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

by Neal Thompson

  Among his many messy, overlapping relationships, the one with beautiful Ming Jung remained especially mysterious to those who witnessed Ripley’s occasionally harsh treatment. Hearst sportswriter and columnist Bob Considine and his wife once spent a summer living across the pond from BION Island. They visited frequently for cocktails, despite some competitive tension between Ripley and Considine (who would write a less-than-flattering and wildly inaccurate mini-biography of Ripley in 1961). The Considines were visiting the night Ripley ordered Ming, “Off to your room,” and Millie Considine went to comfort Ming, who talked about keeping her child’s ashes in a lacquered wooden box. “They are not there now,” Ming allegedly told Considine. “When Bob gets mad at me he hides them.”

  Millie Considine would see Ming paddling alone on the pond and wondered what made Ripley’s women stay. Millie came to believe that “once Ripley took an interest in a girl there was a bond between them forever after—no matter what.” Hazel Storer would similarly wonder about the women who stayed, later writing, “How some of those gals took what he handed out in the way of abusive and contemptuous language I’ll never know.”

  Just a year earlier, in an interview with American Weekly magazine, Ripley had shared his ongoing belief that “the only time women are happy is when they are completely under the domination of men.” Now, though, even Ming had had enough of Ripley’s domination. She’d finally given up on him, moved out of BION, and married a man who ran the Mamaroneck auto and marine service station that refueled and repaired the Mon Lei.

  Ripley was rarely without companionship, however. At Hi-Mount he presented a sexy new Cuban girlfriend to the Storers and other visiting friends, and for a few days they all had a grand time, taking turns riding Ripley’s new motor scooter or his tandem bicycle around the lakeside path. They went to the movies one night and Ripley snored through A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. (Notorious for sleeping in theaters, and for snoring like a diesel engine, Ripley once annoyed a crowd by loudly sleeping through a performance of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Allegro, despite much hushing from an usher and the audience.) Ripley’s girlfriend was soon joined by an attractive blonde who flew up from Havana bearing bottles of rum and an adorable springer spaniel puppy. Rum punches lasted until dawn, but the fun ended the next day.

  Worried that the puppy seemed sick, Ripley suggested to his owner that she take the dog to a vet. She promised she would, but instead corralled the dog inside the kitchen. A household staffer found the dog there, sicker than before, and took him to the vet, where he died. Ripley was furious. To make amends, his Cuban girlfriend and her guest offered to make dinner. They clattered around in the kitchen while the Storers and another couple got dressed in upstairs guest rooms.

  Ripley sat drinking rum, getting madder the more he drank. Hazel was the first to come downstairs and found Ripley alone at the dining room table, his head in his hands. She touched his shoulder and Ripley jumped up and exploded with a tirade about the death of the puppy and his visitor’s carelessness. Hazel went to the kitchen and found the two women locked in an embrace, clearly terrified. Moments earlier, Ripley had apparently gotten fed up with the giggling and burst into the kitchen, yelling at his girlfriend’s friend, accusing her of treating the puppy like “a toy.” He’d terrified both women, and possibly himself.

  And yet, Hazel doubted that Ripley’s love of animals was the true source of his anger that night. She suspected some undiagnosed illness was to blame.

  THE STORERS STAYED with Ripley a few more weeks. Doug Storer wanted to make sure his client and friend was emotionally and physically ready for the upcoming television season. Though Ripley was often surrounded by eager employees and devoted girlfriends, he had few truly close friends with whom to share his deepest troubles. This became apparent during the last days of the Storers’ final visit at Hi-Mount.

  One night they went to a quiet French restaurant in Palm Beach and Ripley relaxed and spoke freely, telling them the full story of Oakie, about his sorrow in losing her to cancer before the war. He broke into tears at the memory of the one true love of his life. Another night, Ripley sat alone with Hazel on the back deck and talked for two hours about his tenuous relationship with his brother, and their most recent schism.

  He’d tried over the years to find the right fit for Doug in his world. Doug had done some work at King Features, until his conflicts with Joe Connolly got him fired. Doug’s role as captain of Ripley’s yacht hadn’t lasted long either, and Doug mostly ended up doing manual labor around BION Island, more comfortable with chauffeurs and carpenters than his brother’s newspaper friends. Doug was extremely introverted and often felt overwhelmed by the social scene that swirled around Ripley. In trying to relax and fit in, he usually drank too much. Tensions led to occasional fights between the brothers, with Doug once telling Ripley, “To hell with you!”

  One frequent houseguest said Doug “changed from mouse to lion as the level on the bottle went down” and Li Ling-Ai thought Doug seemed “always high.” (“He was a blue-collar guy who was caught up in a white-collar world,” one of Doug’s two sons, Robert, said decades later. “There were a lot of temptations there, be it alcohol or women.”) Ripley eventually bought Doug and his wife a house in Mamaroneck and Doug ventured out on his own, working blue-collar jobs, including a stint at a naval shipyard. Even so, Ripley always tried to lure his brother back, calling and asking, “What are you doing? C’mon over.”

  Ripley explained to Hazel Storer that night in Florida how one particular fight with his brother had not yet healed. They’d been at Ripley’s New York apartment and Ripley was on a ladder arranging some of his shelved curios. Doug had been drinking and the brothers began to argue about something. Voices were raised, arms flailed, and Doug knocked over the ladder, which nearly hit Ripley in the head as it crashed to the floor. Stunned, Ripley shouted, “Out!” He pointed to the door and told Doug he wanted him out of his life. He told Hazel he was thinking of cutting off any future financial support.

  Ripley could be quite generous with friends, and in fact had recently loaned Doug Storer $1,000 to carry him through a financial rough patch until the new TV show began. He once bought Li a new car, as thanks for the many rides she’d given him in her beat-up Chevy. (She asked him to return the car.) Li wondered if Ripley, in the role of surrogate parent, had high expectations for his brother and didn’t believe in “handouts.” Ripley sometimes felt that Doug wasn’t willing to care for himself, at least not in the manner that Ripley, as father figure, expected. Ripley set high standards for everyone who worked with him, and Doug had clearly fallen short. In his rant that night with Hazel, Ripley said he considered Doug “no brother of mine.” Hazel tried to be sympathetic, but she was shaken by Ripley’s bitterness.

  AFTER THE STORERS left Hi-Mount, Ripley traveled to Cuba, possibly to reconnect with the girlfriend he’d scared off. While in Havana, he concocted a new plan: to buy the property next to Hi-Mount and turn it into a studio from which he could broadcast television shows.

  He mailed Doug Storer drawings of what the studio might look like, along with an enthusiastic letter: “I have many more and different ideas … What do you think?” Storer replied, in the kind of patient tone one might use with a child, “We don’t know whether it would be mechanically possible to broadcast from that spot,” adding that there might be restrictions that would prevent such a business from operating in a residential neighborhood.

  After Havana, Ripley returned to New York, and a few weeks before the first TV show he invited a group of friends to his apartment for a party.

  When the Storers arrived at Ripley’s place, he was waiting anxiously at the elevator that opened directly into his tenth-floor apartment. He immediately grabbed Hazel by the hand and led her into his bedroom. He’d developed a kinship with Hazel, who assumed that Ripley took a special interest in her because she’d lived in Shanghai in the 1930s. Hazel could tell he was unusually distraught and had been drinking heavily. He sat at the e
dge of his huge bed and began to cry, tears dribbling onto his white dinner jacket. He’d read earlier in the day that the Communist Army had finally overtaken Shanghai.

  Over and over, he told her, “We’ll never see China again. Never!”

  Hazel knew, as did Li Ling-Ai, just how passionately Ripley felt about China. “Rip really loved and admired this remarkable country and its people,” Hazel once said. He had surrounded himself with women, employees, art, food, and furniture from his adopted land. Impressed by the Chinese ability to find happiness in poverty and war, he admired their resilience, believing that the survival of life’s hardships made people stronger and more creative.

  Li once said the Chinese “made him remember his own youth and feel good that he survived too.”

  It made sense, then, for Ripley to become so emotional the night he learned of China’s latest setback. The Communist Army had taken control of all but southeast China, and it was just a matter of time before Chiang Kai-shek’s US-supported Kuomintang forces fell to Mao Zedong’s Soviet-backed People’s Liberation Army.

  For a man so inspired by all things Chinese, it also made sense that the decor and tone of his TV show would be distinctly Asian, a televised culmination of his lifelong obsession.

  ON MARCH 1, 1949, at 9:30 p.m., anyone on the East Coast with a television set tuned to the NBC network would have seen their black-and-white screens fill with the image of a young Chinese man banging a gong, who then welcomed viewers to one of the more surreal programs in the short history of broadcast television.

  After achieving such massive success in newspapers, publishing, radio, and film, Ripley the media pioneer was hoping the Believe It or Not magic would translate to this latest medium. His first show launched with a comedy duo, Ming and Ling, veterans of New York’s cabaret scene who worked at the China Doll club and were known for their Chinese hillbilly routine and their Frank Sinatra impressions. (They’d soon score a radio hit with their song “Eggroll Eatin’ Mama.”)

  Ripley then introduced his lovely sidekick, twenty-four-year-old Peggy Corday, a World War II pinup girl. Ripley bragged that Corday had recently been named “Miss Television of 1949.” Her first moment as Ripley’s on-air assistant was a shrill scream of pretend shock as she opened a closet door to find Ripley’s lifelike Masakichi statue staring back at her. Corday was bright-eyed and quick on her feet; her role would in part require her to keep the unpredictable host on track.

  Until now, Ripley had achieved celebrity as a mostly invisible cartoonist and radio personality. Across the first half of 1949, he became an in-the-flesh television star.

  While the show sometimes featured actors performing the same type of dramatic sketches he’d aired on radio, those acts now took a secondary role to Ripley’s on-screen persona. He’d been in the public eye for three decades, but hadn’t appeared in a film—or on a screen of any kind—since before the war. On the grainy screen of a Motorola set, he seemed older and paunchier than the global adventurer viewers may have expected. (His teeth looked better than ever, though. He’d had another aggressive surgical procedure to further straighten them, so much so that his upper lip, after a lifetime of protrusion, now dipped inward.)

  Viewers liked what they saw. At the end of the first six episodes, NBC had a chance to back out but instead affirmed its commitment to a full thirteen-episode season. Most shows featured Ripley interviewing special guests, war heroes, and interesting people he’d profiled over the years, including a paralyzed Canadian artist who painted with a brush in his teeth. Ripley usually sketched a favorite cartoon, such as the self-mutilating holy men he’d seen in India or African Kikuyu women.

  “I always like to draw pictures of the young ladies,” he said flirtatiously to Corday.

  He seemed most at ease during those pure moments of drawing at his easel while talking breezily about his travels. Ripley was still a supremely talented artist and NBC weaved plenty of on-air sketches into each script, with Ripley drawing scenes that he’d “bring to life for you” in segments called “Ripley’s Sketchbook.”

  Ripley’s favorite dramatic reenactment involved the story of a melancholy Italian man who could never laugh “because the whole world is ugly and unhappy.” His doctor’s prescription was to find laughter at the circus, where the famous Grimaldi the Clown performed. It turned out that the doctor’s patient was Grimaldi himself, who eventually died of “melancholia.” Said Ripley, “The funniest man in the world was also the unhappiest.”

  Turning to Peggy Corday, he added, “The difference between joy and sadness isn’t so very much after all.” Friends would note the irony of Ripley’s affinity for Grimaldi’s story.

  As he’d done since breaking into radio in the early 1930s, Ripley drank whiskey or gin before each episode. Sometimes it helped, and he appeared smooth and calm. Other nights he seemed awkward and clumsy, forgetting guest names and mangling lines and, if one listened closely, slurring and swishing his words. While introducing a lord and lady from Scotland who were to perform a traditional Scottish dance—a surreal jig alleged to be the only time British nobility performed such a thing in public—Ripley told the couple, “Well, you’ll have the joint a-jiving—or something like that.”

  Though he seemed to be finding some momentum, the shows were taking an emotional toll, and colleagues worried about Ripley’s increasing agitation, how he often looked so drawn and tired. On May 4, he fired off one of his scathing telegrams, this one aimed at NBC executives. “This is a formal protest against the dreadful way in which the ‘Believe It or Not’ TV show has been mismanaged,” he wrote, signing it “Believe It or Not Ripley.”

  Two days later, NBC received another telegram, this one from Liese Wisse, telling NBC that Ripley refused to come to the studio the next day. “Mr. Ripley is entertaining guests in New York apartment. Will not be available for rehearsal,” Liese wrote.

  NBC had to wonder what it had gotten itself into with the temperamental cartoonist.

  PEGGY CORDAY WAS PAID $100 per episode and turned out to be worth every penny. Smooth and professional, even a bit sassy and flirty, she often ad-libbed when Ripley flubbed one of his lines or maimed some guest’s name, deftly covering up the host’s gaffes. She was the perfect and perky offset to the sometimes confused and distracted Ripley, who seemed to enjoy having her by his side during his tenuous venture into television.

  Even with Ripley’s lack of polish, the show became instantly popular, at least among the limited number of households with televisions. Ripley could be clunky while interviewing others, but his unease somehow helped guests relax, as it had on radio. Like the daytime TV hosts who would later become megastars using a similar formula, he gently coaxed guests to open up, to share their emotions and vulnerabilities, often with surprisingly moving results.

  He again interviewed Poon Lim, the sailor who’d drifted for 133 days in a life raft. He told Ripley, “I was never afraid.” Ripley introduced viewers to a Philadelphia man who was injured in a car accident and, told that he’d be wheelchair-bound for life, trained himself to walk again—on his hands. Another guest was born blind and had taught himself to play piano—at age two. One show celebrated National Hospital Week and Ripley interviewed Army nurse Katherine Dollison, who’d been on Corregidor when it fell to the Japanese. She broke down while describing her three years in a Japanese prison: “Well, Bob. It was pretty awful.”

  Off-screen, however, the troubles continued. He became disproportionately angry when NBC approved, then overruled, a guest list he and Storer had put together—after the guests had already been paid. Ripley also complained about the injustice of one writer (George Lefferts) getting full credit for writing the show when others (including Pearlroth and Storer) had been doing much of the work. In general, Ripley seemed burdened by this foray into TV land. A week shy of the final episode of his first thirteen-week season, Ripley bade his audience farewell with an impromptu and heartfelt prayer, concluding: “The blessing of the Lord be upon you.”

/>   Though frustrated with aspects of NBC’s handling of the show, he appreciated those who worked on it, and in late May threw a party at a German restaurant for the cast and crew, just before the May 24 program, which would unexpectedly turn out to be his last.

  Thirteen weeks into the season, Ripley fans knew when and where to tune in. At nine thirty on Tuesday night, May 24, viewers saw the familiar introductory shot of a Buddha, followed by the sound of a gong. Announcer Fritz DeWilde explained that tonight Ripley would bring to life a dramatization of “the true story behind the world’s most famous bugle call.” With Memorial Day a week away, Ripley had decided to feature a patriotic tribute to taps.

  First, Peggy Corday joined Ripley at his desk to introduce a reenactment of a Hungarian man and wife being separated during World War II and sent to concentration camps. Each thought the other had died and after the war they both moved to New York. While riding the subway one day, the man met another Holocaust survivor, Marcel Sternberger. As the two men talked, Sternberger realized that he knew the man’s wife and he helped reunite the couple.

  Calling it “one of the most touching love stories ever recorded,” Ripley interviewed Sternberger, whom he called the couple’s “guardian angel.”

  In the next segment, Ripley and Corday looked through his collection of crown jewels, gem-crusted replicas of crowns, and scepters from England, France, India, and Africa. Ripley explained how the duke of Windsor chose not to wear a crown during his brief reign as king of England (before abdicating to marry his American girlfriend). He added that he’d recently seen the duke in Palm Beach, and instead of a crown and scepter he wore a golf cap and wielded a golf club.

  Suddenly, Ripley’s eyes glazed over and he grew quiet, still holding one of the crowns in his hand. Corday realized something was wrong and quickly stepped in.