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

by Neal Thompson

  Seabeck the housekeeper often complained to Ripley about his collections of curios “with no place to put them” and about the odors his crates and boxes emitted, especially anything from Tibet, which smelled like “rancid butter.” One night Seabeck retired to her bedroom, exhausted as usual. She was about to climb into bed when, with a shriek, she discovered the Masakichi statue tucked beneath her bedcovers.

  Over time, Ripley’s staff became its own semi-functional family. Years later, friends and staffers would wonder whether the parties and gags, the dog and snakes, were Ripley’s way of staving off a festering sadness.

  ONE NIGHT IN 1941, the staff sat in the kitchen, drinking and reading aloud from some of the bizarre letters submitted to Ripley’s latest contest. They were laughing their heads off when Ripley, who was supposed to be in Central America, walked through the kitchen door with terrible news.

  After nearly fifteen years as his most consistent female companion, his traveling partner and not-so-secret lover, Oakie, was dead.

  When Oakie had gotten married—sometime in the mid-1930s, though no one seemed sure when or where—Ripley became even more vague with friends about the details of their relationship, though it was hard to ignore that they continued to spend enormous amounts of time in each other’s company, on BION Island or touring the world: Morocco, Tripoli, and Libya; Germany, France, and Italy; Mexico, Brazil, and Bermuda. They once visited the Mediterranean island of Djerba, which in Greek mythology had been home to the lethargic Lotus Eaters, whose diet of lotus leaves brought them peace. He and Oakie had plucked a few leaves and fed them to each other, and Ripley declared, “One taste of this plant and man forgets all his troubles.”

  Over time Oakie had apparently come to accept his particular views of love and fidelity, and she seemed to agree with Ripley that America’s moral standards were out of whack. Ripley felt the American preoccupation with monogamy was to blame—the same moralistic fixation that led to Prohibition. “You can’t force people not to drink,” he told one reporter—just as you can’t force people to love only one person.

  And yet, though he had chosen not to marry her, and allowed her to wed another, he would later confess that Oakie was “the only woman I ever loved.” He had assumed she would be his covert love forever. When she succumbed to breast cancer, it clearly rattled him.

  In his mourning, Ripley launched himself into a project that he hoped would honor her memory. He began designing a room that he planned to endow to a New York hospital, a place where women suffering from cancer might live during their treatment—or during their final days. He wanted the room to have soothing colors, inspiring paintings, and comfortable furniture, “to delight the eye of the sufferer.” (He would work on this project off and on over the next few years, but it seems as if he never saw it through to fruition.)

  After Oakie’s death, Ripley seemed to resort, almost desperately, to his collector’s habits. Having amassed a small zoo of pets, four homes (he still had his NYAC apartment and had purchased a beach house in New Jersey), plus enough employees to field two baseball teams, he began to add more and more beautiful women to his cluttered and manic life.

  NO ONE COULD SAY for sure when and where he found some of his companions. A random woman would show up one day, introduced as a new “secretary” or “housekeeper” or “publicist.” She’d stay for dinner, then be at the breakfast table, then still around the next night, until she was part of the BION Island family. Later, there would be another new arrival, and another. Almost all were young immigrants, predominantly Asian, some in seemingly murky roles—they worked for him, lived with him, and sometimes shared his bed.

  Among the first to commit herself unreservedly was a quiet and fragile Japanese woman named Ming Jung, referred to by one colleague as “an exquisite creature.” As was often the case, no one at BION seemed to know the woman’s full story, but Hazel Storer would sometimes chat with Ming and in time learned that she had been married to a man who had worked as a cameraman in Los Angeles. The couple split after their only child died, and Ming kept the baby’s ashes in a lacquered box.

  Ming accompanied Ripley on a few trips, and at parties she was often dressed in a snug-fitting Chinese gown. She became part of a rotating cast of Ripley companions who, by the early 1940s, began regularly occupying BION’s guest bedrooms.

  Toshia Mori, an actress whom Time once called “a sloe-eyed Japanese girl,” was hired as a “research assistant” for Ripley’s Movietone films and soon moved in. She once fainted after wandering into the secret basement room where Ripley kept his erotica and torture photos. Ripley had added to this collection over the years, including a shrunken head from Ecuador that had arrived by mail with a note: “Please take care of this, I think it is one of my relatives.” One ghastly photo showed an African family, all ten of their legs terminating at the knee, and another featuring a man whose testicles were so swollen by elephantiasis he had to carry them in a wheelbarrow.

  “Oh those terrible things,” Toshia whispered as one of Ripley’s staffers carried her to a couch and gave her some brandy.

  Ming and Toshia were joined by a pert young assistant housekeeper from Spain who napped constantly, and a histrionic Japanese singer who sought Ripley’s attentions with halfhearted suicide attempts. She once swallowed half a bottle of aspirin and another time threatened to stab herself in the heart—with a bread knife. One night, she leapt dramatically off a balcony, but the four-foot drop was only enough to inflict a bruise.

  Women came and went, some semi-famous, though it was never entirely clear who was friend, girlfriend, or just a curious visitor. Gossip columnists found euphemistic ways of referring to Ripley’s female coterie without naming names: “a very charming friend of Ripley’s” or “tall, quite dark, and full of sparkling vitality.” One frequent guest was Ann Sheridan, a redheaded actress and pinup girl who was between marriages when she befriended Ripley and became a fixture at his dinner parties, occasionally photographed by his side in magazine profiles. Another regular was singer and actress Anna May Wong, a Chinese American beauty who had pulled away from Hollywood to raise money for Chinese war refugees and, in Ripley, found a sympathetic supporter of her causes.

  BELIEVE IT!

  Known for her dragon lady and diva roles of the 1920s and ’30s, Wong had appeared with Toshia Mori in Streets of Shanghai and Mr. Wu in 1927. Laws against interracial marriage prevented both actresses from becoming leading ladies, since they weren’t allowed to kiss white men on-screen.

  There were others: Daniel Boone’s great-granddaughter; a leggy blond Hungarian actress, Ilona Massey; singer/actress Marion Hutton, whose mother was a bootlegger and speakeasy proprietress; Marquita Nicholi, a model who lived at the famed Barbizon Hotel for Women. Ripley had little tolerance, though, for women who didn’t make themselves useful in some fashion. A publicist named Kay Lawrence was another regular at BION, always drinking white wine and giggling. Ripley called her the “goofy blonde” until she mishandled a magazine story that Ripley felt was less than flattering, after which he called Lawrence “half-assed.”

  Sometimes these girlfriend-secretary-housekeepers would leave, to be replaced by another. Sometimes they overlapped and two or three would be living on BION Island at once. “The ones with gumption and pride left him,” Hazel Storer would write years later. “Those that stayed found plenty of compensations—easy living, easy money, not too much work, and plenty of liquor.”

  Ripley kept bedrooms and bathrooms stocked with necessities, as well as fragrant soaps, talcums, oils, and lotions. One writer speculated that Ripley stocked his life with women so he wouldn’t have to choose just one. The women had their reasons to appreciate his attentions. Though he dressed sloppily during the day—no shoes, bathrobes, charcoal-covered fingers—he cleaned up well and dressed elegantly at night. He could be funny, charming, and wildly generous. And he doted on them, sometimes taking three or four women shopping at once.

  One night Doug and Hazel Storer
visited to find Ripley reclined on a chaise in his living room, wearing only a robe and framed by four gorgeous women—Hungarian, English, German, and Russian. Two sat on silk pillows, massaging his feet, while two rubbed his neck and shoulders. “It looked just like a harem,” Hazel recalled, and would later claim that Ripley (who had now become her boss) “lived in open concubinage.”

  One of Ripley’s radio writers referred to them as his “Broads Brigade.” If Ripley announced he was headed to New York for the day, the women would declare they’d been planning to go there too. If he was headed out of town they’d try to position themselves to be chosen to join him. Once, Ripley was headed to the Caribbean and told a girlfriend (probably Ming) that she couldn’t come along because he was visiting a British colony and, since she was Japanese, she wouldn’t be permitted. She saw Ripley off at Penn Station and by Philadelphia he had hooked up with the woman who would accompany him.

  Ripley knew plenty of women were desperate to become Mrs. Robert L. Ripley. They competed with and undermined one another and sometimes went too far. A married woman from Buffalo sent a torrent of love letters and warned that if Ripley didn’t write back she’d show up at BION Island. When her furniture and suitcases arrived, Ripley had to pay to send everything back. (The husband apologized for his wife’s behavior.) Another fan sent a barrage of valentines, telling Ripley she was unhappy with her husband and her life. When she died, the woman’s teenaged daughter took up the letter writing. One girlfriend cornered him at a train station in Vienna, a minister in tow, and Ripley hid in an empty rail car until the hopeful bride gave up.

  By now, he had learned from past mistakes. Lovers who had sued or threatened to sue upon realizing a proposal wasn’t forthcoming had taught him to be careful with his affections. As Hazel Storer would tell a writer years later, “He liked, needed, and distrusted women.” He would admit as much, telling one interviewer, “Women are wonderful, simply wonderful—in their place.” At BION, he actually took the extreme precaution of having some female guests sign a one-page waiver, in which they acknowledged that they were living on the island “voluntarily.”

  Slow nights featured just the “intimate circle,” as Seabeck the housekeeper put it in an unpublished memoir: Ripley’s brother and his wife, Crystl, plus two of Ripley’s handpicked women, one on his left, one on his right. Some nights the women jostled for the more respectable position to Ripley’s right.

  Sometimes the arrangement flat-out collapsed. Ripley once invited Bugs Baer and others for Christmas dinner, but Baer had plans and Ripley found himself alone with just four guests: a widowed ex-girlfriend and her teenage son, a French actress, and an Asian girlfriend. As Ripley later described it to Baer, the ex-girlfriend propped a framed photograph of her late husband next to her plate while her skinny son sulked. The two other women glared at each other silently through the meal until one of them reached into the Christmas turkey, grabbed a fistful of chestnut stuffing, and threw it in her rival’s face.

  Ripley called Baer the next day. “It’s just as well you and Louise didn’t come,” he said. “You probably wouldn’t have had a very good time.”

  IN 1941, Ripley installed two massive bronze Chinese warrior statues at the end of the causeway crossing to his island. Mounted on stone pedestals, each menacing figure weighed a ton, and he would tell guests they were to ward off evil spirits. With America edging closer to war, he wasn’t taking any chances.

  Ripley had desperately wanted his country to remain neutral, for political and personal reasons. Earlier in 1941 he had given a radio address encouraging President Roosevelt and Congress to do everything possible to avoid the war. Former president Herbert Hoover, with whom Ripley had become friends, thanked Ripley for his efforts. “Believe it or Not, that speech has surprised me in the effect which it has had,” Hoover wrote. “Your opportunities to help are very great.” Hoover’s encouragement prompted Ripley to write to congressmen, some of whom wrote back with promises of neutrality. Ohio senator Robert Taft replied, “It is always encouraging to hear from those who feel as I do on this issue.”

  Of course, the events of December 7, 1941, changed everything. By early 1942 Ripley had immersed himself emotionally and professionally in the war and in relief efforts. He began spending more time at his New York apartment, to be closer to the radio studios, and even bought the top two floors of the building to gain extra space for guests, staffers, and offices. He continued decorating Holmes’s former Nirvana with Asian artifacts, including a Chinese bridal bed and a sedan chair. At one of his Chinese-themed parties, he parked the chair in the living room with Ming Jung sitting inside most of the night. Guests wondered if she willingly stuffed herself in the passenger compartment or if Ripley had encouraged it for theatrical effect.

  Oddly, it seemed as if Ripley’s female companions were all from lands at war—Japan, Russia, China, and Germany. Shortly before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Ripley had hired a tall and striking new secretary, a German immigrant named Lieselotta Wisse. She was nineteen when she joined Ripley’s stable of female “employees,” although, unlike some others, she was a hard worker and a well-organized secretary who was soon managing Ripley’s social and business schedules. Liberty magazine called Liese, as she was known, “a disarming-looking brunette.” When Liese received her citizenship papers, Ripley threw her a party at his New York apartment. She and twenty friends arrived to find a huge Nazi flag laid out on the living room floor. Ripley toasted Liese’s citizenship and, gesturing to the flag, told her to “stomp on it.” He meant for it to be a cathartic event, but guests felt embarrassed for Liese as she jumped on the flag.

  Ripley’s hatred for Hitler was soon far outweighed, however, by mounting worries over the land that had established itself through the years as his favorite: China.

  It had been a decade since Ripley and Oakie witnessed firsthand the evidence of Japan’s brutal invasion of China—the craters and rubble, the corpses and executions.

  By 1942, word had reached the United States of China’s many years of suffering. Eleanor Roosevelt had begun encouraging Americans to host “Bowl of Rice” parties to raise money for humanitarian aid to Chinese refugees. Ripley hosted one such charity luncheon at his apartment and invited an elegant and witty Chinese American divorcée named Li Ling-Ai to speak to guests about the United China Relief program.

  Li had been raised in Honolulu and studied theater and dance in China. The war with Japan and a failed marriage inspired a move to New York in the late 1930s. She lived in near poverty in a closet-sized apartment until she was hired to run the Chinese Pavilion at the 1940 World’s Fair (along with Anna May Wong). Li then helped produce and finance a 1941 documentary that exposed China’s struggles against its Japanese invaders. Kukan: The Battle Cry of China won an honorary Academy Award and Li was invited to the White House for a special viewing with President and Eleanor Roosevelt. Soon Li was being invited to give lectures and performances, and she used her newfound fame to raise money for aid to China. She even took flying lessons, in hopes of delivering food to war-torn Chinese villages.

  After seeing Kukan and reading about Li, Ripley invited her to his luncheon that day, one of many such fund-raisers he hosted during the early 1940s. Ripley was instantly impressed by her eloquence, humor, and charm. And it was hard to ignore that she was stunningly beautiful. Li designed her own clothes and jewelry and was always dressed as if she were a costumed stage actress, wearing shapely, intricately embroidered gowns, bejeweled headdresses, and flowers in her hair.

  Li found herself drawn to Ripley, too. Though he was surrounded by other women “all the time,” she found him to be “a rough diamond, but a gentleman.” In an interview decades later, she recalled their first meeting: “This man, I looked at him and I thought, a real gentleman in the Chinese sense.”

  Ripley introduced his new friend in a cartoon as a “celebrated Chinese actress, author & lecturer.” The cartoon contained a close-up sketch of Li’s pretty face and the statement �
�Chinese eyes do not slant!! It’s an illusion.” (She was mad at first, since he hadn’t asked for her permission.) Elsewhere in print she was described as a noted Chinese feminist, dancer, dramatist, designer, and aviatrix. She was soon being featured in Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. When Li sang at one of Ripley’s dinner parties, gossip columnist Louella Parsons wrote about Li’s “sweet, low, throaty voice … I never saw such a personality.”

  In no time Li became one of Ripley’s “favored lady friends,” as Seabeck put it, and he asked her to join his staff, giving her an impressive title: Director of Far Eastern Research. She became a regular on BION Island and at the New York apartment, and the others could tell from the start that there was something different about their relationship. They would co-host parties together, cooking up Chinese meals dressed in matching costumes. Sometimes she would pick him up in her beat-up Chevrolet and squire him to some small family restaurant in Chinatown, or she’d arrive unannounced at the mansion and he’d demand, “Hurry up and make something good to eat.” A self-described “sassy girl,” Li was the only one who could get away with teasing Ripley, arguing with him or making fun of him. It helped that she could match him drink for drink.

  Ripley loved to spar with Li. War had caused his political views to skew further to the right, which was at odds with the left-leaning bent of some of his guests, particularly Li. At a party for Li’s film he embarrassed guests by raising a toast to “that son of a bitch” Roosevelt. Often he’d instigate a political argument, taking a contrary position, egging on both sides, and it was sometimes unclear whether he felt strongly or just wanted to rile things up. At dinner tables Li would mischievously take the position of the stubborn liberal and never backed down. Ripley would get up from the table and, with a smirk, turn his radio up to full volume.