A Curious Man: The Strange and Brilliant Life of Robert Believe It or Not! Ripley

by Neal Thompson

  RIPLEY AND BEATRICE passed their first wedding anniversary in the fall of 1920. Though they’d lived apart for most of that year, they were still husband and wife and they tried occasionally to reconcile, usually with terrible results. They once got into a marathon shouting match at the Hotel Marie Antoinette. Another night, beckoned by an anonymous caller, Beatrice found her husband dancing with another woman at a Broadway café. When she confronted him, he dragged her to the street and put her in a cab.

  Over the next year, Ripley further distanced himself from his young bride, traveling to handball tournaments with Bugs Baer, his partner in sport and in drink. It’s possible that the onset of Prohibition had contributed to Ripley’s refusal to give up his NYAC apartment and settle down with Beatrice. He referred to his kind as “the great criminal element,” so it helped to have a bed at the NYAC, just a few blocks north of the notorious stretch of speakeasies along Fifty-second Street, known to house more illegal pubs than anywhere in the city, where secret chutes were built into the walls to dump liquor during a bust.

  Through 1921, Ripley began cranking out a steadier stream of Believe It or Not cartoons, averaging roughly two a month. Though they still largely contained sports feats, he’d begun featuring more non-sports vignettes, such as the man who ate sixty eggs a day for a week and a man named Martin Laurello who had a “revolving head.” He scavenged gossip rags and stuffed his notebooks full of news clippings about hard-to-believe facts and feats, the stranger the better.

  As his marriage dissolved and his personal life got messier, his cartoons seemed to grow incrementally weirder. He’d slip in a sketch of a man who never shaved, a man who ate glass and nails, a man who crossed the English Channel on a mattress, a man who stood on one leg for twelve hours, and a 147-year-old man who could lift two hundred pounds. He also presented to readers a billiards player with no hands who sank 799 straight balls, and another who sank 46 straight with his nose.

  Signs of Ripley’s marital strife sometimes slipped into print. In a mid-1921 essay titled “The Female of the Species,” he derided America’s female athletes as inferior to their European counterparts. “What is the matter with the American girl?” he asked in print, stating that European women excelled in “stage, opera, science, and letters…[and] how about beauty?” He felt American women suffered from “strained nerves” and too many soda-fountain lunches. In an unpublished article advocating physical fitness for women, he fretted that every beautiful woman inevitably “begins to fade.”

  After that she begins her desperate fight with cosmetics to save the remnants of her girlishness; she develops a warped “office-girl” figure, spongy muscles, listless eyes … Then there’s nothing left except bitter, lonely spinsterhood.

  Despite Ripley’s outbreaks of chauvinism, and his fights with and absences from Beatrice, she still loved him. She gave him a sultry photograph of herself that summer of 1921, signed “Your lover girl.” But against so much competition—from nightclubs to baseball games, boxing matches to handball courts—she eventually realized there was nothing to salvage. In December of 1921 she filed papers requesting a formal separation, charging her husband with “cruel treatment,” “excessive indulgence in intoxicants,” and a “fondness for other young women.” A judge granted the separation and awarded Beatrice a monthly alimony of $125, plus $750 in legal fees. Her attorney told the press he’d “made several appeals to Mr. Ripley to do the right thing by his wife,” but Ripley’s failure to do so had forced Beatrice to bring her complaints to the judge.

  Ripley declined to publicly defend himself, allowing the accusations of womanizing, alcoholism, and physical abuse to stand.

  Finally, the marriage went down in flames one night after Beatrice followed him to the Great Northern Hotel and up to Room 304.

  He and another woman had shared a quiet dinner and a few drinks, then returned to his room for a nightcap. One thing led to another. Clothes were removed.

  The romantic mood was suddenly interrupted by urgent knocking at the door, and then shouting, then pounding. Somehow his spouse had found him. Ripley emerged, flustered and wearing only a bathrobe, to find Beatrice accompanied by two other men (an elevator operator and a shoe salesman, he’d later learn—in court). He tried to block them from seeing his companion, but Beatrice could tell the other woman was “scantily attired.”

  When the shouting died down, Beatrice announced that she was finally, completely through with him. She’d let a judge decide the details.

  Exactly one year after his noisy split from Beatrice, Ripley landed the assignment and the adventure of a lifetime.

  “All my life I have waited for this day—the day when dreams come true,” Ripley told readers in his first dispatch from afield, on December 1, 1922. “To go ’round the world is a youthful dream. Now is the time, before it is too late … from the New York Athletic Club and back. Impossible to go further than that.”

  A decade after escaping San Francisco and landing a fruitful partnership with the Globe, Ripley ceased to be a mere sports cartoonist as he embarked on a journey that would change everything. Over the next four months, he would travel by train, steamship, army transport, rickshaw, sedan chair, elephant, horse, camel, and on foot. The journey would test his skills as an aspiring adventurer and offer readers a rare firsthand look into the non-Western world. It would provide rich new material for subsequent Believe It or Not cartoons, leading Ripley in a new artistic direction—more worldly, more weird.

  The unexpected around-the-world expedition would also introduce him to the country whose people and culture would transfix him for the rest of his life.

  TRANSGLOBAL TRAVEL REMAINED a rarity among the masses, such journeys typically undertaken only by the military, merchants, or true explorers. In recent years, attempts at luxury cruise travel had ended badly: the Titanic in 1912; the Lusitania in 1915.

  BELIEVE IT!

  Among the Titanic victims were NYAC members whose bodies were identified by the leather key tabs imprinted with their membership numbers.

  The RMS Laconia, owned by pioneering British steamship operator Cunard, had been launched in late 1921 to replace the original Laconia (sunk off the Irish coast in 1917 by German U-boat torpedoes). The luxury ocean liner now sought the ambitious distinction of becoming the first passenger ship to circle the earth. Having his name on the passenger list made Ripley feel like some modern-day Magellan or Marco Polo, and Ripley proudly called the Laconia “my houseboat around the world.”

  Unlike previous assignments, confined by stadium walls and sports teams’ schedules, the itinerary would be mostly in Ripley’s hands. Instead of writing about others, as he had during World War I and at the Olympics, Ripley would be his own leading man. He was expected to file a dispatch every day or so, accompanied by a sketch or two, for the next four months. But where he went, whom he met, and the stories he told … that would all be largely up to him.

  The Globe offered “Ripley’s Ramble ’Round the World” series to dozens of newspapers who subscribed to the Associated Newspapers syndicate. The inaugural dispatch was accompanied by a logo of a caricatured Ripley in full stride, wearing a jaunty cap, bow tie, and knickers, a huge sketch pad under one arm, and wielding a pen like a sword in the other hand.

  Ripley first boarded a Lake Shore Limited train bound for Chicago, then west on to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, where he’d meet the Laconia. As the lights of New York faded, and the train window framed only darkness, Ripley lay back on the shelf-bed of his sleeper car, suddenly wondering if he was ready to leave his comfortably urban and urbane lifestyle behind. Now entirely on his own, away from friends and mentors, responsible for describing the world to millions of readers, he felt scared—a “fear that creeps toward your throat,” he’d later call it—as he watched his hometown recede from view.

  THE TRANSCONTINENTAL RAIL journey was his first return to California since his mother’s death seven years earlier.

  His solemnity fizzled up
on reaching Los Angeles, where he toured Hollywood studios, watched Charlie Chaplin act in a few scenes, and joined up with three traveling companions who would make cameo appearances throughout the Ramble: Jack Davidson, an actor who had appeared in fifty films (including The Winning of Beatrice and The Wild Girl); May Allison, Davidson’s costar in The Winning of Beatrice, also the star of nearly fifty films; and Allison’s new husband, Robert Ellis, a prolific actor, screenwriter, and director, whose most recent film was A Divorce of Convenience. Ripley’s otherwise extensive journal keeping offered no commentary on the eerie similarity between his Hollywood friends’ films and his own life—Beatrice, wild girl, divorce…

  The foursome traveled to San Francisco and Ripley played tour guide, showing his companions a few favorite haunts—the Barbary Coast, the Cliff House, Mission Delores, and the Hotel Fairmont, where he’d witnessed the smoldering city days after the earthquake—as well as his humble old basement apartment. He introduced them to Coffee Dan’s, an underground speakeasy accessed through a hidden wall leading to a playground slide that deposited guests onto the barroom floor. Inside, they ordered “ham and eggs”—code for liquor. Ripley told Jack Davidson the place had the spirit of San Francisco “before the fire.”

  The ship left San Francisco the next morning, steaming through the burly shoulders surrounding Golden Gate Bay. Slightly hungover, Ripley grew woozy and melancholy watching San Francisco shrink in his wake. He had eagerly left for the East Coast a decade earlier, but still felt pangs of homesickness for Northern California.

  “Once again I leave home,” he wrote in an essay, revealing to Globe readers that his Ramble might become more than a mere travelogue.

  Why any one place should forever hold enchantment for the reason you are born there is a mystery. But like cats and birds we are pussy-footed and pigeon-toed and our footsteps lead toward home.… The Eskimo longs for his northern bleakness and his ice hut, the cowboy dreams of the wide open towns and prairies of the west, the old salt is looking out to sea … and down in the hold of many ships are dead Chinamen’s bones going home to China.

  In his sketch of the Laconia disappearing over the horizon, smoke from the stack spelled “Goodbye.”

  DURING HIS FIRST DAYS aboard the Laconia, Ripley met the other pioneering travelers who would visit remote parts of the world while also sipping martinis in the ship’s saloons, perfectly legal since the Laconia sailed under the British flag. Among the passengers were ten honeymooning couples, five ministers, thirty widows, twelve millionaires, and, as Ripley told readers, “one of the best known prohibition enforcement officers New York ever had.”

  Ripley was soon taunting his Prohibition-restricted readers: “You folks at home have doubtless forgotten the saloon,” he said. “Let me tell you …” The ship’s most popular bar, unobtrusively called A Aft, was filled with “American law-breakers.” A beer cost fifteen cents, a whiskey twenty cents, and a bottle of champagne $6. A sign on the wall gave helpful advice to wine buyers: WILL PASSENGERS KINDLY GIVE THEIR ORDERS FOR WINES IN ADVANCE, SO THAT THEY MAY INSURE THEM BEING SERVED AT THE PROPER TEMPERATURE.

  Two weeks after leaving New York, Ripley spotted the shimmering Hawaiian archipelago. Onshore at Hilo, he was surrounded by slender, dark-skinned native girls who welcomed Ripley with effusive alohas and piled garlands around his neck. He was instantly smitten, calling the Big Island “an emerald jewel set in the sea.”

  Though the Prohibition officer searched passengers disembarking at Hilo, to prevent anyone from bringing alcohol ashore, Ripley had developed a knack for sniffing out liquor wherever he went. He and his friends found a local resident who offered some Hawaiian moonshine, okolehao, distilled from pineapple and the root of the Ti plant. Ripley bragged in print about the smile that okolehao put on his face. Paraphrasing Shakespeare and the Bible, he wrote: “Oh Mule! Where is thy sting?”

  At the Moana Hotel on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Ripley reunited with Duke Kahanamoku, a local swimming and surfing legend whom he had met at the 1920 Antwerp Olympics. Kahanamoku introduced Ripley to “surf riding,” which Ripley attempted to describe to readers: “These bronze-skinned natives paddle on a board … to a distance upward of a mile, where they catch a likable wave and then mount to their feet and stand upright.”

  Ripley tried surf-riding in an outrigger canoe and later enjoyed a tribal hula dance at midnight. He considered the Hawaiian Islands “a land of romance and happiness,” although he worried that the Hawaiian race—“the most lovable and hospitable race on earth”—was being eradicated by disease and the influence of Japan, China, and America. He thought Honolulu was too full of US soldiers and sailors to be a novelty. Then again, he felt comforted by the strong military presence. “And that means that the outpost—the frontier, if you will, of America—is safe from foreign aggression,” he wrote, nineteen years to the day before the Pearl Harbor attacks.

  Reluctantly, he left Hawaii, worried that he’d never experience “such genuine, whole-hearted hospitality again.” Then again, having earned a blistering red sunburn, he looked forward to the cold, legal beer aboard the ship.

  FOUR DAYS LATER, after roiling through a twelve-hour storm, Ripley spent a sullen Christmas at sea, thinking of Christmases gone by. His morose holiday worsened as the ship struck the edge of a violent typhoon, and Ripley hunkered in the A Aft saloon beside a snarling man from New Jersey named Sam. Ripley’s drinking partner complained miserably about the weather, regretting his decision to spend a month at sea just to see “a lotta Chinks.”

  When the Laconia finally passed through the howling winds of the typhoon, the clouds broke and Ripley was able to leave the bar, walk onto the deck, and witness a spectacularly setting sun. It looked like a giant blood-red orange melting behind Japan’s white-tipped Mount Fuji, the perfect welcome to Asia.

  A month after leaving New York, Ripley began to find his travel-writer voice in Japan. Instead of focusing on Prohibition and saloons, he started to weave history lessons with cultural analyses, travelogue and random cogitations, weird facts and personal opinion, the type of wide-ranging commentary that would decades later be called blogging. He sometimes exposed his biases, sharing hints of racism and stereotyping that had previously made cringe-inducing appearances in his cartoons.

  “The Japs and the Jews are the only civilized peoples with a fundamental religion of their own,” he wrote in a dispatch on Shintoism. He called the Japanese religion a “strange faith,” but was impressed that it preached “love of nature, patriotism, love of family, and filial reverence.” He was equally impressed by the Japanese emphasis on ceremony, though he found it frustrating that it took so long to get a cup of tea. He toured temples and shrines, Tokyo’s red-light district (“bizarre and brilliant”), and spent New Year’s Eve amid the “kaleidoscopic throng” of the Ginza (“the busiest, noisiest, unhandsomest, and most flamboyant of all streets”).

  He found Japan to be “a hive of industry” where “everybody seems to be pushing or pulling something.” As with his remarks about America’s military presence in Hawaii, he presciently assessed Japan’s military affairs, troubled by the ubiquity of naval vessels and the rampant construction of “massive and murderous” battleships.

  Despite his passionate curiosity about the world, Ripley could be a lazy traveler, and sometimes a boor. Just as he seemed to relish opportunities to divulge his chauvinism (and possible alcoholism) in print, he rarely hesitated to put his provincialism on full display. He considered it too much work to learn even a few phrases of his host country’s language, unabashedly speaking English at all times. As he’d done in Europe years earlier, when someone didn’t understand him, he spoke louder.

  “Rickshaw man!” he yelled at a driver in Kobe. “Do you speak English?”

  “Darn near,” the man replied.

  In one dispatch he described the Japanese language as so complicated “the Japs can’t learn it themselves.” It was sometimes hard to tell whether his oafishness was tongue-in-ch
eek, but he insisted that he could travel anywhere speaking English alone: “Simply speak up and let the other fellow do the worrying.”

  He was equally unflinching with readers when he confessed, after reboarding the Laconia for the next leg of the journey, that he was surprised that he liked Japan so much. “I never thought I would, being born and raised in California and holding the western idea of the Jap,” he said.

  Folks back in New York must have gagged at a few comments from their otherwise civilized and sophisticated friend, remarks that would proliferate as the trip wore on. Ripley seemed to be trying out different traveler personas, waffling somewhere between small-town yokel and streetwise foreign correspondent.

  AFTER A BRIEF STOP in Manchuria, the ship reached the ancient Chinese city of Tsingtao, and Ripley’s first thought upon landing in the country he’d long dreamed of was that “human life is the cheapest thing in Asia.” China was both beautiful and horrible, he quickly learned, an uneasy dichotomy that he’d confront in many future travels. He first witnessed the horrible. Along the wharves, he and the other tourists were beset by the local poor—clots of alms-seekers tugging at his sleeves and cuffs.

  “I wonder what China is going to look like if this collection of deformities, rags, and leprosy is a sample,” he wondered aloud.

  After Tsingtao came Shanghai, which astonished him as “one of the most interesting and cosmopolitan places in the world.” He and his actor friends dined on bird’s nest soup and shark’s fin. While touring the old city by rickshaw, he was again swarmed by beggars as he rolled through foul-smelling alleys “thronged with a noisy mass of humanity, the existence of such that I never would have believed.” He saw crawling lepers with twisted limbs and at one point was chased down a cobbled alley by a man dragging another man strapped to a board, his hands and feet eaten away by leprosy.