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

by Neal Thompson

  Satisfied with the publicity, Ripley and Oakie left the Bahamas the next morning for a seaplane ride to the island of San Salvador, to tour the site where Columbus allegedly landed in the New World, believing he’d circled the earth and reached Asia.

  But for Ripley and Oakie, it would be their last adventure together. As they would learn within a few months, Oakie was sick. Incurably so.

  AS 1940 WOUND DOWN, Ripley must have exhaled, having survived a year of tumult. Threatened by rivals such as Hix and enduring the financial distress of his Odditorium failure, he never slowed down, and in fact kept pushing himself further, always striving to reinvigorate his oft-mimicked brand.

  That fall he earned a glowing two-part profile in the prestigious fifteen-year-old New Yorker magazine, whose writer, Geoffrey Hellman, summarized the Ripley legend and touted the cartoonist’s astronomical wealth, his $500,000-plus annual income, the thirty annual lectures at $1,000 a pop. Hellman rehashed vignettes of Ripley’s charmed career, like the time he fell into an orchestra pit during a lecture, couldn’t find the stairs, and had to exit the theater and pay admission to reenter … or the time a group of Nicaraguan kids chased him down Managua’s streets shouting, “Reep-lee! Reep-lee!”

  A late-1940 Advertising Research Foundation survey found that Believe It or Not had become the second most popular newspaper feature. Only the front page was of more interest to readers. Ripley had survived imitators’ threats, lovers’ lawsuits, and risky radio shows.

  Now he had to find a way to keep his career alive through another world war.

  Though frustrated by the global wartime travel limitations, Ripley managed to transfer some of his excess energy into further sprucing up BION Island and hosting his increasingly audacious parties. Among the many impressive skills the once-shy cartoonist had developed was the ability to throw a bash. In New York he emceed star-studded galas for politicians, sports stars, military leaders, and visiting royalty, from Malaysian princesses to Spanish and Portuguese counts. On BION Island, he entertained as if ringmaster of his own circus.

  At scores of dinners, luncheons, barbecues, wedding showers, and even christenings, he spent freely on the best food, drink, and entertainment. For summer cookouts he’d have six chefs grilling meats and seafood while magicians or musicians entertained the crowd, including his lovely new accordion-playing friend, Gypsy Markoff. Sometimes Bugs Baer would entertain guests with ad-lib comedy routines, and Ripley was always ready to initiate a game of softball or badminton or a dance on the outdoor dance floor. Any holiday was reason enough for a party—St. Patrick’s Day, the Fourth of July, Chinese New Year. Ripley loved to hustle around, bossing his staff, introducing guests to one another, giving speeches and toasts.

  Not every party went according to plan. Ripley once invited newsmen to honor a seventy-year-old bride and her twenty-four-year-old husband, whom he’d featured in a radio show. He forgot it was his kitchen staff’s day off, so his housekeeper and gardener had to prepare and serve lunch for thirty. Another time, Ripley invited a Boy Scout troop for a luncheon but neglected to tell the staff, who scrambled to prepare a suitable feast. Then there was the Sunday morning when his brother announced he was marrying his German girlfriend, Crystl, that afternoon at four. Doug preferred a simple affair, but by five his brother had invited guests and launched a fully catered party.

  Ripley often strained his staff’s tolerance by calling a dozen friends over for impromptu get-togethers or making impulsive plans to roast whole pigs or sides of beef all day on a spit. “Rip never cared for being alone,” Doug Storer’s wife, Hazel, once said. One housekeeper later said, “I cannot remember a dinner without at least one or two guests … one or two lady guests.”

  Ripley had installed a wiring system for lights and an outdoor sound system. During daylong affairs he would make announcements over the loudspeakers before the start of a swimming or boating contest, a softball game, or a toast. Some parties brought a hundred guests or more and Ripley stocked the guest bathrooms with extra bathing suits, slippers, robes, towels, and sun lotion. At larger parties, if anyone drank too much—or, in one case, started a fight—Ripley was quick to enforce order. “Throw that bum out!” he bellowed late one night after a scuffle between guests. “Throw all those bums out!”

  By 1940, magazine writers and photographers had learned that Ripley’s strange abode and massive parties made for good copy. Visitors included LIFE magazine (headline: BELIEVE IT OR NOT: THIS IS WHERE ROBERT L. RIPLEY LIVES), Radio Guide (AT HOME WITH RIPLEY), Liberty magazine (WHERE A GLOBETROTTER HANGS HIS HAT), and even Good Housekeeping, which interviewed his housekeeper (IF YOU WERE HOUSEKEEPER TO MR. RIPLEY).

  In the summer of 1940, LIFE co-hosted a party at BION featuring a dozen Odditorium performers. Guests arrived in limousines and the day’s events were captured in a four-page spread. One photo shows Linda Lee, a singer on Ripley’s radio show, pouring a beer beside a sword-swallower in mid-swallow. In another photo, a woman lights a cigarette while sitting on the chest of a man lying on a bed of nails. One particularly creepy picture shows Martin Laurello (The Human Owl) getting a drink at the bar, his head turned gruesomely backward. By afternoon, “the novelty of examining one another’s peculiarities had worn off,” as LIFE put it, and guests went swimming, spun around the pond in Ripley’s boats, and played musical chairs. A fire breather tried to cook hot dogs on a skewer.

  Also at that party was one of Ripley’s heroes, Burton Holmes, who sat in a wheelchair nursing an injured foot. Ripley wheeled Holmes around the island, showing off his totem poles, bronze statues, and his boat collection. During the tour, Holmes mentioned that his injury had lately kept him from enjoying Nirvana, his bi-level apartment beside Manhattan’s Central Park. He was thinking of selling the Asian-themed place, which would come fully furnished with artifacts Holmes had collected from the Orient. Holmes wondered: Was Ripley interested?

  Weeks later, Ripley called from New York to tell his housekeeper, Almuth Seabeck, “I have found the apartment I have been looking for.” Ripley’s chauffeur delivered Seabeck to Sixty-seventh Street and Central Park West and they spent the afternoon inspecting Holmes’s ten-room apartment, the dark hallways, ornate teak molding, two-story living room, and the balcony overlooking Central Park. A week later, Ripley was moving in. Employees dubbed it his “new baby.”

  Ripley rationalized that he could now work in the city during busy weeks of radio shows and lectures, then spend weekends at BION Island. His staff knew the arrangement would be more complicated than that, and would surely involve extra work for all. Seabeck, a middle-aged woman who had traveled the world before settling in America, had been Ripley’s housekeeper since 1938 and had come to predict and even appreciate Ripley’s frenetic pace and his antics.

  She immediately ordered duplicates of Ripley’s favorite clothes—one set for the city, one for the country.

  BUGS BAER and other longtime friends found it astonishing that a man who’d spent so many years living out of a suitcase had become consumed by his domestic surroundings, to the point of obsession. Baer had even begun worrying about Ripley’s health now that he’d stopped exercising. “Bob walks twice around that island of his and collapses,” Baer told the New Yorker, which remarked on Ripley’s “increasing tendency toward plumpness.”

  A doctor tried to impose a diet, but regular parties thwarted doctor’s orders. At age fifty—the same age his father died—Ripley had become downright beefy. Though he tried to eat right, preferring vegetables and rice over steak and potatoes, his decade with King Features had enriched him at the expense of his athlete’s physique. The youthful obsession with fitness had been fully sacrificed on the altar of fame. The former champion, once touted as someone who “plays handball as well as he draws,” hadn’t danced across a handball court for a decade, and the effects were mounting—high blood pressure, stress, sleeplessness, and fatigue. He’d previously held a new religious belief in the curative effects of exercise. Now he clung to the hop
e that if he just kept busy, kept traveling and having fun, he’d outrun his father’s fate.

  It wasn’t just work that prevented Ripley from exercising so much as a transference of obsessions. Instead of good health he’d become fixated on good housekeeping.

  Incapable of turning all household duties over to his staff, Ripley could be finicky about the smallest of domestic details. He once grew furious when an actress visited for a weekend at BION Island and clogged the plumbing with her blond hair, calling her “the dirtiest female I have ever known.” He constantly relocated furniture and artwork, often redecorating entire rooms on a whim. He would tell a staffer to start working on a remodeling project that seemed important one day, but the next day he’d change his mind, telling the same housekeeper, gardener, or carpenter, “Drop it, it’s not important!”

  AS A BOY, Ripley once paid a hard-earned nickel for a postcard-sized duplicate of a painting by a Russian artist named Konstantin Makovsky, titled The Boyar Wedding Feast. When he couldn’t convince his mother or sister to pose, he would sketch the postcard for practice, over and over.

  One day, Seabeck found two rolled-up canvases in an attic, one of which appeared to be the original Wedding Feast. She framed and hung it in Ripley’s New York apartment. The other painting was a portrayal of a Russian nobleman selecting a frightened girl to become his wife. Unaware of Ripley’s complex views of wedlock, Seabeck encouraged him to hang The Choosing of the Bride in his mansion, and for some reason he decided to devote an entire room to the painting. He had the domed ceiling painted blue, to match the painting, and had the floor tiled in black and white, to match the tiled floor in the painting. When guests entered the room, the effect made it seem as if they were entering the choosing-the-bride scene itself—an oddly sentimental gesture for someone who claimed never to have been in love.

  Among his more ambitious projects was digging a tunnel beneath his house, to connect the basement bar to an outdoor rotunda. Workers soon discovered they’d have to blast through bedrock to get the job done, but Ripley gave the go-ahead and put his brother in charge. Crews spent weeks boring into rock with pneumatic drills, setting off small explosives that shook the house and caused spiderweb plaster cracks in the ceilings. The tunnel eventually reached its destination, but was quickly neglected, a rarely used passageway that became a dimly lit space for Ripley to display his collection of tribal masks, which the staff called the Mask Room.

  Some visitors didn’t understand this need to convert a home into a museum. One writer, after a tour, said that walking through Ripley’s house felt “like getting lost in the mummy section of a museum after its been closed for the night. It’s just plain creepy.”

  Creepy or not, people loved to visit BION and to be around Ripley, whose quirks of dress and personality could be endlessly entertaining. Ripley had always been an oddball, but his eccentricities seemed to amplify with age. He walked quickly and pigeon-toed, with a slight butt-waggle. He sucked his teeth and twiddled his now-necessary eyeglasses. He wore a small sketch pad on a cord around his neck and was always scribbling ideas or doodling. When someone told him an interesting story, he would pop open his mouth and bug out his eyes in exaggerated astonishment.

  After so many years on radio and in film, onstage and before audiences, he had become an unexpectedly adept performer, though he now sometimes performed more than necessary. In social settings, he could be pedantic and a bit of a bore. Some visitors were put off by his know-it-all history lessons, his stories about some artifact he had discovered in Bolivia or Afghanistan or Egypt. “Listening to Bob was sometimes like attending a lecture,” Seabeck once said. But longtime friends and employees tolerated Ripley’s monologues as fair trade for his vast generosity, for his willingness to turn his home into a carnival for their entertainment.

  THOUGH GENEROUS and compassionate, Ripley could be atrociously forgetful. B. A. Rolfe once bumped into him on a date with a beautiful blonde, and Ripley pulled Rolfe aside to ask, “Do you know the name of the girl I’m with?” Still, he seemed able to remember anyone who had assisted him along the path to success.

  Over the years he had stayed in contact with Carol Ennis, who helped him get his first newspaper job in San Francisco. If he visited San Francisco, he would always treat her to lunch or dinner, and if Ennis visited New York he would make sure she had a chauffeur-driven limousine to squire her around town.

  Norbert Pearlroth, though sometimes feeling underappreciated by King Features, remained as devoted as ever to Ripley after twenty years. Pearlroth once mentioned to Ripley his frustration over the cost of his daughter’s private-school tuition. The next day, Ripley handed him a $500 check, then another check each of the following six days. When Pearlroth thanked his boss for the $3,500, Ripley said, “Next time ask me something really tough.”

  Ripley seemed aware of his good fortune, the beam and front door from his Santa Rosa house reminding him how far he’d come. He always showed guests the original “Champs and Chumps” cartoon hidden behind a backlit mirror above his fireplace, telling them with a gesture toward his paintings, rugs, and furniture, “If it weren’t for that [cartoon], these wouldn’t be here.” He also seemed to feel grateful for the years of support and loyalty of longtime friends, especially Bugs Baer.

  While traveling, he would often send postcards to friends, and though he might forget the day of the week he rarely forgot birthdays. He’d send hand-drawn cards, like the one drawn for Baer’s fiftieth that showed Baer’s head growing out of a long stem, above a caption that read “Long Life to the Half Century Plant.”

  Ripley frequently invited friends to stay at BION for a night or two, including his King Features boss Joe Connolly, or Doug Storer and his wife, or Vyvyan Donner, who had made him feel so welcome during his first years in New York. (It helped that Donner, as fashion editor for Movietone News, often brought along pretty young models.) Donner would laugh at Ripley and Baer, both now past the half-century mark, calling them “overgrown boys.” Seabeck the housekeeper noticed that, whether it was softball or drinking, a political argument or girl talk, Ripley and Baer went at it “with the eagerness of two youngsters playing hooky from school.”

  Maybe to compensate for his abbreviated boyhood—the premature departure from high school and his teenaged entry into the workforce—Ripley performed well in the role of heedless adolescent. He loved to play pranks, such as hiding the nude Masakichi statue in guests’ closets and then waiting outside for their shouts of terror.

  Friends assumed there was something chemical at work, that Ripley was neurotic and compulsive, perpetually sophomoric and impetuous, that he simply couldn’t help himself or control his urges. Empty floor or wall space? It seemed to make him uncomfortable and needed to be filled with a statue or a weapon or a chair or a painting. Uncluttered ledges? The shelves surrounding his bar were now jam-packed with figurines, carved tusks, pistols, tureens, and old currency.

  This pathology extended to his collection of pets. He now owned collies, Dalmatians, spaniels, and cats, including a six-toed Manx named Peter who loved to hide under the fridge, waiting for a dog to walk past to attack. Ripley still owned his foulmouthed parrot and had recently obtained a twenty-eight-foot boa constrictor as thick as a Dalmatian.

  One weekend, on an early-morning stroll around the island, Joe Connolly practically tripped over the fat snake, named Gertie, who had gotten loose from the pen.

  “Don’t worry, Joe,” Ripley said. “He’s a friend of mine.”

  Though Ripley fed Gertie a steady diet of rabbits, the snake escaped regularly. Baer especially hated Gertie, and Ripley once created a barrier of broken glass around the snake’s pen, assuring Baer, “A snake won’t cross broken glass.”

  “Neither will I,” Baer replied, vowing not to come back to BION while Gertie was still on the loose. (The snake was later shipped off to a zoo.)

  WHEN HE WASN’T OCCUPIED with his curiosities and his pets, he used BION Island to nurture his nostalgia for the bo
ozy Prohibition-era NYAC/bachelor’s lifestyle. He installed beer kegs in the bar so that even during the workweek he and his staff could slip downstairs to draw a cold pint. Whenever B. A. Rolfe visited, the tubby bandleader would immediately grab a quart-sized tankard from Ripley’s collection and insist that it never be allowed to dip toward empty.

  Everyday life at BION was like a fraternity party, with a Keystone Kops aspect to the workaday. Ripley’s desk was surrounded by file drawers, stacks of papers, reference books, sticks of charcoal, leftover food and drink, and two phones. While drawing he’d reach for a phone to ask a secretary to find some tidbit at the library or call some scholar—or Pearlroth—to verify an elusive fact. He was always falling behind schedule, always late for meetings. Trips to New York escalated into madcap flurries. Thursdays were the worst, since Ripley was due for rehearsals for his Friday-night radio show. Everyone scurried about collecting script pages, cartoons to deliver to King Features, Ripley’s glasses, extra clothes for the New York apartment, drawing materials, and maybe a bottle of sherry for the drive south.

  Still, Ripley seemed immune to the persistent backlogs, almost amused by the never-ending demands and the sometimes-angry insistence from King Features to “send more cartoons!” At the worst possible moment he would call for a spontaneous softball game or tell staffers to meet on the front lawn to help assemble some new boat he’d ordered from India. He managed to find time for fishing, boating, sunbathing, and afternoon naps. He believed in the healthy effects of a good sweat, and liked to lie in the hot sun, then cool off with a glass of beer. He took steam baths before dinner, and after dessert would lead guests downstairs to the bar for cordials, radio, and conversation. He rarely went to bed before midnight, often ending his night with a drawn-out card game, a glass of milk, or a late-night snack in the kitchen.