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

by Neal Thompson

  Friends couldn’t quite tell if Ripley and Li were lovers or just pals, but it was hard to ignore the similarities between her and Oakie. Just as Oakie had left a war-ravaged homeland after World War I, Li was a refugee of sorts—her hometown of Honolulu had been attacked, as had her adopted homeland of China. Like Oakie, Li was sophisticated, independent, and educated, worldly and multilingual. And most important to Ripley, she was strong-willed and passionate.

  Commenting years later on their friendship, Li said, “He likes to argue, likes when you argue back. He’s annoyed by stooges and yes men.”

  Ripley and Li began traveling together—to an air show in Cleveland, lectures in Boston, and “Chinese Night” in Mamaroneck, among other destinations—to promote Li’s film and to raise money for British and Chinese relief agencies. With help from Ripley and the Hearst publicity machine, Li was soon becoming famous herself. She and Ripley were frequently photographed together—a Boston newspaper photographer captured them eating cheek to cheek from a shared bowl of rice—and writers began referring to Li as “China’s leading dancer.”

  A beautiful partnership had blossomed. Li would later describe how Ripley had given her a break when nobody else would. He encouraged and supported her, provided a leg up. She believed that, through her, he was repaying a favor to those who had helped him. She called such gestures the “reflection of the heart.”

  Ripley preferred people who served a purpose—those who were either funny or smart or talented or beautiful. If someone didn’t enrich his life somehow, they weren’t useful. He cherished those who enhanced Believe It or Not in some way too. And while there was a price for admission to Ripley’s inner circle—he was obsessed with work and impatient with distractions—there were also rich rewards. “He pretends to be tough but he’s always doing little things for people,” Li told a reporter at the time, describing her new friend’s loyalty and generosity.

  In that manner, Li viewed Ripley as an American with a Chinese soul. She liked to think he viewed her as a Chinese with an American soul.

  Though Ripley was pleased with this new relationship—especially so soon after losing Oakie—by 1942 the war had completely closed off most of the planet, sealing him inside US borders. It was a harsh blow to his wanderlust. Ever resilient, however, he managed to find a new and reliable source of unbelievably true stories for his cartoons: war.

  AFTER PEARL HARBOR, the Nehi Corporation exercised a clause that allowed it to kill Ripley’s RC Cola radio show in the event of “dire international calamity.” With the country about to devote all its resources to a two-front war, it seemed Ripley’s decade-long run on the air might come to an end. But then his years of vocal pro-Americanism paid off in a surprising way, as did his trust in Doug Storer, who negotiated a new program with the biggest sponsor of all: Uncle Sam.

  By now, Storer’s own career had progressed, thanks to the exposure he’d earned as Ripley’s manager and radio producer. He’d taken on other clients—self-help guru Dale Carnegie, King Features writer Bob Considine, and bandleader Cab Calloway, for example—and by late 1941 had been named head of programming at NBC’s new Blue Network. Wielding his new title, within days of the Pearl Harbor attack Storer had reached an agreement with the coordinator of inter-American affairs for Ripley to broadcast twenty-six half-hour episodes featuring pro-American, war-related believe-it-or-nots. Just as he had drawn patriotic cartoons for the US government during World War I, Ripley would lend his artistic talent to the current war effort.

  There was one catch: the deal had to remain a secret. The coordinator of inter-American affairs, millionaire Nelson Rockefeller, wrote to demand that Storer and Ripley never publicly mention Rockefeller, nor his department, nor the US government “as sponsoring or in any way being connected with or responsible for carrying out the project.” NBC would air the shows with no reference to the real sponsor.

  The Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs Office (CIAA) had been created within the State Department to disseminate news reports, films, advertising, and radio to Latin America, an effort to counteract pro-Italian and pro-German propaganda there. By 1942, CIAA had a $38 million budget and a staff of a thousand, all devoted to shaping South America’s public opinion in favor of its neighbor to the north. Walt Disney performed duties similar to Ripley’s on CIAA’s behalf, notably a 1941 South American goodwill tour that produced the film Saludos Amigos (“Hello, friends”). Rockefeller’s reaction to the film—“exceeds our highest expectations”—prompted Disney to produce more thinly veiled propaganda films for the CIAA.

  BELIEVE IT!

  US intelligence later discovered that the CIAA Office had been infiltrated by Soviet intelligence. Federal employees at the CIAA were sharing information with Soviet spies, whose code name for the CIAA was “Cabaret.”

  Ripley’s directive was to broadcast positive stories about Americans at war and promote the United States’ commitment to “Western Hemisphere defense.” The primary goal was to comfort South America, as Ripley’s $1,500-per-show contract put it, with stories of “every-day life, history, famous institutions, science, heroes, soldiers, statesmen, artists.” Rockefeller’s office, the War Department, and the State Department would be allowed to review Storer’s scripts and veto guests.

  See All the Americas with Bob Ripley launched in January of 1942 on Saturday nights. An announcer told listeners that “our modern Marco Polo, the most traveled man in history” would “make you better acquainted with the twenty neighboring republics to the south of us.” Each show highlighted a different country, and Ripley told stories of visits to Quito, Rio, and Buenos Aires. “The principal delight in my Believe It or Not work is the pleasure of traveling,” he said in one show. “But if someone should ask me where I have derived the greatest content, I would have to say, truthfully, South America.” (Truthfully, Ripley preferred Asia to South America, having once scorned Bolivians as “stupid” and “weak.”)

  Ripley was proud to be playing a role in the war effort and intoxicated by the covertness of the project. Plus, he would now be able to verbally attack communism and fascism on the air without fear of being muzzled. The new show was important to Ripley, who felt he was doing something more valuable with his passionate patriotism than just entertaining. Ever the competitor, he was doing something heroic for his home team.

  RIPLEY’S FIRST THIRTEEN-WEEK season was extended for thirteen more weeks, and Nelson Rockefeller wrote to thank him for doing such a “marvelous job.”

  Then Ripley received a letter of censure from the Office of Censorship, slapping his wrist for identifying the location of a US fighter squadron in the South Pacific. Soon after that, he received a letter from President Roosevelt’s radio department thanking him for “the valuable service you have rendered to the government” but informing him his contract would not be renewed. Ripley wondered if his opposition to Roosevelt was partly to blame.

  Thus began a yearlong period in which Ripley would not be on the air, the longest such gap in a decade. He tried to stay busy, lending time to war efforts and charities. He cooperated with the Office of War Information by donating Believe It or Not sketches—of Medal of Honor winners or star athletes in the military—which were reprinted as posters or in military newspapers. He performed onstage for servicemen headed overseas and even agreed to draw sketches for a military booklet warning soldiers about venereal disease. Still, he felt a growing need to devote more of himself, somehow, to the war.

  “I wanted to get into this war,” he would soon tell a reporter, concluding that radio might be “my greatest opportunity for serving my country.” Storer assured Ripley that he was searching for new shows and sponsors, but there were limited opportunities “with the war picture as it is.”

  In late August 1942, he received more bad news. Linda Lee, the sultry-voiced singer who had performed for years on his show with B. A. Rolfe’s orchestra, was dead at age twenty-seven. Lee had been under a doctor’s care for “a nervous condition” and had been
fretting over her husband’s enlistment in the Army. She fell to her death—or possibly jumped—from the low-silled window of her seventh-floor apartment on Central Park South. Wearing a nightgown, she landed on the sidewalk across from horrified diners at the Hotel St. Moritz café.

  Lee’s death was the latest in a series of personal losses for Ripley, starting with the 1940 death of his high school teacher Miss O’Meara. (Ripley wrote a letter that was read at the funeral, avowing that O’Meara’s teachings “will be cherished throughout my life.”) That was followed by the devastating death of his lover, Oakie, and then the unexpected death of his travel secretary, George Wieda.

  Even his dogs had begun dying. Barking and roughhousing had become part of everyday life at BION Island. Ripley raised Dalmatians and donated his pups to Mamaroneck’s fire department. He adopted a shaggy-haired English sheepdog named Rhumba, and for promotional photos and holiday cards he would comb Rhumba’s hair over one eye and pose beside his one-eyed dog, Cyclops. With so many dogs and their offspring on the island, he often gave puppies to friends as gifts.

  Inevitably, not all the pets survived. Ripley’s first dog, Dokie the cocker spaniel, had been killed by a delivery truck. A spaniel named Virtue crashed through the ice and drowned in the pond. His collie Flash was killed by the gardener’s Saint Bernard. Ripley buried his dogs in a pet cemetery on a knoll atop BION Island. One pet’s headstone read, HE LIVED A DOG’S LIFE.

  As he was absorbing the deaths of colleagues and pets, he received the heartbreaking news that his companion Ming Jung had been sent to an internment camp, one of the detention centers into which Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated, beginning in 1942. It’s unclear how she ended up there, since Executive Order 9066 applied primarily to Japanese Americans living on the West Coast. Ripley acted quickly and used his influence to secure Ming’s release, but she’d gotten sick at the camp and had to be hospitalized. The details of her illness remained unknown to friends, but Ripley once told Storer that she’d developed problems with her circulation, that her blood pressure dropped to dangerously low levels and at one point doctors thought she’d die. Ripley fretted during her months in the hospital and visited her often. Ming eventually recovered and moved back to BION Island, but the internment and illness had taken a toll. She would spend hours paddling alone on the pond and rarely spoke about her imprisonment or illness.

  By 1943, it seemed as if everything in Ripley’s life had been upended by war. Newspaper friends were headed off to war assignments, trusted chauffeurs and butlers were being drafted or enlisting, and other employees found stateside jobs related to the war effort. When Almuth Seabeck’s husband enlisted, the housekeeper resigned and Ripley decided to shutter BION Island for a while. It was too difficult to keep the place running without a full staff, so he hosted one last party—a farewell for Seabeck and her husband—then mothballed his mansion and moved into the New York apartment.

  MONTHS EARLIER, Storer convinced NBC to allow him to create another new Ripley show to promote stories about aviation and encourage youngsters to become pilots. Sponsored by the Junior Air Reserve, with the support of the air forces of the US Army and Navy, Scramble would broadcast coast to coast each Friday.

  Ripley aggressively took up this new cause, advocating the future of flight to America’s youth. Lending his voice to the aviation community was a natural fit. He’d always had an interest in flying, and he realized that he owed a portion of his success to the airplane—his Lindbergh cartoon remained one of his best known, and the Wrong-Way Corrigan interview had been among his earlier radio coups. Over the years, he’d befriended famous flyers, including Eddie Rickenbacker, a frequent BION visitor whom he’d known since Rickenbacker’s pre–World War I days as a race car driver.

  Scramble gave Ripley an opportunity to tap into his memories of a world before war, to describe to radio listeners his actual visits to the places that were now gory battlefields—in China, North Africa, the South Pacific, and Europe. “When I was in Tripoli …” began one such episode.

  Ripley’s success with Scramble prompted the National Aeronautic Association in 1943 to name him “special assistant” to its Air Youth Division, and he embarked on a nationwide tour. He spoke to junior aviation groups, high schools, Boy Scout troops, and orphanages, encouraging young men and women to pursue a career in aviation. “The air age is on us,” he told a group in St. Louis. “The airplane has made the world so small and drawn the peoples of the world so close together that in a not very long time they all may speak the same language and wear the same clothes.” Fifteen years earlier, Ripley had been terrified of flying. Now he was declaring throughout the Midwest that aviation would “bring about lasting peace.”

  Finally, with Ripley so much in the public eye, Nelson Rockefeller contacted Doug Storer to say his office had decided to renew Ripley’s CIAA show. Rockefeller said Ripley’s return, with more episodes on Latin American countries, “would be in the best interest of the United States.” Through the fall of 1943, Ripley was back on the air, and Rockefeller wrote in a letter, “You are certainly making a real contribution toward better understanding between the Americas.”

  Just as Ripley had thrived during World War I and during the Depression, he was flourishing through the second world war, at least career-wise. The year ended on a professional high note, with a twenty-fifth Believe It or Not anniversary party at the Waldorf-Astoria. Max Schuster couldn’t attend but sent a gushing telegram: “After twenty-five years of awed and breathless admiration I am more convinced than ever that the greatest Believe It or Not of them all is the story of Bob Ripley.”

  BACK IN LATE 1942, a German U-boat had torpedoed a British merchant ship off the South American coast and only one of the fifty-four crewmen survived.

  Poon Lim, a Chinese steward, had grabbed a life vest and dived overboard, then climbed into a life raft stocked with enough food for sixty days. Lim drifted for twice that long before being rescued by fishermen off the coast of Brazil. His 133 days alone at sea—nearly twice as long as the castaways Ripley had interviewed in the Bahamas—was an all-time record.

  In January of 1944, Ripley interviewed Poon, a slight and quiet man who described singing folk songs to pass the time and, when his food ran low, making a fishhook from the spring of a flashlight. On the air, while actors dramatized his plight, Poon could be heard in the background, sobbing. In his column the next day, Walter Winchell listed the emotional broadcast among his weekly “headliners.”

  Ripley’s new show, Rhythm, Romance, and Ripley, sponsored by Pall Mall cigarettes and airing over the Mutual Network, became an instant hit. It was also Ripley’s most lucrative radio partnership, with Pall Mall coughing up $4,000 a week for Ripley’s salary. Airing five nights a week at 9:15 p.m., the fifteen-minute broadcasts focused exclusively on hard-to-believe war stories. “Amazing wonders culled from a world at war” was how publicists described it.

  One night Ripley profiled a soldier whose pet monkey saved his life on a North African battlefield, and he later featured a man who was honorably discharged for snoring too loud. One show introduced listeners to Ray and Curtis Ewing, a father and son from Bellingham, Washington, with an inconceivable story. Curtis Ewing’s army base in northern Australia was bombed in 1942, and while picking through rubble he found a chunk of shrapnel with his father’s name etched into it. Ray Ewing, a Boeing airplane mechanic, had years earlier chiseled his name into the engine block of the family car. The scrap metal from the old car had somehow ended up in a Japanese bomb factory.

  With his new show up and running, Ripley hired a press agent, and the gossip columns were suddenly packed with Ripley stories and snippets. He earned ink in the columns of Hedda Hopper, Louella Parsons, Louis Sobol, Dorothy Kilgallen, E. V. Durling, and, on a regular basis, Walter Winchell. Some writers said Ripley was thinking of taking his strange life story to Broadway, working with a writer on a Believe It or Not play. Others rehashed certain facts (some questionable) about Ripley’s
life so frequently, so consistently word for word, that it was obvious they were writing from press releases: born on Christmas Day … visited 201 countries … designed tombstones as his first job … likes the company of chipmunks … first man to broadcast around the world … still uses the front door of his boyhood home … only wears bowties.

  Columnists raved about evenings spent at “one of Ripley’s fabulous parties,” with guest lists ranging from Jimmy Durante, Jack Dempsey, and Carmen Miranda to Chiang Kai-shek’s personal physician. Louella Parsons described the “heartwarming” birthday party Ripley threw for his longtime boss and friend, Joe Connolly, who had been ill. When Bugs Baer, Eddie Rickenbacker, Vyvyan Donner and others sang happy birthday to the famed King Features president, Parsons pronounced the evening “one we’ll all remember.”

  THOUGH PARSONS PRAISED RIPLEY as “a grand host” for celebrating Connolly’s fiftieth, the relationship between Ripley and his superiors had in fact become quite strained.

  Ripley’s radio show often stretched him to the breaking point, and his obligations to King Features got pushed down the priority list. In addition to prepping for five weekly shows, he was still drawing seven cartoons a week. And while columnists sometimes gushed that Ripley remained “one of the few famous cartoonists who still does his own drawings,” the truth was that a growing stable of young King Features artists was drawing more of Ripley’s cartoons.