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

by Neal Thompson

  “It is not pleasant to be chased by a thing like that,” Ripley reported, heedless of his insensitivity. “Surely there is no lower form of life to be found than in this decayed old poverty-stricken spot.”

  Still, even in his disgust Ripley found his curiosity aroused by China and its people. Unlike his fellow first-class passengers, who shopped for trinkets and postcards, he frequently ventured off the itinerary in search of a more authentic experience, discovering in himself an unexpected facility with improvised exploration. In Hong Kong, he left the others for an impulse drive around Repulse Bay. On Formosa, he insisted on making a side train trip to see the headhunters he’d read about, though he was disappointed to find the men corralled behind barbed wire, looking “more like lounge lizards than blood-thirsty cannibals … I could lick them all myself.”

  At Formosa, the Laconia had anchored offshore and passengers were delivered from the pier to the ship by small shuttle boats. When a sudden storm kicked up, a dozen tourists were thrown overboard from the shuttle and had to be rescued by a Japanese warship. Laughing at their cuts and bruises, Ripley considered the rescue a thrilling highlight. Anytime the trip became ridiculous or dangerous, Ripley grew giddier, as if it were all a game.

  In fact, he seemed surprisingly fearless at times, less afraid of gun-toting soldiers than alms-seeking beggars. When he learned about military skirmishes in Canton (as Guangzhou was then called), he asked the US consul for permission to visit. His request was denied, so he and Bob Ellis negotiated with local military leaders for passage on a midnight transport boat out of Hong Kong. Like a Boy Scout on his first campout, Ripley gushed with excitement: “They say it is very dangerous and we are strongly advised not to go,” he said. “But I have always wanted to be a war correspondent like Herb Corey.”

  Squeezing through flotillas of houseboats, Ripley’s boat arrived in Canton at dawn. He and Ellis then walked nervously among the soldiers of Sun Yat-Sen’s revolutionary army, part of the Kuomintang, which battled Chinese warlords and regional armies in an effort to unite the fractured Chinese Republic. The soldiers must have been surprised and/or amused to see Ripley in town, wearing a herringbone suit, knicker pants, a bow tie, and boyish cap, his sketch pad always in hand. Among the uniformed soldiers and poorly clothed locals, he stood out like a clown at a funeral.

  One soldier finally snatched Ripley’s sketch pad and accused him of being a spy. “I no like strange soldiers,” the man yelled before Ripley’s guide came to the rescue. He and Ellis then climbed into sedan chairs, each borne on the shoulders of three men who plunged into the labyrinthine streets of the ancient city, into the “evil-looking alleys” and the “mystic, foul-smelling center” of what Ripley breathlessly discovered to be the real China.

  After spending the night at the deserted Victoria Hotel, he and Ellis returned to Hong Kong the next day, and Ripley felt that in Canton he had experienced a more genuine taste of China than he would in a year in Hong Kong or Shanghai. Those cities, he scoffed, had been built mainly by Europeans.

  As the Laconia steamed toward its next stop, Ripley was sorry to leave China, which had repulsed, appalled, and dazzled him. He worried that it would now be impossible for anyplace else to top “the vast, old decaying land of the Celestial.”

  COASTING INTO MANILA, he thought about Magellan entering the same port four hundred years earlier. The bay, crammed with warships flapping with American flags, made Ripley swell with patriotism and pride. “Our Uncle Sam has done well with his most pretentious colonization effort,” he wrote.

  Halfway around the world at this point, he had come to fancy himself a far more adventurous traveler than his high-class compatriots, whom he mocked for their petty complaints about heat and food. He scorned those wearing Gallagher and Sheans—“the concrete helmet which distinguishes all tourists of tropical climes.”

  BELIEVE IT!

  Ed Gallagher and Al Shean were a popular vaudeville act, earning $1,500 a week at the 1922 Ziegfeld Follies. (Shean was uncle of the Marx Brothers; Gallagher married a Follies Girl.) In their most famous skit, Gallagher parodied an American tourist, wearing a white suit and pith helmet.

  “Why a human being will wear such a human lid passeth all understanding,” claimed Ripley, who would one day adopt the exact same traveling costume.

  Again, he seemed embarrassed by the timidity of the parochial American traveler, even as he was clearly afflicted by the same backwater lack of international sophistication. One moment he could be the keen and curious observer, the next he’d be the insensitive doofus. He had been tickled by the “pidgin English” many Chinese used to converse with tourists, but also found Chinese merchants too shrewd and aggressive—“a Jap or a Jew hasn’t a chance with him,” he wrote.

  And yet, emboldened by his adventures in China, he was now eager to leave the Philippines and reach India. Along the way he visited Java, Singapore, and Rangoon, but India beckoned loudly. “Can India offer more wonders than Japan or China, especially China?” he wrote one night in his journal. “It seems impossible …”

  In the meantime, he was finding his rhythm as a correspondent—and having a blast. In playful dispatches home he teased his audience, a mischievous tool he’d wield in future cartoons. After visiting a beer garden in Java he declared, “I went to bed and slept with a Dutch wife.” The next day he explained that a Dutch wife was an oblong pillow, and that the previous night was “not as romantic as it sounds.” He kept razzing those suffering under Prohibition with stories of exotic drinks and taverns. When it got cold, he told readers, he “drank gin to keep warm.” When it was hot, he drank beer. He discovered “Chota Peg” (whiskey and soda), and raved about noontime Gin Slings at John Little’s Department Store in Singapore, the recipe for which he shared with readers: “Let me whisper …”

  Upon reaching India, however, his tone shifted, from playful to shocked and somber, and Ripley’s question about whether anything could top China was quickly, horrifically answered.

  THROUGHOUT THE RAMBLE, he frequently declared, aloud and in print, often with unambiguous authority, that something he had witnessed was the best or worst or most or least in the world, which would become his pet three-word tic. Repulse Bay was “the most beautiful in the world”; the Javanese were “the cleanest people in the world”; Singapore “the most cosmopolitan city in the world”; the Hooghli River in India “the most dangerous in the world.” Buddhists were “the happiest people on earth”; and a Chinaman was the “most virtuous and most honest man in the world,” but also “the dirtiest.”

  He was blatant about these statements, and seemed to care little about redundancy or contradiction (or insult). If he felt it at the time, that was truth enough. But in the city of Benares—“the most remarkable in the world”—he discovered a place in no need of hyperbole.

  “I have traveled 20,000 miles and have seen no place which so baffles description as this,” he reported. “Here in India cows are sacred, little girls are married at the age of three, the dead are fed to vultures, holy men sleep on beds of nails, and a man may marry as many wives as he wants. What a motley mixture of mystery!”

  India introduced Ripley to the devout Hindu ascetics and beggars known as fakirs. (He sometimes called them fanatics or “wretches.”) These men performed inhumane, self-flagellating acts to prove their sanctity. One man had been sitting on a bed of nails for twelve years, while others kept their arms aloft all day—Ripley called them “up-arm men.” Some never clipped their cuticles (“nail men”) and others hung upside down from limbs like monkeys (“tree men”).

  The holy city of Benares seemed to be an epicenter for the extremes of Hindu spirituality, home to what Ripley called “the weirdest collection of humanity on the face of the earth—demented, delusioned, diseased, and devout.” One of the few white faces, he roamed streets clotted with goats and sacred cows, gawking at the blood and bones scattered about, at the “insane worshippers” and wild-eyed beggars. Walking along the banks of the Ganges
River, he watched in amazed horror as a woman, with no sign of emotion, set afire the body of her recently dead husband, using a long pole to make the fire burn faster as vultures circled overhead.

  “Not a pleasant site [sic],” he wrote that night by kerosene lamp, concluding: “You are never so dead as when you die in India.”

  Similar “burning ghat” ceremonies were held all along the riverbanks, and Ripley returned three days in a row to witness numerous cremations. Meanwhile, orthodox Hindus bathed in—and drank—the same murky water in which human ashes were being scattered, in which dead bodies floated, and into which sewage seeped. Ripley worried whether leprosy was contagious, but seemed unable to turn away from the corpses and deformed beggars. In home-movie footage Ripley gapes as a man pierces his own tongue with a bicycle spoke; he gives coins to a gnarled beggar who walks on all fours; he walks among the half-clothed poor, skittish but agog.

  “Nowhere on earth can you see such a weird cross-cut of human life,” Ripley wrote. “All this pagan panorama.”

  In contrast to the horrible, Ripley also witnessed the sensational. At the Taj Mahal (“the most beautiful building in the world”), he was relieved to enjoy such dazzle after the squalor of Benares. In Jaipur (“a kaleidoscope”), he watched a rainbow-like wedding procession led by an elephant carrying the bridegroom through the streets. But death was never far away. The wedding party marched past a man carrying his dead son wrapped in thin red gauze.

  “Funerals and weddings are continually passing each other,” he wrote back to America. “Such is life.”

  India fascinated, revolted, beguiled, and moved him. His hotels were wretched, his mattresses festered with bedbugs. Still, he disparaged those who “travel for the sole purpose of mailing picture postcards back to envious home folks,” and he continued to explore outside the safe bubble of the tour company’s itinerary.

  In Delhi, he and Jack Davidson bribed their way into the sacred Jama Masjid mosque during midday prayer. When they were spotted, furious elders dragged them out a side gate as worshippers shouted and jeered. In Calcutta, wanting to visit the famous Black Hole dungeon, he hailed a cab and yelled, “Black hole!” The driver nodded enthusiastically, and after an hour of meandering they stopped beside a miserable riverside structure. The driver pointed and said, “Black hole!” Ripley walked through a door and was hit by the sight and smell of partially cremated bodies. The driver had delivered him to a burning ghat, where Ripley watched a young boy attempting to burn his father’s corpse. He left wondering if the boy’s meager supply of wood would get the job done.

  Back aboard the Laconia, Ripley confessed to readers the origins of his now-sated curiosity about India. He had once dated “a little blond sweetheart named Jean” who had lived in India and had given him a book of Kipling’s poetry, in which she’d underlined her favorite verses. Among them:

  If you’ve ’eard the East a-callin’, why you won’t ’eed nothin’ else.

  No! you won’t ’eed nothin’ else, but them spicy garlic smells,

  an’ the sunshine an’ the palm-trees, an’ the tinkly temple-bells.

  Ripley would pen eight dispatches from Benares alone, and a total of 26—out of roughly 120 total—from India, “that enchanting land of squalor and splendor.” As the Laconia cruised west, he summed it all up: “A strange country is India.… It is a common thing to die here.”

  AS HE HEADED toward the Middle East, his thoughts turned to God. Though his mother had been Christian and Ripley believed in a Christian version of God, he was hardly devout and sometimes admitted to having mixed feelings about Christianity. But in recent weeks he had been exposed to Shintoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and witnessed the extreme and painful lengths to which people go to prove their devotion. So now, sailing toward Egypt, he found himself pondering the mysteries of Islam.

  “For the life of me I cannot make up my mind whether the vaunted power of the prophet is a myth or not,” he admitted to readers. At the same time, he couldn’t deny the anxiety that most Westerners felt for “the fanatical Muslim,” with his robes, his daily prayers, his fierce piety. “Always it seems the European statesmen have lived in dread of the power of Islam,” he wrote—once again, with eerie premonition. “The fear of Jehad has been upon the Christian world for ages.”

  At such moments, Ripley displayed a surprisingly well-calibrated cultural tuning fork. Ever the self-absorbed American, dark-skinned non-Westerners confused and unsettled him, eliciting insensitive commentary (similar to his chauvinistic remarks about women). Then again, he was capable of astute and prophetic observations—on Japan’s aggressive military buildup and the threat of the “fanatical Muslim.” Even so, he seemed at the same time able to find compassion and respect for the Other.

  Ripley admired the restraint of Muslims, as well as Buddhists and Hindus. He reluctantly envied their ability to shun liquor and felt something close to shame that “the only people in the world who drink are Christians.” He realized that, except for fellow passengers, he hadn’t seen anyone drunk since Coffee Dan’s in San Francisco.

  In Jerusalem, however, he became downright enraptured at being at “the center of the world … my Holy City!” At St. John’s Hotel, near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, he couldn’t believe he was near the spot where Christ died, the tomb where Jesus was briefly buried, the pathways “trodden by His feet.” But he was also keenly aware of the ancient city’s sizzling religious tensions. Rioting between Arabs and Jews had gone underreported in the American press, he realized. He learned that Palestinian Arabs were intent on preventing Zionists from controlling the Middle East, which he found not surprising since 90 percent of Palestine was Arab.

  Still, he remained wary and distrustful of Islam, comparing the Mohammedan (as many Westerners then called Muslims) to the “Ku Klux Klan” for their head-to-toe white robes. Ultimately, he hoped that the potential dangers of Muslim fanaticism and threats of jihad were empty, that “the rising tide of his faith is only a ripple.”

  Again, the two sides of Ripley the traveler were on display—the ethnocentric American buffoon, and the curious anthropologist. He appreciated the “otherness” of the world but didn’t necessarily want to get too close or, God forbid, shake its hand—an attitude that would change in time.

  One thing he did admire about Islam was a man’s ability to marry numerous women and to divorce them simply by repeating “Thou art divorced” three times.

  He called their method of divorce “a great idea!”

  CROSSING THE MEDITERRANEAN toward Europe, Ripley suddenly longed for home, his enthusiasm sapped. A Monaco casino looked beautiful on the outside, but inside was foul, smelly, and filled with American gamblers. In southern France, he thought Nice was “nice” and Marseilles was “quaint.”

  Though he’d sent eight dispatches from Benares, he would send just eight from Paris and Rome combined. The European stopover that intrigued him the most was Pompeii’s ruins: “the deadest town I was ever in—and I am not excluding Philadelphia.”

  In Paris, he watched the funeral procession of actress Sarah Bernhardt and spent a day with Georges Carpentier, the boxer. He played tennis with Molla Mallory, one of the world’s top-ranked female players, who had lost in the finals at Wimbledon six months earlier. When Mallory beat him 6–0, 6–0, Ripley blamed the previous night’s drinking and smoking. “I didn’t come over to play tennis, anyway,” he griped.

  One day he introduced himself to a stunning Peruvian woman named Carmela and they walked the gaslit streets and shared what he’d later coyly describe as “some wonderful moments.” Ripley promised to visit her in Lima. “I’m a man of my word,” he told Carmela, calling her “my little dark-eyed señorita.”

  Yet, after China and India, Europe seemed like an indulgence. Even while standing before Rodin’s hunched-over The Thinker, he wondered aloud: “If he is thinking of man, he cannot think very much.” Before sailing home, Ripley grew philosophical about his global odyssey, and shared some of his
thoughts with readers: “Paris is all things to all people. You can find good and bad and indifferent here just the same as you can in Santa Rosa, California—my home town.”

  Ripley eagerly boarded the massive RMS Aquitania, bound for New York, then slipped into a glum reverie as the journey of a lifetime drew to an end. During the five-day westward crossing, completing his circle around the globe, he had plenty of time to look back on the strangest months of his life.

  In his cabin one night, Ripley began cataloguing the world’s cities of wonder. Benares ranked first, he decided, followed by Canton (“a vast rabbit warren of slant-eyed humanity”), then Jerusalem, Rome, Cairo, and Paris. Seventh on his top-seven list was New York, whose buildings were soon twiddling on the horizon.

  “There is no city like Benares,” he wrote in his Ramble’s final dispatch. “But there is no place like home.… Columbus was right. The world is round.”

  Gliding into New York harbor at dusk, he felt exhausted and dejected, thinking back on Cairo (“a plundered land”) and Monaco (“Man is a gambling animal!”). He found himself wondering how so many could be starving in India and China—“Oriental millions wallowing in filth, ignorance and starvation”—while America was so full-fed. But he admitted that, whatever miseries he had witnessed, and whatever “waves of pessimism” he felt, he wasn’t ready to reform the world.

  “I can’t reform myself!”

  In his journal, which he did not share with readers, he wrote: “Why should the spirit of mortal be proud—ideals and actualities are far apart.”

  Encircling the earth had rewired Ripley. The poverty and hunger he’d witnessed haunted him.

  “If this world suffers from anything more than another it is malnutrition—malnutrition of brain and belly,” he wrote in one of many stories that continued to appear for months after his Ramble. “What the world needs most is one God and one square meal!”