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

by Neal Thompson

  Certain sights and smells would linger forever, from the Chinese man with deformed hands like lobster claws to the smoke rising off burning corpses beside the Ganges to the man with two faces and one eye: “the most horrible living thing I have ever seen.” It was now unavoidable that this uneasy fascination with the “demented, delusioned, diseased, and devout” of the world would alter the tone of his cartoon.

  He had already come to realize that sports feats alone couldn’t sustain his Believe It or Not series. After his Ramble, he grew even less interested in the strange things people did in the name of sport, and more fascinated by the inexplicable things people did for their gods. His cartoons began featuring oddities of a more freakish nature: the “Hanging Hindu,” whom Ripley had seen dangling from a tree, a hook dug into his back; the “Hindu Sky-Facer,” whom Ripley had watched stare directly at the sun with milky and withered eyes; the “Ever-Standing Man,” who had been on his feet for twenty years, balanced on a crude wooden rack.

  Gruesome became a new staple of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Friends and colleagues thought he seemed refreshed by his big adventure, liberated to finally be able to indulge his long-gestating desire to draw and write about something other than sports. From admirers who appreciated the eccentric new tenor of his work, requests trickled in…Would Mr. Ripley speak to our organization? Write a story for our magazine? Donate a drawing to our charitable group? Cash to our orphans’ home?

  Back at the Globe, he started hunting for a translator to help him mine even more believe-it-or-nots from the stacks of foreign books and magazines he’d collected from around the world. But just as he was getting back to work, he found his career jeopardized by a new employer, ominously known as “The Grocer.”

  FRANK A. MUNSEY owned three New York papers: the Sun, the Evening Telegram, and the Herald. In mid-1923, for $2 million, he added Ripley’s Globe to his collection, boosting his overall circulation and putting him in league with William Randolph Hearst as one of the city’s top newspapermen.

  As a pioneer of inexpensive printing on untrimmed pulp paper, Munsey had helped create dime novels and “pulp” magazines in the early 1900s. Unlike Hearst, who spent money freely and recklessly to perfect his papers and expand his empire, Munsey was a penny-pinching horse trader with a reputation for selling, merging, or dismantling his possessions, earning such nicknames as “The Great Consolidator” and, because he also owned grocery stores, “The Grocer.”

  Since 1891, Munsey had purchased sixteen papers, sold six, consolidated or closed seven, and by 1923 owned just the three. As Munsey’s biographer put it, he was like an engineer mono-maniacally focused on building a huge dam, but indifferent to the homesteads that would be flooded—“No man in the newspaper field was more hated than Munsey.”

  As a cartoonist, Ripley had good reason to fear Munsey’s purchase of the Globe. Back in 1920, when Munsey bought the revered New York Herald, he instructed the art director to fire cartoonist J. Norman Lynd, adding, “He’ll know what it’s for.” It turned out that four years earlier, Lynd had drawn a caricature of Munsey as a gravedigger, knee-deep in a Daily News grave, the headstones of other dead newspapers behind him. Munsey never forgot a slight. A week after buying the Herald he shut it down, merging it with the Sun and putting hundreds out of work. On the Herald’s last night, employees met in the newsroom for drinks and toasts as a bugler played “Taps.” One competitor said Munsey had “the talent of a meat-packer, the morals of a money changer, and the manner of an undertaker.”

  For Ripley, the Globe’s new ownership and uncertain future spoiled an otherwise happy return from abroad. Despite the success of his Ramble and the steady popularity of his cartoons, Ripley’s future was suddenly as uncertain as it had been in a decade.

  At such a tenuous time, it didn’t help to get bad publicity.

  RIPLEY’S GROWING RENOWN among New York journalists meant his personal life was subject to scrutiny. And the failing marriage of a world-traveling cartoonist and a high-kicking Follies Girl gave society writers a sordid story line. Ripley’s as-yet-unresolved split with Beatrice became fair game for the Globe’s gossip-hungry competitors, the type of story that up-and-coming columnist Walter Winchell liked to call “hot news.” Various headlines began to appear through mid-1923:

  FORMER ‘FOLLIES’ GIRL IN COURT AGAIN

  EX–STAGE BEAUTY SUES CARTOONIST

  CARTOONIST’S WIFE SUES FOR DIVORCE

  Such stories were usually accompanied by photographs of Beatrice in a long gown, draped in furs, wearing a fashionable hat, and looking entirely pissed-off.

  In her latest complaint, Beatrice wanted a judge to make their two-year-old separation permanent. She wanted a divorce. When her lawyer tipped off the press, writers responded with lurid stories about the couple’s troubles, citing “new evidence” submitted by her lawyer, including a detailed account of the night in late 1922 when Beatrice found Ripley and his “scantily attired” friend at the Great Northern Hotel.

  When the New York Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, Beatrice, now living on Madison Avenue, appeared at the hearing in “a costly fur-trimmed, hand-embroidered gown,” as one columnist described it. The newspapers called Ripley her “stalwart, handsome husband.” But the judge had harsher words, claiming that Ripley’s poor husbanding skills and extramarital affairs were sufficient evidence to grant Beatrice the divorce.

  Ripley’s refusal to publicly deny Beatrice’s accusations left an impression of guilt. At times, all he would say was that marriage had been a “rough voyage.” Other times, he’d pretend the marriage never happened at all. In rare introspective moments, he would acknowledge that he was simply “too temperamental” to be a good husband. Losing his father at age fifteen had denied him a grown-up’s perspective on love and marriage. And after leaving Santa Rosa, he had mostly lived and worked among newsmen and athletes who harbored manly views on women and wedlock.

  His own chauvinistic views inevitably continued to appear in print. Women “are fast causing modern man to degenerate into a mechanical toy for their sole amusement,” he declared in one article. Elsewhere he wrote: “The husband of today is little more than a slave with the divine gift of writing checks.” America would be happier, he believed, “if husbands did not quarrel with their wives. And men were masters in their own houses.”

  RIPLEY HAD BEEN THRIFTY in his New York lifestyle, living for a dozen years in modest quarters and owning few possessions. Though his Globe salary had quadrupled to $100 a week, his savings began dwindling after the divorce.

  In addition to $200 monthly payouts to Beatrice, plus legal fees, he had continued sending money to California. His brother, Doug, after living for years with his surrogate Santa Rosa family, had moved in with his older sister Ethel and her husband in Sacramento. Doug was a difficult young man, disinterested in school or work, and he’d sometimes disappear into the woods for days at a time. He declined his older brother’s invitation to come live with him in New York, and Ripley felt bad that he couldn’t do more for his family.

  In a letter sent after the divorce became final, he complained to Ethel about the heavy price of his failed marriage. “I received my divorce on Friday 13—not so unlucky after all,” he wrote. “It cost me a great deal more money than I had and leaves me in debt up to my neck. But I think the relief from worry will permit me to earn a little more.” He promised to send Ethel more money “as soon as I get some—I am going to work hard.”

  He signed the letter “Lovingly, Roy,” and then added, in reference to both his Ramble and his recent woes: “The world is round, but a little bumpy.”

  Unfortunately, Frank Munsey soon made good on his reputation as a newspaper killer.

  IN ANNOUNCING HIS PLANS to merge the Globe with the New York Sun, to create a “bigger and better newspaper,” Munsey insisted he was doing New Yorkers a favor by pruning the “oversupply of evening newspapers.” Munsey was unsentimental about such consolidations, claiming “there is no great
er menace to society than newspapers that are struggling to keep alive.”

  Ripley’s last cartoon appeared on May 31, 1923. Three days later, the Globe published its final issue, ending its reign as the nation’s oldest paper. Among the five hundred employees to lose their jobs were “good men and women, for the Globe’s staff had been notable,” wrote George Britt in a 1935 biography of Munsey.

  Ripley landed on his feet, finding a spot at the Evening Telegram, which Munsey had purchased in 1920. But he felt unsettled by the recent tumult. He’d recently enjoyed the peak experience of his life on the Ramble, then became roiled in a painfully public divorce. That was followed by the premature end to his entrenched position at the Globe and a forced separation from longtime editors and colleagues. All of it threatened his shaky finances and his ability to support Doug.

  So when he started at the Evening Telegram, he decided he needed a little help. At first, all he really wanted was someone to help him decipher the foreign-language publications he’d gathered during his Ramble, someone who could help breathe new life into Believe It or Not.

  What he found was more than a mere translator. He found a business partner and ally, a man who similarly appreciated the eccentricities of the world.

  NORBERT PEARLROTH WAS BORN in Tarnow, in the ancient Austrian section of Galicia. He was tall, handsome, and always the smartest in his class, possessing a near photographic memory of anything he read. In his youth, Pearlroth had devoured books of all types, and found at an early age that other languages came easily.

  Before the war, he had attended the university in Krakow, where he breezed through his studies with plenty of time to earn extra money doing homework for classmates. One day he saw a newspaper ad for a series of encyclopedias printed in German called the Library of Entertainment and Knowledge and decided to buy it with his homework earnings. World War I upended his plans to become a lawyer, as Tarnow remained a dangerous battlefront throughout the war. (It became part of southern Poland after World War I.) So Pearlroth fled to America and by 1923 was married, living in the Bronx, and commuting into Manhattan to work at a bank.

  Through a mutual friend, Pearlroth learned that a newspaper cartoonist was seeking a linguist and translator. Pearlroth was fluent in Italian, French, Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew, and more. He sometimes studied three languages at a time, and could quickly figure out the basics of any language.

  “Tell me something odd,” Ripley said to Pearlroth when the two first met, sometime in late 1923. Ripley had gotten into the habit of asking new acquaintances, What’s the strangest thing you know? He’d figured: you never knew who might have a bizarro story that could be worked into a Believe It or Not cartoon. In recent years, his schoolboy notebooks had grown fatter with handwritten ideas added among the clipped-out articles, partly the result of asking questions of strangers.

  Pearlroth served up a factoid that day about a California church built from the wood of a single redwood tree. At first, Ripley seemed confused. Is this guy making fun of me? Pearlroth later said he had no idea the First Baptist Church of Santa Rosa—the so-called Church Built of One Tree—was Ripley’s parents’ house of worship. When Pearlroth explained that he’d learned of the church from his Library of Entertainment and Knowledge encyclopedias, Ripley grew excited.

  “I’m from Santa Rosa,” he declared. “And I know that church.”

  On the spot, Ripley offered Pearlroth a part-time job. “I’ll only need you for an hour a week,” he said, suggesting payment of $25 a week.

  To Pearlroth, the deal sounded too good to be true. Twenty-five bucks an hour? But working for Robert LeRoy Ripley, Pearlroth soon learned, would be more than an hour-a-week commitment.

  Ripley must have known that he’d found a unique and potentially valuable assistant. The two men were kindred spirits in some ways, opposites in others. Ripley was the shy kid who’d found success based on his alleged knowledge of the world. Pearlroth was the handsome supergenius who’d found comfort in a private, solitary pursuit of scholarship. Ripley was athletic and social, a drinker and womanizer. Pearlroth was bookish, a faithful husband, and a devout Jew. Both shared a passion for oddball scraps of information, and Pearlroth was attracted to Ripley’s enthusiastic, if naïve, quest for the mysterious arcana of humanity.

  “Our daily life is so cut and dried that we get relief from fairy tales,” Pearlroth said years later, in a rare interview about what drew him to Ripley in 1923. “Except his fairy tales are true, and this excites people. They like to learn that nature makes exceptions. These are fairy tales for grown-ups.”

  In time, Pearlroth would quit his bank job and commit himself to the most eager and enigmatic boss he could have imagined. Pearlroth would soon be exploiting, on a daily basis, his beloved Library of Entertainment and Knowledge collection, from which he would learn that birds had no sense of taste or smell, that a Brazilian butterfly had the fragrance and color of chocolate, that the dental nerve of an elephant weighed twelve pounds. Armed with such off-kilter curiosities, Pearlroth would help Ripley take Believe It or Not to unexpected new heights, and a rare and symbiotic relationship would bloom.

  But not without some setbacks.

  THOUGH RIPLEY HAD BEEN WELCOMED at the Evening Telegram in mid-1923, he soon became a twice-burned victim of Frank “The Grocer” Munsey’s obsession with consolidation. Munsey merged the Evening Telegram with the Evening Mail, which he purchased in early 1924. Again, scores of employees lost their jobs.

  Ripley was replaced by a sports cartoonist named Ed Hughes, whose sketches and columns seemed near replicas of his own, including assorted Believe It or Not–style bests and mosts in sporting achievements. Even Hughes’s signature looked like Ripley’s.

  Ripley wasn’t quite jobless, since Associated Newspapers agreed to keep him on its art staff. Still, for the first time he would not be affiliated with a local newspaper. Instead, his cartoons would be produced solely—and infrequently—by Associated Newspapers, appearing nationally, but not in New York.

  Until now, he had worried little about imitators or competitors. But without a home at the Globe, his Believe It or Not concept began losing momentum, allowing Hughes and others to offer similar hard-to-believe-themed cartoons. Believe It or Not slowed to a trickle through 1924, the start of an awkward new career phase. During this period of semi-employment, weeks could go by with Ripley not being in print at all. He tried to stay busy writing and drawing on a freelance basis for magazines, including the NYAC’s in-house newsletter. He pitched a book about his Ramble around the world, but couldn’t find a publisher. Putting his love of handball into print, he authored Spalding’s Official Handball Guide, which was published in late 1923. A year later he edited and illustrated The Everlast Boxing Record, a book of essays by well-known sportswriters.

  Ripley sent copies of the handball and boxing books to his brother, but in an exchange of letters with his sister he learned that Ethel was struggling to help Doug finish high school. “Keep him at it and he will thank you some day,” he wrote. He and Ethel then agreed by mail that, due to his financial woes and her troubles with Doug, they should sell the family house on Orchard Street. Ripley told his sister the house “seems to be a source of trouble and expense.”

  BY LATE 1924, Ripley was looking back gloomily on two volatile years. The end of his marriage, Doug’s truancy, and the sale of the Santa Rosa house had all combined with the lingering effects of the death of the Globe and his premature departure from the Telegram. Signs of melancholy crept into his work. When an earthquake leveled parts of Japan—including places he had visited—Ripley drew a stunning visual commentary, an illustration of a Japanese man lying amid the ruins as an angel hovers above. “Tokio and Yokohama will rise again,” Ripley wrote in the caption. “San Francisco rose again—greater than ever … spirit never dies!” In that year’s Christmas cartoon, he sketched two raggedy orphans huddled beside a woodstove, from which hang two socks. The caption: “Empty Stocking.”

  La
ter he would use words like “indolent,” “disillusioned,” and “easily annoyed” to describe the simmering depression that vexed him through the mid-1920s. He felt his characteristic optimism replaced by despondency. He had worked hard during more than ten years in New York and had proven himself to be more than just a sports cartoonist. He was an athlete, an author, a lecturer, a world traveler, and, as he liked to consider himself, a circumnavigator. He had even been invited to join the prestigious Circumnavigators Club, whose membership included arctic explorers Richard Byrd and Robert Peary.

  But now he was divorced and an orphan, an underemployed cartoonist and not really a New York newsman. Though he’d found an able assistant in Pearlroth, he felt unmoored and alone. He’d lost his wife and, in the bloodbath of Frank Munsey layoffs, had lost his editor and mentor, Walter St. Denis.

  In the past, others had come to Ripley’s rescue at crucial moments, patrons who helped him survive school (Miss O’Meara), escape Santa Rosa (Carol Ennis), and reach New York (Peter Kyne). Now, facing the most difficult period of his adult life, it was up to him to find a reserve of resilience and mettle for a comeback, to regroup and then regain his edge as America’s purveyor of oddities. A firm believer in the restorative effects of a road trip, he began planning another big adventure.

  A YEAR EARLIER, not long after his divorce was finalized, one of Ripley’s few Evening Telegram cartoons had featured his brother/alter-ego, Demon Dug, hiding behind a tree, spying on a girl who is walking arm in arm with another boy. The cartoon was titled “A Bachelor’s Decree.”

  From his hiding spot behind the tree, Dug mutters, “I’m off wimmen for LIFE!”