A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  “Rip is quite unspoiled,” said Hugh Leamy, who interviewed Ripley for the American magazine. “One of those soft-spoken, unobtrusive souls who can do a half dozen jobs at once without getting confused or excited.”

  Ripley worked hard to avoid the business side of his job. Contracts, letters, and phone calls were Dick Hyman’s job. But he always made time for friends and fans, even if they put him behind schedule. He felt fortunate to have attracted so many followers, and was grateful for their loyalty. As he told Leamy, “If I hadn’t hit on a lucky idea, I’d have been just another cartoonist.”

  Every day brought new offers. Billboard magazine described the “spirited salary-bidding contest” between RKO and Warner Bros., both hoping to sign Ripley to a vaudeville contract. Ripley signed with Warner Bros. for $4,000 per show. That was followed by a similar bidding war between radio networks, which led to Ripley signing with the National Broadcasting Company’s Red Network and agreeing to a year of weekly programs, a contract worth $52,000—$1,000 for every fifteen minutes of airtime. Billboard said Ripley was the only performer besides Jack Dempsey who could earn so much without singing or dancing.

  Becoming a stage and radio performer was a bold move for someone still uneasy with public speaking, and Ripley considered turning down the offers, knowing he was “not very good at it.” At Hyman’s urging, he began taking speech lessons to improve his elocution and diction. He also started attending theater performances and films, studying how professional actors spoke and carried themselves. “I’m getting better,” he told one reporter. “And it’s good discipline for the spirit.”

  It turned out that spirits were also good discipline. Ripley performed best with his paper cup of gin or whiskey nearby. But even with the emboldening assistance of alcohol, he remained a less-than-natural entertainer. His hands shook and his talks were speed-bumped with “ums” and “ahs.” He hoped to prove to sponsors and fans, though, that he was a good sport, willing to try anything if it helped the cartoon. “Shyer than a white rabbit,” a radio colleague said. “But he threw himself heart and soul into everything he did.”

  Fans and radio listeners would come to appreciate Ripley’s awkward, earnest manner.

  As would Hollywood.

  WARNER BROS. had been founded by four Polish brothers from western Pennsylvania who, after World War I, began producing their own Hollywood films. After a successful run with the heroic soldier-dog Rin Tin Tin, the brothers bought the Vitagraph Company in 1925 and took over that company’s Vitaphone studios in Brooklyn, where they produced “talkies.” In 1927, Warner Bros. unveiled The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson, followed a year later by The Lights of New York, considered the first true talking picture. By 1930, Warner Bros. had produced hundreds of experimental short films called “Vitaphone Varieties” or “Broadway Brevities,” starring vaudeville stars, comedians, singers, and even media celebrities like Walter Winchell.

  BELIEVE IT!

  In 1930 Vitaphone launched a series of animated cartoons called “Looney Tunes” that would create such characters as Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Elmer Fudd. Introduced as Egghead in the late 1930s, the speech-impeded and stuttering character who became Fudd was believed to have been partly modeled on Ripley. One cartoon, “Believe It or Else,” featured a bucktoothed Egghead wearing a loud suit and spats. The narrator introduces the world’s loudest hog caller, the human basketball, and the world’s fastest woodcutter. “I don’t believe it!” says Egghead. Egghead/Fudd also made a cameo appearance in The Isle of Pingo Pongo, a faux South Seas travelogue cartoon that was later banned for its racist depiction of black islanders.

  Hearst had been working with Vitaphone for more than a decade, and it’s likely that his influence led Warner Bros. to offer Ripley four ten-minute “Vitaphone Varieties” shows, at $3,500 per episode—the start of Ripley’s long-term and lucrative relationship with both Warner Bros. and the big screen. Ripley’s name began to appear on theater marquees in mid-1930 and the films became instant hits, sometimes prompting applause at their conclusion.

  In Ripley’s first-ever film, he introduced viewers to a six-year-old Chinese boy from Chicago named One Long Hop, said to have been born the day of Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, and a woman who could speak ten words per second. (The boy was actually the son of Ripley’s cartoonist friend, Paul Fung—“One Long Hop” was a nickname; fast-talking Cygna Conly was a romantic interest who would soon come to work for Ripley.) In his next film, Ripley emerged from behind a six-foot mound of letters to thank a few letter carriers for handling so much of his mail. Then he displayed some creatively addressed envelopes, including one addressed in Braille, others in Greek, sign language, and one with a tear in the envelope next to a sketch of Robert E. Lee—Rip + Lee.

  The films offered the first in-the-flesh look at the famed cartoonist. For many, it likely came as a shock to see how badly his teeth protruded and how significantly they affected his speech. Like a craggy wall between upper and lower lips, Ripley’s misshapen and misaligned teeth prevented him from fully closing his mouth, making it difficult to pronounce certain letters. With the help of his speech lessons (and liquor) he had grown accustomed to compensating, but certain letters and words still sounded awkward—b’s sounded like v’s, p’s sounded like fee, and s’s emerged in a slushy lisp.

  On-screen, Ripley appeared swishy and loose-limbed, almost effeminate—possibly due to his self-prescribed doses of hooch. He walked with a sheepdog’s waddle and constantly fiddled with the nubs of charcoal he kept in his pockets. After introducing guests, he’d shuffle to an easel and sketch a cartoon—an “Up-arm Man” from India or the boy who died of old age at six years old or the man-eating tree of Madagascar. He wore nice suits with bow ties and spats over his shoes. He appeared fit and confident, though he was starting to develop a paunch and lose hair, the remnants of which were slicked back and shiny.

  The director, Murray Roth (who cowrote Lights of New York), grew frustrated as Ripley mangled the scripts. In his On Broadway column, Walter Winchell teased, “Ripley, who knows everything, can’t remember his lines over at the Long Island studios. heheheh.” Speaking before a small audience assembled on a stage designed to look like a ship’s lounge or an airplane cabin, Ripley introduced guests and shared film footage of his travels to Morocco or Jerusalem or film clips of real people doing weird things. His human queeriosities included a sixteen-month-old roller skater, a six-year-old boy who smoked, and an armless trombone player. By featuring odd performers from Scranton, Flint, Tacoma, and Toledo, he showed an appreciation for small-town America as well as genuine awe for the fetishes and fixations of those willing to spend years of concentrated effort carving a chain of matchsticks or building a violin entirely of sugar or printing an eighth-of-an-inch copy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which Ripley stored inside a pinky ring.

  In one episode, Ripley is arrested and tried in a mock court, forced to prove some of his controversial statements: America had no official national anthem? The Statue of Liberty was built atop a prison? He patiently defends himself on all charges and once again explains the details of his famous claim that Lindbergh had been the sixty-seventh man to fly across the Atlantic. Finally, the judge intervenes and declares, “Mr. Ripley, believe it or not, you are acquitted.”

  HEARST’S SYNDICATES were reaching more Americans than any one news source had at any time in history, which meant Ripley was reaching them, too. But as the financial crisis worsened—Hearst ordered his papers to never use the term “depression”—circulation declined, prompting Hearst to aggressively expand his media empire into radio. He told employees that radio publicity was “the greatest promotion in the world today.”

  Ripley had done occasional radio shows since his 1922 debut, a thirty-nine-minute show on WDY in Roselle Park, New Jersey (the nation’s first broadcast station). He had appeared on The Collier Hour show in 1929 and in early 1930, but those shows had all been one-time events. By mid-1930, he was ready for a
show of his own, and signed with NBC.

  Sponsored by Colonial Beacon Oil Company, Ripley’s program would air Monday nights in New York and a dozen other cities. As with his Vitaphone films, Ripley would introduce listeners to some of the strange people he’d been featuring for years in print. His first guest was speed-talking Cygna Conly, who read Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in thirty-two seconds—eight and a half words per second. Eventually, by putting sextuplets on the air, a girl who roller-skated on her hands, a legless boy swimmer named Zimmy, a girl named June Bugg, a man who survived being buried alive, a seventy-year-old contortionist, and scores of other “living Believe-It-or-Nots,” he would join Jack Benny, Al Jolson, and Kate Smith as a star of 1930s radio.

  WITH BELIEVE IT OR NOT on the air and in the theaters, it was getting harder for Ripley’s doubters to prove him wrong. Instead of existing as black-and-white newspaper drawings, Ripley’s oddities and their feats could now be seen and heard. In time, some of his achievers would become minor celebrities themselves, bringing even more mail from people with odd abilities or physical deformities or unlikely tales, all wanting to become part of Ripley’s famous world of the weird.

  As a self-described odd duck, Ripley felt justified in encouraging other odd ducks to share with him their peculiarities and abnormalities, even if he knew it might not be in their best interest. Some had accidental talents, such as the Kansas man with the iron stomach who ate glass, newspapers, raw cow livers, and a sack of cement. Others were born with deformities or became disfigured by accident and developed unique new skills, such as the Missouri man who lost his arms and eyesight in an explosion but learned to read Braille with his tongue—an accomplishment worth $5,000 in one of Ripley’s contests.

  By now, Ripley realized that he owed his success to the “twisted folly” of such volunteers. And at a time of rising unemployment and a malaise spreading like a disease, the escapist distractions of his world travels and his expanding menagerie of misfit characters was the ideal tonic for an ailing nation.

  His book was now in its fourteenth printing and still on the bestseller lists, having sold more than 70,000 copies. The Believe It or Not brand was succeeding overseas, too, with the book’s foreign editions earning rave reviews in Dublin, Cape Town, Stockholm, Munich, Bratislava, Tokyo, and Peking. Simon & Schuster wanted him to write another book in 1931, so he began saving readers’ letters to recycle their material. Fans wrote to him constantly, sharing their lives with him. They wanted Ripley to know about their empty rocking chair that rocked each night at the same time. About the man who bowled two games at once—lefty in one lane, righty in the other, scoring 270 in each. About the eight-year-old girl who’d been driving a truck since she was five. About the man who could lift a table and six chairs with his teeth, or the man who had smoked ten cigars a day for sixty-five years, or the sisters who made clothing from newspapers.

  Such letters were proof, as the New York American put it in a promotional ad, that “there’s a little bit of Riplianism in all of us,” that everyone harbors a “fascination with the apparently untrue facts of life.”

  It seemed people needed Ripley’s affordable brand of entertainment, treasured it during an otherwise troubled time. America was hunkering down, suffering a Roaring Twenties hangover. But with Ripley in their papers and on their radios, they could experience foreign lands, meet strange and interesting people. Ripley was becoming the country’s know-it-all professor of history, geography, science, and anthropology. His offbeat lessons gave people hope.

  That’s how Norbert Pearlroth saw it too. Ripley’s cartoons “show that life is not all cut and dried, that nature is not always so workaday, that it has its own exceptions. Life does play strange tricks.” While Ripley’s lifestyle soared, Pearlroth’s remained workaday. He still visited the library each day and came home late each night, despite complaints from his wife and son. He was making about $75 a week by 1930, but he continued to believe that his search for “the marvelous, the incredible” was a worthy mission. In fact, he seemed addicted to the thrill of finding what he called “a good one.”

  “A really good item,” he once said, “is one where your heart has some part of it, where your heart begins to beat.”

  WHEN RIPLEY HEADLINED the National Automobile Show in January 1931, he was preceded onstage by President Herbert Hoover, who assured the crowd that “despite the depression” he was looking forward to “a prosperous New Year.” While 1931 would hardly be a prosperous year for most Americans, Ripley’s fortunes would mount.

  For two years, his life had been a nonstop whirl. He’d tried to keep up his traveling pace, but every trip now carried obligations. If he visited Toronto or Havana, he was expected to do interviews with Hearst papers and radio stations. If he wanted to see Europe, King Features expected stories and cartoons, NBC expected him to make up for his absence from the airwaves, and Vitaphone wanted more film. Such duties rarely stopped him from leaving the country as often as possible, though—often on a moment’s notice.

  In March of 1931, he and Bugs Baer escaped New York on the SS Roma, bound for Northern Africa and the Middle East. Shadowed by a Hearst cameraman, Ripley toured Morocco, Algiers, Tunis, Egypt, Palestine, Istanbul, and the Balkans. He returned home in May, and while the SS Leviathan was moored off Fire Island, still fifty miles from Manhattan, he broadcast a radio show from the ship back to NBC’s New York studios, which his producers touted as the first ship-to-shore radio program.

  The next day called for another stunt. In order to reach Newark for a radio show that night, Ripley climbed into a lifeboat that was lowered over the side of the Leviathan. The boat delivered him to an awaiting seaplane. Looking disheveled in a rumpled three-piece suit and crooked tie, his thinning hair askew, Ripley tipped his hat to passengers crowded along the Leviathan’s rails, then climbed inside. As the plane took off from choppy seas, a cameraman from Hearst’s Metrotone Newsreel circled above in another plane, filming the whole scene.

  What the cameras couldn’t see was Ripley’s fury. He hated to fly and hadn’t been told about the stunt until the last minute. The scheme had been concocted by Dick Hyman, his new business manager and publicity assistant, who rode beside him. During the short flight, Ripley glowered, refusing to speak to Hyman. His anger melted the next morning, though, when he saw the front-page newspaper coverage, including maps, diagrams, and photos of Ripley waving from the seaplane.

  The stunt allowed Hearst’s papers to declare that Ripley had completed his most recent foreign journey “by liner, boat, plane, train, and motorcar.” When Ripley summoned Hyman to the New York Athletic Club that afternoon, he was beaming.

  FIRED FROM HIS first two newspaper jobs and on the brink of unemployment just five years earlier, Ripley was suddenly being described in print as “the highest paid artist in America today.” At the time, Arthur Brisbane was making $250,000 as editor of Hearst’s New York American and was considered to be the country’s best-paid newsman. But Ripley’s income from King Features, Warner Bros., Simon & Schuster, and NBC actually surpassed that of Hearst’s most trusted employee. Ripley’s income—an astounding $350,000 a year in 1931—accidentally found its way into print, thanks to a lawsuit.

  Famous Speakers Inc. sued Ripley, claiming that the contract he signed in 1929 required him to give lectures exclusively for Famous Speakers. Company president Betty Smythe wanted half of the earnings from Ripley’s films, radio shows, and vaudeville performances. In his testimony, Ripley revealed to a Supreme Court judge his six-figure income, which was hungrily picked up by the gossip columnists. The judge ruled in Ripley’s favor, but the experience spooked him. He realized he needed to be more protective of his lucrative franchise.

  After hiring Hyman in late 1929 he hired NYAC handball partner Robert Hyland to manage his finances and legal affairs. Next, he formed a company, Believe It or Not, Inc., and invited his brother, Doug, to help run it.

  Now in his late twenties, Doug had lived a nomadic life. After leav
ing Santa Rosa, he’d briefly lived with sister Ethel and her husband in Sacramento but then quit school and moved to Ohio, staying with his father’s relatives and working as a carpenter. That lasted a few years until Doug escaped altogether, moving into the hills to live in a cabin. Ripley had been trying to lure Doug to New York for years. He would visit or send money to the grocery store Doug frequented, but instead of buying a train ticket Doug would buy more supplies and head back to his cabin. By 1931, Ripley had finally convinced his brother that it was time to move to New York and become part of the Believe It or Not machine.

  Even with Doug added (somewhat reluctantly) to the payroll, Ripley’s pace never slowed. He typically arose at dawn to start his twelve-hour workdays. After twenty-five years of cartooning he remained a skilled artist with an almost obsessive focus on the smallest of details. Intense morning sketch sessions were typically followed by film work in the afternoon and radio at night, then a late dinner or drinks. The release of his second book in late 1931 required another round of nonstop publicity. The New York Times called it “better, more entertaining, more surprising than his first one.” When the book tour ended, he was back in the Vitaphone studios, filming a musical called Seasons Greetings.

  Ripley hired a clipping service to collect articles in which his name appeared, another effort to keep track of his empire. One clip summed up the dizzying expansion of the Believe It or Not brand, adding: “Fortunately for him he enjoys a strong physique or he would break down beneath the celebrity strain.” But at forty-one, the strain was showing. With no time for exercise or handball, he was losing his athlete’s physique, losing hair, gaining weight, and drinking too much. He told friends he had started having headaches.