. Photographs by Rebecca Smeyne for The New York Times

Yet More Vintage Reviews from the Archive

 

[As I affirmed in “More Vintage Reviews from the Archive” (19 April 2021), in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I reviewed theater for the New York Native, a biweekly gay newspaper published in New York City from 1980 to 1997.

[My assignments were mostly Off-Off-Broadway and occasionally Off-Broadway plays, and the notices were fairly short since two plays were usually reviewed in most columns.  (For the reviews republished here, the companion play has usually been omitted—though it may have been published in another post on Rick On Theatre.)]

ADJOINING TRANCES

by 

45th Street Theatre

3 April 1989 

[The review below, in the column entitled “Winter Pleasures/Summer Doldrums” (with The Winter’s Tale, my notice for which is posted on Rick On Theater on 28 November 2019 as part of “‘Moron! Vermin! Curate! Cretin! Crritic!!’: John Simon (1925-2019) - Part 1),” appeared in the New York Native on 3 April 1989.]

No less than great acting would be required to invigorate Adjoining Trances, described as “a new play suggested by the friendship of Carson McCullers [1917-67] and Tennessee Williams [1911-83].”  Playwright Randy Buck, until now an actor and director, imagines the conversations and thoughts of the two writers during the summer they spent at Williams’s Nantucket, Massachusetts, house in 1946, the year he produced Summer and Smoke and she, the stage version of her novel The Member of the Wedding. 

Even with Williams’s train of lovers and McCullers’s marital troubles and her stroke—all of which we merely hear about—the play is 90 minutes (no intermission) of mostly talk, much of it soliloquies to the audience. 

The characters, here named Bird (Robert Dorfman) and Sister (Melinda Mullins), as both writers were sometimes known, sit for the most part at a table center stage typing their scripts and reveal various events of their lives and private thoughts.  Despite the reported closeness the two developed, Bird and Sister do not really seem to connect on stage.  Long before the single act was over, I began to wonder if anything were going to happen.  Nothing did. 

The acting bond needed here is the Jessica Tandy-Hume Cronyn of Gin Game (Broadway, 1977) or Frances Sternhagen-Morgan Freeman of Driving Miss Daisy (Off-Broadway, 1988).  Unfortunately, only one of this pair holds up her end of the partnership.  Melinda Mullins’s Sister is, at least, a human being, with a pulse and respiration.  When she speaks, it sounds, as hamburger maven Clara Peller might have said, like there’s somebody back there.  When she needs Bird’s help to get around after her stroke, she really does seem to need it, both physically and emotionally. 

She only gets the physical, however, from Robert Dorfman; the rest of him does not seem to be there.  His portrayal is unconnected, plastic, and artificial, from an exaggerated and inconsistent accent to his stereotyped imitation of fey behavior.  The smile he pastes on and the high-pitched giggle that comes from nowhere indicate that Dorfman is imitating an image of Williams, not creating a character.  In addition, he has a curious habit of stumbling over lines, lots of them, that made me wonder if he is doing a bad job of acting a stutter, or if he simply cannot get his words out. 

Director Edward Berkeley’s contribution seems principally to have been to move the actors around the set now and then, and to get one out of the way so the other can deliver one of the too-frequent, too-long inner monologues without distraction.  Even Robert Jared’s lighting seems uncoordinated, suddenly fading out or in at the wrong moments, ill-serving the underutilized set, imaginatively designed by Don Jensen. 

I am left with a single curiosity about Adjoining Trances—other than the meaning of the title: since Buck’s acting and directing has been in the decidedly non-realistic, highly theatrical vein—he lists as credits Charles Ludlam, Robert Wilson, and La Mama—why has he written his play so flatly and untheatrically?   

[This Off-Off-Broadway production of Adjoining Trances was produced by Lily Turner and Alexander Racolin at the 45th Street Theatre (between 8th and 9th Avenues in the Theatre District).  It seems to have been largely forgotten in the record, because the play’s première is documented as the 1997 Theatre Row revival at the Samuel Beckett Theatre.  Many regional revivals have been staged since.

[Playwright Randall Buck, a native of Johnson City, Tennessee, died at 65 at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Hudson, New York, in 2017 after a long illness.

[Clara Peller (1902-87), a former manicurist, was a character actress who, at the age of 81, starred in the 1984 “Big Fluffy Bun” advertising campaign for the Wendy’s fast food restaurant chain.  Peller played a crusty old lady who, upon examining a pathetically tiny burger in an absurdly large bun, slapped the counter of a neighborhood hamburger joint and loudly (and later famously) demanded, “Where’s the Beef!” and then punctuated the call with an exasperated look beyond the counter and grumbled, “I don’t think there’s anybody back there!”] 

*  *  *  *

WORKING ONE ACTS ’89

The Working Theater

Henry Street Settlement

8 July 1989 

[“Working For A Living” included two reviews, Working One Acts ’89, below, and Is This 24 Lily Pond Lane? which follows. The column appeared in the New York Native of 8 July 1989.]

The Working Theater is dedicated to “working people and the issues they confront,” but of four Working One Acts, only Daniel Therriault’s Floor Above the Roof actually deals with people who labor for a living. 

Staged by different directors, each play in this collection, the fourth Working One Acts the company has presented, has a separate cast and a different set, designed by Anne C. Patterson, against a grey, cityscape silhouette, the production’s single unifying element. 

The last two plays provide the most interest, starting with Jackie Reingold’s Freeze Tag, directed by Evan Handler.  A comedy, it plays out the meeting of former high-school classmates Andrea (Julie Boyd) and Aldrich (Lyn Greene). 

Aldrich is studying to be a “personal private investigator” and, having picked Andrea as her test subject, has learned things about Andrea’s life even Andrea doesn’t know, including her fiancé’s infidelity.  Aldrich, once teen-aged Andy’s protector, urges mousy Andrea to take revenge.  Aldrich just wants to be Andrea’s protector again, but Andrea has second thoughts and, despite Aldrich’s pleas, backs out of the plans. 

The first half is outrageously, absurdly funny, and Boyd, whose character and appearance resemble Annie Potts of TV’s Designing Women (but not of Ghostbusters II), paints a vibrant portrait of an intimidated woman brought out briefly into the full glare of her pent-up anger.  The concept of people with their own personal private investigators is a wacky take in a 1984 in which not only is Big Brother watching, but so is everyone else; it’s funny and scary simultaneously. 

But the second half, when Aldrich—whom Greene performs with an artificial, nasally Bronx accent—reveals that instead of a ­post-modern self-starter she is merely a lonely, obsessive nut, turns to realism and becomes attenuated and over-long.

Sand Mountain Matchmaking, written and directed by Romulus Linney, has the most lyrical language of the collection, due as much to the milieu—Smoky Mountains backwoods—as to Linney’s talent.  Unfortunately, the language, buoyed by nice characterizations, must carry this sedentary and undramatic play.  Linney has made a habit of dramatizing a lot of his prose, and this story of a young widow seeking a new husband on a remote mountain is probably another example. 

Rebecca Tull (Adrienne Thompson) is courted by the eligible men: Clink Williams (Earl Hagan, Jr.), a randy bachelor only interested in sex; Slate Foley (Paul O’Brien), a brute not above beating anyone, including his wife; and Radley Nollins (Robert Arcaro), a bible-quoting, self-righteous boor.  On advice of Lottie Stiles (Mary Foskett), a hillbilly Yenta who calls with grandson Vester (John Karol), Rebecca uses a spell to get rid of the unwanted suitors and find the right man.  Miraculously, this frightens the louts away but attracts stalwart Sam Bean (Scott Sowers).

Performances are on the button, and the mountain accents sound just right, but the whole play is performed seated, with Rebecca in her cabin as each suitor sits, interview style, next to her.  It’s talking heads by way of American Gothic.  Furthermore, despite the exotic locale, Linney says nothing that hasn’t been common knowledge at least since the advent of modern feminism. 

The first two plays are less provocative, though Will Holtzman’s The Closer starts with some promise.  Directed by R. J. Cutler, it seems at first to be a Beckettian tragicomedy about Howard (Murray Rubinstein) who enters his new condo to find a stranger, Al (Earl Hagan, Jr.), who won’t leave. 

Presumably an indictment of our materialistic, Yuppie-dominated society—Howard is a deal-closer, a junior-level Ivan Boesky/Michael Milken—the play deteriorates into a struggle over possessions when Al simply turns out to be the apartment’s distressed previous inhabitant.

Floor Above the Roof is the only play strictly about working people—warehousemen Cantor, Jay, and Swifty (Mark Kenneth Smaltz, David Wolos-Fonteno, and Richard Fiske) and freight elevator operator Elroy (Randy Frazier).  It is a ­blue-collar Grand Hotel: each man has a story and a problem, and Elroy is the catalyst-cum-father confessor.  For a theater dedicated to workers, this play, directed by John Pynchon Holms, misses a lot in representing them. 

Despite their looks, for instance, the cast is off.  These actors are all too articulate and soft-spoken to be convincing as men who work with their backs.  Even their obligatory lewd cat-calls contain a tacit apology.  Then the dialogue is much too sophisticated for the types who inhabit Manhattan warehouses and loading docks. 

It’s hard to imagine Cantor exclaiming, “I’ll caesarean myself with my fingernails,” to express frustration with his life; when Jay says of his daughter, “her face is precisely symmetric,” is this the language of a laborer? 

In a realistic play, even artistic license requires a certain accuracy, both in language and appearance.  In Floor Above, the workers’ clothes are neat, clean, and dry, even after a hot, sweaty day in a steamy warehouse.  Has Patterson, who also designed the costumes, never heard of “distressing”? 

The three-hour evening has other contributing problems.  With four plays, designer Patterson might have considered less substantial, more easily removable scenery.  Long breaks are necessary to lug off heavy, cumbersome pieces and stack them by the entrances since the Henry Street Settlement’s Recital Hall has no real backstage or wings.  Lack of air-conditioning or ventilation in the basement-level space made the long program seem longer, even on an unseasonably cool evening. 

[Founded in 1984, the Working Theatre began producing Working One Acts in ’86.  Closed at present because of the COVID pandemic, the company is still holding forth.  This bill of one acts was presented at the Henry Street Settlement Arts for Living Center (466 Grand Street in Lower Manhattan) in June 1989.]

*  *  *  *

IS THIS 24 LILY POND LANE?

by Toby Armour

Theater for the New City

8 July 1989

[With Working One Acts ’89, above, this review was part of “Working For A Living,” New York Native, 8 July 1989.]

Toby Armour’s social consciousness in Is This 24 Lily Pond Lane? is more obvious and more honest than those of the Working Theatre’s one-acts (see above).  A ­comedy-mystery about disabled actors, the cast includes several handicapped performers. 

While this fact and its social and dramatic significance are not the play’s focus, the audience is clearly intended to recognize that these people can, in their own ways, do for themselves what able-bodied people can, and often a good bit more.  If that sounds like TV movie-of-the-week stuff, unfortunately it plays like it, too.

Part of the problem is the script Armour wrote for people she worked with at the National Theater Workshop of the Handicapped [Lower Manhattan-based repertory theater company and school providing training and performing space for writers and performers with disabilities, 1977-2008].  The amateur actors are staying at their director’s East Hampton, Long Island, house, and the contrivances pile up. 

On a stormy night, blind Lucia disappears and an escaped murderer is on the loose somewhere nearby.  Except for the disabilities, that’s essentially the plot of Emlyn Williams’s Night Must Fall.  Armour’s only innovation is a masked choral duet who punctuate the hour-and-a-half single act with portentous speeches under red lighting. 

Factual oversights also subvert the plot.  For one, a gun with blanks is fired point-blank at two characters, causing no serious injury.  Even blanks kill if fired that close: remember actor Jon-Erik Hexum’s 1984 death? 

For another, the group’s high spirits at the end—because of their cleverness in capturing the murderer and escaping his attempts on their lives (though some of the escapes are never adequately explained)—ignore that the man did, in fact, kill someone outside.  This tends to dampen the whimsy of the moment.

The other problem is the acting.  The mix of experienced and inexperienced actors directed by Armour give uneven performances.  Some lines are delivered with conviction, others with empty-sounding inflections and flat intonations; some movements are made with intent, others without motivation. 

One casting decision seems ill-advised: Michael Lengel must pass himself off as a thrice-married psychiatrist—he’s actually the escaped schizophrenic—though the oldest he looks is 23 [Lengel was actually 35 at the time].  Both the characters and the audience are supposed to be fooled, but even Lengel’s relative talent can’t pull off this subterfuge credibly.

The good intentions and commitment of both writer and cast are certainly laudable, but aren’t enough to make good theater.  Perhaps with careful rewriting and recasting, Is This 24 Lily Pond Lane? might make successful television.

[The première of Is This 24 Lily Pond Lane? was staged at Theater for the new City in New York City East Village in June and July 1989.  It was later also presented at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland.]

[Jon-Erik Hexum (1957-84) was an actor in the TV series Voyagers! (1982-83) and Cover Up (1984-85), and the 1984 “Bear” Bryant biopic, The Bear.  He died by an accidental self-inflicted blank-cartridge gunshot to the head on the set of Cover Up.]

*  *  *  *

SWIM VISIT

by Wesley Moore

Primary Stages

2 July 1990

[My review of Wesley Moore’s Swim Visit was the sole play covered in “Off the Shallow End,” New York Native, 2 July 1990.]

Primary Stages Theatre Company ends its fifth season with the New York première of Wesley Moore’s Swim Visit.  Directed by William Partlan, the play recounts the confrontation of Ted (Pirie MacDonald), manufacturer of a rapidly obsolescing fiberglass tray, by Clay (Mark Metcalf), a young worker at Ted’s factory. 

Clay has invited himself, the factory workers’ self-appointed spokesman, to Ted’s suburban home on a Sunday afternoon when Ted, his wife Izz (Caroline Lagerfelt), and Izz’s friend Beth (Alice Haining) are sunbathing on the pool deck (simply designed by Robert Klingelhoefer).  According to Clay, the workers fear Ted is destroying the plant by producing merchandise no one is buying. 

This conflict, which surfaces well into act two, is the old chestnut of the young and ambitious versus the old and stagnant.  Clay and Ted, standing in for these two forces, even fight with a pair of hedge clippers to make sure we know this.

The characters behave schizophrenically, shifting purpose and personality to propel Moore’s plot along.  When Beth learns that Clay is expected, she makes it clear she is not interested in socializing with a strange man.  She pulls on a pair of tights over her bikini and wraps her blouse around her as Clay makes his entrance.  In a wink, off comes the blouse. 

Clay, presented as a clear-minded man with a purpose, is easily convinced to stay for a swim, then to stay for dinner and, finally, to stay the night.  It also takes him little time to enter into a dalliance with Beth, the nature of which is nicely captured in Clay’s response when Beth remarks how strong his arms are: “[They’re] not so strong.  You just haven’t felt a man in a while.  And you’re glad I’m here.”  In the end, Clay importunes Beth with “You’re a wonderful person.  Let me take you out of here.” 

Along with schizophrenic characters and soap-opera dialogue, Swim Visit is laden with some pretty heavy symbolism.  Aside from the hedge-clipper fight, Ted and Clay have a swimming race  which Clay wins.  Among numerous others, there is a recurring reference to a “stinking carcass” in a pond—something old and dead that has been rotting there for weeks. 

The cast struggles mightily to animate the characters, but the four capable performers do not seem to believe what they say or do.  Lines are delivered without conviction and emotional outbursts come out of nowhere.  At the end of his fight with Ted, for instance, Clay explodes, “I could kill you!”  Clay’s purpose is neither personal nor particularly emotional, so where does this animosity come from? 

More curiously, where does it go?  Motivations are also never clear, forcing the actors to pursue actions mechanically.  Clay’s sticking around never makes sense, but when he finally seems about to leave, he abruptly stops and seductively massages Izz’s shoulders. 

Swim Visit never answers any of its own questions or resolves any of its problems.  Too many things are simply left hanging, as if they are unimportant.  Things like the audience.

[Swim Visit was produced at Primary Stages’ home of 17 years at 354 West 45th Street (later renamed the Davenport Theatre until 2019, when it closed as a playhouse) in the Theatre District; it has since moved several times until 2016, when it settled in the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village.  The U.S. première of Moore’s play ran there 8-30 June 1990, but was previously produced in 1986 at London’s Donmar Warehouse Theatre.]

"Ritchie Boys: The Secret U.S. Unit Bolstered by German-Born Jews that Helped the Allies Beat Hitler"

reported by Jon Wertheim 

[On 24 April, I posted “Latter-Day Esthers & Women Maccabees,” a collection of three articles that tell the stories of Jewish women who fought the Nazis in World War II or helped the Allied war effort by spying on the occupying German forces in Hungary.  

[Now comes “Ritchie Boys,” broadcast on the CBS news magazine 60 Minutes on 9 May, which tells some of the story of a group of American soldiers in World War II who used their knowledge of the German language and German culture and society to help combat the Nazi regime in the Third Reich.

[In a way, I was a descendent of the Ritchie Boys.  I was a counterintelligence Special Agent in the army in the 1970s, an officer in Military Intelligence, an army branch which grew out of the work of the men like those profiled below.  Furthermore, my father was assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), the agency that became MI, during the Occupation of Germany in 1945.

[The Ritchie Boys, as you’ll read, were soldiers who were trained at the Military Intelligence Training Center (MITC) at Camp Ritchie in Washington County in western Maryland, about a mile south of the Pennsylvania state line.  (The nearest populated place to the military reservation is Highfield-Cascade, Maryland, which is surrounded by it.  It’s 16 miles northeast of Hagerstown, Maryland, the county seat; 68 miles northwest of Baltimore; 70 miles northwest of Washington, D.C.; and 173 miles due north of Richmond, Virginia.) 

[After 1942, GI’s with knowledge of German and the languages of the Nazi-occupied countries or those allied with the Third Reich were trained in intelligence, counterintelligence, and interrogation (also psy-war, but I didn't know about that part).

[MITC operated from 1942 to 1945; Camp Ritchie (later Fort Ritchie) continued until 1998.  The U.S. Army Intelligence School (USAINTS) was established in 1950 at Fort Holabird in Baltimore, Maryland (where I trained in 1971 as a counterintelligence Special Agent – see my post on Rick On Theater “Berlin Memoir,” 16 and 31 December 2016, 20 January 2017, 9 and 19 February 2017, 11 and 29 March 2017, and 13 April 2017), and moved to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, as the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and School (USAICS) in 1971.]

The Ritchie Boys were responsible for uncovering more than half the combat intelligence on the Western Front during World War II. For the many German-born Jews in their ranks, defeating the Nazis was heartbreakingly personal.

For as casually as we often toss around the word “hero,” sometimes no lesser term applies. Tonight we’ll introduce you to members of a secret American intelligence unit who fought in World War II. What’s most extraordinary about this group: many of them were German-born Jews who fled their homeland, came to America, and then joined the U.S. Army.  Their mission: to use their knowledge of the German language and culture to return to Europe and fight Nazism. The Ritchie Boys, as they were known, trained in espionage and frontline interrogation. And incredibly, they were responsible for most of the combat intelligence gathered on the Western Front. For decades, they didn’t discuss their work. Fortunately, some of the Ritchie Boys are still around to tell their tales, and that includes the life force that is Guy Stern, age 99.

Jon Wertheim: You work 6 days a week, you swim every morning, you lecture, any signs of slowing down?

Guy Stern: Well I think not (laugh) but I don’t run as fast, I don’t swim as fast but I feel happy with my tasks.

A few months shy of turning 100, Guy Stern drips with vitality. He still works six days a week and if you get up early enough, you might catch him working out at his local park in the Detroit suburbs.

But ask him about his most formative experience - and he doesn’t hesitate. It was his service in the military during World War II.  

Jon Wertheim: What was it like for you, leaving Nazi Germany, escaping as a Jew, and the next time you go back to Europe it’s to fight those guys?  What was that like?

Guy Stern: I was a soldier doing my job and that precluded any concern that I was going back to a country I once was very attached to.

Guy Stern: I had a war to fight and I did it. 

This is Guy Stern 80 years ago.  He is among the last surviving Ritchie Boys - a group of young men – many of them German Jews – who played an outsized role in helping the Allies win World War II.  They took their name from the place they trained - Camp Ritchie, Maryland  – a secret American military intelligence center during the war.

Starting in 1942, more than 11,000 soldiers went through the rigorous training at what was the army’s first centralized school for intelligence and psychological warfare. 

David Frey: The purpose of the facility was to train interrogators.  That was the biggest weakness that the army recognized that it had, which was battlefield intelligence and the interrogation needed to talk to sometimes civilians, most of the time prisoners of war, in order to glean information from them.

David Frey is a professor of history and director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Jon Wertheim: How effective were they at gathering intelligence?

David Frey: They were incredibly effective. 60-plus percent of the actionable intelligence gathered on the battlefield was gathered by Ritchie Boys

Jon Wertheim: 60% of the actionable intelligence?

David Frey: Yes

David Frey: They made a massive contribution to essentially every battle that the Americans fought - the entire sets of battles on the Western Front.

Recruits were chosen based on their knowledge of European Language and culture, as well as their high IQs. Essentially they were intellectuals. The largest set of graduates were 2,000 German-born Jews.

David Frey: If we take Camp Ritchie in microcosm, it was almost the ideal of an American melting pot. You had people coming from all over uniting for a particular cause.

Jon Wertheim: All in service of winning the war?

David Frey: All in service of winning the war. And there’s nothing that forges unity better than having a common enemy.

David Frey:  You had a whole load of immigrants who really wanted to get back into the fight.

Immigrants like Guy Stern. He grew up in a close-knit family in the town of Hildesheim, Germany. When Hitler took power in 1933, Stern says the climate grew increasingly hostile.

Guy Stern: My fellow students – it was an all male school – withdrew from you.

Jon Wertheim: because you were Jewish you were ostracized?

Guy Stern: That is correct.

Guy Stern: I went to my father one day and I said “classes are becoming a torture chamber” 

By 1937, violence against Jews was escalating. Sensing danger, Stern’s father tried to get the family out.  But the Sterns could only send one of their own to the U.S. They chose their eldest son. 

Jon Wertheim: Do you remember saying goodbye to your family?

Guy Stern: Yes

Jon Wertheim: What do you remember from that?

Guy Stern: Handkerchiefs (pause), I couldn’t know at that point that I would never see my siblings or my parents again nor my grandmother and so forth and so on.

Guy Stern arrived in the U.S. alone at age 15, settling with an uncle in St. Louis. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, Stern, by then a college student, raced to enlist.

Guy Stern: I had an immediate visceral response to that and that was this is my war for many reasons.  Personal, of course, but also this country - I was really treated well.

In New York, Paul Fairbrook had a similar impulse. Now 97, Fairbrook is the former dean of the Culinary Institute of America. His Jewish family left Germany in 1933 when he was 10. 

Jon Wertheim: Why did you want to enlist initially?

Paul Fairbrook: Look I’m a German Jew.  And there’s nothing that I wanted more is to get some revenge on Hitler who killed my uncles, and my aunts and my cousins and there was no question in my mind, and neither of all the men in Camp Ritchie.  So many of them were Jewish.  We were all on the same wavelength.  We were delighted to get a chance to do something for the United States.

At the time though, the military wouldn’t take volunteers who weren’t born in the U.S. But within a few months the government realized these so-called enemy aliens could be a valuable resource in the war. 

Paul Fairbrook: You can learn to shoot a rifle in 6 months but you can’t learn fluent German in 6 months. And that’s what the key to the success was[.]

Paul Fairbrook: You really know an awful lot of the subtleties when you’re having a conversation with another German and we were able to find out things out in their answers that enabled us to ask more questions. You really have to understand it helps to have been born in Germany in order to – in order to do a good job.

Both refugees like Fairbrook and Stern, as well as a number of American born recruits with requisite language skills, were drafted into the Army and sent to Camp Ritchie.

Jon Wertheim: How did you find out you were going to go to Camp Ritchie?

Guy Stern: I was called to the company office and told you’re shipping out, and I said “may I know where I’m going?” and he said “no, military secret”. 

Jon Wertheim: They swore you to secrecy?

Guy Stern: Yes.

Originally a resort, Camp Ritchie was a curiously idyllic setting to prepare for the harshness and brutality of war. Nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Maryland – it was away from prying eyes and prying spies – but close enough to decision makers at the [P]entagon. 

Jon Wertheim: Give us a sense of the kinds of courses they took.

David Frey: Well the most important part of the training was that they learned to do interrogation, and in particular of prisoners of war.

David Frey: Techniques where you want to get people to talk to you.  You want to convince them you’re trustworthy.

David Frey: But they also did terrain analysis, they also did photo analysis, and aerial reconnaissance analysis. They did counterintelligence training.

Jon Wertheim: This was really a broad range of intelligence activities.

David Frey: It was a very broad range. And they did it all generally in 8 weeks

Jon Wertheim: What you describe, it almost sounds like these were precursors to CIA agents.

David Frey: They were in fact. Some of them were trained as spies and some of them went on to careers as spies

Victor Brombert: My parents were pacifists so the idea of my going to war was for them calamitous, however they realized that it was a necessary war, especially for us.

Victor Brombert, now 97 years old, is a former professor of romance languages and literature at Yale and then Princeton. He was born in Berlin to a Russian Jewish family. When Hitler came to power, the Bromberts fled to France, and then to the U.S., eager to fight the Nazis, he, too, joined the Army. After recruiters found out he spoke 4 languages, they dispatched him to Camp Ritchie, where strenuous classroom instruction was coupled with strenuous field exercises.  

Victor Brombert: There were long and demanding exercises and close combat training.  “How to kill a sentry from behind.” I thought, “I’m never going to do that,” but I was shown how to do it.

Jon Wertheim: So physical combat training as well as intelligence?

Victor Brombert: Yes, well with a stick.  You sort of swing it around the neck from behind and then pull.  

Among the unusual sights at Ritchie: a team of U.S. Soldiers dressed in German uniforms. The Ritchie Boys trained for war against these fake Germans with fake German tanks made out of wood. Another unusual sight: towering over recruits, Frank Leavitt, a World War I veteran and pro wrestling star at the time, was among the instructors.  

Training was designed to be as realistic as possible. The Ritchie Boys practiced street-fighting in life-size replicas of German villages and questioned mock civilians in full scale German homes. Some of the prisoners were actual German POWs brought to the camp so the Ritchie Boys could practice their interrogation techniques. 

Jon Wertheim: I understand you – you had sparring partners. You playacted

Victor Brombert: One had to playact with some of the people were acting as prisoners and some of them were real prisoners.

By the spring of 1944, the Ritchie Boys were ready to return to Western Europe – this time as naturalized Americans in American uniforms.  

Still, if they were captured, they knew what the Nazis would do to them.  

Some of them requested new dog tags – with very good reason.

Jon Wertheim: This dog tag says Hebrew. Did your dog tag identify you as Jewish?

Guy Stern: I preferred not having it. I asked them to leave it off.

Jon Wertheim: You didn’t want to be identified as Jewish going back to Western Europe.

Guy Stern: No because I knew that – the contact with Germans might not be very nice.

On June 6, 1944, D-Day, the Allies launched one of the most sweeping military operations in history. A mighty onslaught of more than 160,000 men, 13,000 aircraft, and 5000 vessels.   

Guy Stern: We were on a PT boat taking off from Southampton. And we all were scared.  We were briefed that the Germans were not going to welcome us greatly. As a Jew, I knew I might not be treated exactly by the Geneva rules.  

Divided into 6-man teams the Ritchie Boys were attached to different Army units. When they landed on the beaches of Normandy, Wehrmacht troops were waiting for them – well-armed and well prepared.  

Victor Brombert was with the first American armored division to land on Omaha Beach.  He is still haunted by what he experienced that day.

Victor Brombert: I saw immense debris.  Wounded people.  Dead people.

Victor Brombert: I remember being up on a cliff the first night over Omaha Beach. And we were strafed and I said to myself, “now, it’s the end” because I could – you could feel the machine gun bullets

Jon Wertheim: Is that when you first realized – I’m – I’m in a war here?

Victor Brombert: Yes, I realized that I was afraid.  I never calculated that there is such a thing as terror, fear.  So I experienced viscerally, fear.

On the front lines from Normandy onwards, the Ritchie Boys fought in every major battle in Europe, collecting tactical intelligence, interrogating prisoners and civilians, all in service of winning the war.

In 1944, the Ritchie Boys headed to Europe to fight in a war that was for them, intensely personal. They were members of a secret group whose mastery of the German language and culture helped them provide battlefield intelligence that proved pivotal to the Allies’ victory. The Ritchie Boys landed on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day and helped liberate Paris. They crossed into Germany with the Allied armies, and witnessed the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.  All the while, they tracked down evidence and interrogated Nazi criminals later tried at Nuremberg. It was also in Europe that some of them, like Guy Stern, learned what had happened to the families they left behind.  

By the summer of 1944, German troops in Normandy were outnumbered and overpowered. The allies liberated Paris in August and drove Nazi troops out of France.  But Hitler was determined to continue the war. In the Ardennes region of Belgium, the Germans mounted a massive counteroffensive, which became known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Jon Wertheim: I see a tent in the background of that photo right in front of you

Guy Stern: Yes, that’s my interrogation tent

Jon Wertheim: So this is you on the job.  You’re in Belgium?

Guy Stern: Yes, doing my job interrogating.  Right.

Amid the chaos of war, Guy Stern and the other Ritchie Boys had a job to do. Embedded in every army unit, they interrogated tens of thousands of captured Nazi soldiers as well as civilians – extracting key strategic information on enemy strength, troop movements, and defensive positions. They then typed up their daily reports in the field to be passed up the chain of command.

Victor Brombert: Our interrogations - it had to do with tactical immediate concerns.  And that’s why civilians could be useful and soldiers could be useful, “where is the minefield?” very important because you save life if you know where the mine – “where is the machine gun nest?”  “How many machine guns do you have there?” “where are your reserve units?” and if you don’t get it from one prisoner, you might get it from the other.  

97-year-old Victor Brombert says they relied on their Camp Ritchie training to get people to open up.

Victor Brombert: We improvised according to the situation. According to the kind of unit, according to the kind of person we were interrogating. But certainly what did not work was violence or threat of violence. Never. What did work Is complicity.

Jon Wertheim: What -What do you mean?

Victor Brombert: By complicity I mean, “Oh we are together in this war. You on one side and we on this side. Isn’t it a miserable thing? Aren’t we all sort of, tired of it?”

Jon Wertheim: The shared experience?

Victor Brombert: The shared experience, exactly. Giving out some cigarettes also helps a lot. A friendly approach - trying to be human. 

The Ritchie Boys connected with prisoners on subjects as varied as food and soccer rivalries but they weren’t above using deception on difficult targets. The Ritchie Boys discovered that the Nazis were terrified of ending up in Russian captivity and they used that to great effect. If a German POW wouldn’t talk, he might face Guy Stern dressed up as a Russian officer. 

Guy Stern: I had my whole uniform with medals. Russian medals and I gave myself the name Commissar Krukov.

Jon Wertheim: That’s what you called yourself?

Guy Stern: That was my pseudonym.

Jon Wertheim: How did you do commissar?

Guy Stern: Thank you for asking (laugh) I gave myself all the accouterments of looking like a fierce Russian commissar.

Guy Stern: And some we didn’t break but 80% were so darned scared of the Russians and what they would do.

Jon Wertheim: So there’s a real element of - costumes and deception and accents. 

Guy Stern: Yes and it’s theatrics in a way yes.

Their subjects ranged from low-level German soldiers to high ranking Nazi officers including Hans Goebbels, brother of Hitler’s chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels.

Another bit of indispensable Ritchie Boy handiwork: the order of battle of the German Army. Paul Fairbrook helped write this compact manual -  known as the red book  – which outlined in great detail the makeup of virtually every Nazi unit, information every Ritchie Boy committed to memory.  

Paul Fairbrook: When the soldiers said “I’m not going to talk” they could say “wait a minute. I know all about you. Look, I got a book here and it tells me that you were here and you went there and your boss was this.” And they were impressed with that.

Jon Wertheim: So it sounds like this gave the officers in the field a guide to the German Army so they could then interrogate the German POW’s more efficiently.

Paul Fairbrook: That’s exactly right.  

The Ritchie Boys earned a reputation for delivering important tactical information fast, making a major contribution to every battle on the Western Front.  

Jon Wertheim: Their work saved lives?

David Frey: Absolutely. They certainly saved lives. I think that that’s quantifiable.

David Frey teaches history to cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

David Frey: Part of what the Ritchie Boys did was to convince German units to surrender without fighting. 

Jon Wertheim: And you’re saying some of that originated at Camp Ritchie?

David Frey: Much of it originated at Camp Ritchie because it had never – it hadn’t been done before. How do you appeal to people in their own language? Knowing how to shape that appeal was pretty critical to the success of the mobile broadcast units.  

In trucks equipped with loudspeakers, Ritchie Boys went to the front lines under heavy fire, and tried, in German, to persuade their Nazi counterparts to surrender. They also drafted and dropped leaflets from airplanes behind enemy lines.  

Jon Wertheim: This was one of the leaflets that was dropped out?

Guy Stern: Out of a plane. I have some that were shot.  

Guy Stern: This one was our most effective leaflet and why was that?  Because Eisenhower had signed it and the Germans had an incredibly naïve approach to everything that was signed and sealed.

Jon Wertheim: And you think because it had that signature, somehow that certified it.

Guy Stern: Yes, that carried weight and the belief in the printed matter was very great.

Jon Wertheim: That’s the kind of thing you would know.

Guy Stern: Yes.

Jon Wertheim: As a former German who understood the psychology and the mentality.

Guy Stern: That’s correct.  

Apart from the fighting, there were other threats confronting the Ritchie Boys. Given their foreign accents, they were in particular danger of being mistaken for the enemy by their own troops, who instituted passwords at checkpoints.  

Victor Brombert: What happened to one of the Ritchie Boys - at night on the way to the latrine, he was asked for a password and he gave the name - the word for the password - but with a German accent. He was shot right away and killed.

Jon Wertheim: Did you ever worry your accent might get you killed?

Victor Brombert: Yes of course. You know, I don’t talk like an Alabama person or a Texan.

By the spring of 1945, Allied Forces neared Berlin and Hitler took his life in his underground bunker. Germany surrendered on May 8 of that year. 

Jon Wertheim: What do you remember feeling that day?

Guy Stern: Elated.

Guy Stern: It was absolutely, “we won kid!” (laugh)

Jon Wertheim: And those are your – those are your comrades.

Guy Stern: Yes.

Jon Wertheim: Those are your guys.

Guy Stern: Yes.

But joy turned to horror as Allied soldiers - and the world - learned the full scale of the Nazi mass extermination.  

Guy Stern recalls arriving at Buchenwald Concentration Camp three days after its liberation, alongside a fellow American sergeant. 

Guy Stern: We were walking along and you saw these emaciated, horribly looking, close to death people.  And so I fell back behind because I didn’t want to be seen crying to a hardened soldier and then he looked around to look where I was, how I was delayed, and he, this good fellow from middle of Ohio was bawling just as I was.

A few days later, Stern returned to his hometown, hoping to reunite with his family.  But Hildesheim was now in ruins. A childhood friend described to Stern how his parents, younger brother and sister had been forced from their home and deported.

Guy Stern: They were killed either in Warsaw or in Auschwitz.

Guy Stern: None of my family survived.  I was the only one to get out.   

Jon Wertheim: Did you ever ask yourself why me?  Why were you the one that made it to the United States?

Guy Stern: Yes, even last night.  And I said “Well, huh, in slang, there ain’t nothing special about you, but if you were saved, you got to show that you were worthy of it. And that has been the driving force in my professional life.  

Jon Wertheim: So as a way to honor your family that perished.

Guy Stern: Yeah.

After the war, Guy Stern, Victor Brombert and Paul Fairbrook came home, married, and went to Ivy League schools on the G.I. Bill.  Guy Stern became a professor for almost 50 years.

They all rose to the top of their fields, as did a number of other Ritchie Boys, says history professor David Frey. 

Jon Wertheim: I understand there are some Ritchie Boys (that) became fairly prominent figures.

David Frey: There are a whole variety of prominent Ritchie Boys.  

It turns out author J.D. Salinger was a Ritchie Boy.  So was Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. As was philanthropist David Rockefeller.

David Frey: Some became ambassadors. Some became critical figures in the creation of the CIA. Others were actually really important in American science.

Jon Wertheim: So there’s all sorts of impact years and years and years after the war from this – this camp in Maryland?

David Frey: It was not only the short term impact on the battlefield.  It was an impact on war crimes. They were critical in terms of arresting the - some of the major figures and gathering the evidence for Nuremberg, then shaping the cold war era, they really played a significant role.

Jon Wertheim:  How do you think we should be recalling the Ritchie Boys?

David Frey: I think we look at this group and we see true heroes.  We see those who are the greatest of the greatest generation.  These are people who made massive contributions.  Who helped shape what it meant to be American and who – in some cases – gave their lives in service to this country.

Jon Wertheim: This - This is a remarkable story.  Why do so few Americans know about this?

David Frey: Because it involves military intelligence, much of it was actually kept secret until the - the 1990’s.

David Frey: A lot of what was learned and the methods used are important to keep secret. And only in the early 2000’s did we begin to see reunions of the Ritchie Boys. 

Now in their late 90s, these humble warriors still keep in touch, swapping stories about a chapter in American history now finally being told.   

Jon Wertheim: What is it like when you get together and reflect on this experience going on 80 years ago?

Guy Stern: We always find another anecdote to tell. (laugh)

Jon Wertheim: You have a smile on your face when you think back.

Guy Stern: Yes, this is what happens.

It was hard for us not to notice that beyond the stories runs a deep sense of pride.

Paul Fairbrook: (laugh) You bet your life I’m proud of the Ritchie Boys. It was wonderful to be part of them! 

Paul Fairbrook: I was proud to be in the American army and we were able to do what we had to do.  I don’t think we’re heroes.  But the opportunity to help fight and win the war was a wonderful way.  I can look anybody straight in their eye and say I think I’ve earned the right to be an American.  And that’s what – that’s what it did for me.

—Produced by Katherine Davis. Associate producer, Jennifer Dozor. Broadcast associate, Elizabeth Germino. Edited by Stephanie Palewski Brumbach and Robert Zimet.

© 2021 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[L. Jon Wertheim is the executive editor of Sports Illustrated and has contributed to 60 Minutes since 2017.  The 2020‑21 season is his fourth on 60 Minutes.

[My father was one of the Ritchie Boys, a fact that’ll come up in “Letters from the Fronts,” my future multi-part post based on the correspondence between my future mother, a Red Cross social worker, and father, a captain of field artillery, in the year after they met on New Year’s Day 1945.  (This project is currently in progress, but it’s a long process.)  After combat in Europe ended in May 1945, Dad was detailed to the CIC and served in the Occupation as a Nazi-hunter.)

[The 60 Minutes story (video and transcript: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/world-war-ii-jews-escape-nazi-germany-hitler-60-minutes-2021-05-09/) focuses on the German-Jewish refugees who trained there, but my dad said that the first recruits were GI’s from all over who spoke any of the enemy languages or the languages of German-occupied territories.  There’s more to this story, some of which I tell in “Letters.”

[My father wasn’t a refugee or even an immigrant; he was born in the United States.  His parents and grandparents were immigrants, but not from Germany (my paternal grandfather came from the Ukraine and my grandmother was born in Latvia), though German was the language of my great-grandparents’ homes.  That’s how my father learned German.  (He also studied the language in high school and college.)]