A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  Ripley had once met Roosevelt, in the 1930s, and initially claimed to like the man. He served on a March of Dimes committee at one point and sketched a few Believe It or Not cartoons that were sympathetic to Roosevelt. Over the years, however, his animosity grew, and even three years after Roosevelt’s death his hatred was on full, fuming display that night at the captain’s table. Years later, friends would speculate that maybe the poverty of Ripley’s youth fueled his belief that the New Deal helped people who should be helping themselves. Li wondered if it had something to do with China—Roosevelt’s hesitance to help China during its war with Japan, or maybe Ripley’s pride in the fortitude of the Chinese. “He liked China because he saw people working despite poverty, working in spite of war,” she said. Ripley seemed to believe the New Deal prevented people from finding their inner strengths (as he had) and made them “beggars forever.”

  Whatever the complicated reasons, Ripley seemed to know he’d gone too far that night. The captain, Hobart Ehman, finally rose and put a hand on Ripley’s shoulder, then whispered in his ear. Ripley hung his head and excused himself from the table.

  HOMEBOUND TOWARD SAN FRANCISCO, the Cleveland stopped once more in Honolulu, where Ripley received special permission and a military escort to tour the devastated naval yard at Pearl Harbor. Here again he came face-to-face with lingering scenes of the war’s most terrible moments.

  Many of the ships that had been wounded or destroyed on December 7, 1941, had been scrapped or sunk, leaving only the towers, turrets, and antennae of the USS Arizona visible above the waterline. Ripley told radio listeners the Arizona’s remains looked “like bony skeleton hands.” More than 1,100 men had died on the Arizona. Ripley was shocked to learn that most of the bodies were still entombed inside.

  Standing above the rusting battleship, trying to describe on-air what he was experiencing, Ripley’s voice quavered and he struggled to proceed. The others stood back nervously and watched him peer down into the water, the Arizona’s deck visible just feet below the surface. He seemed so sad.

  “You have no idea how shocking was the sight of that twisted, tortured steel,” Ripley said at the close of his broadcast. “I’m sure that all my listeners will join me in tribute to the heroes of Pearl Harbor.”

  Li Ling-Ai had decided to stay in Honolulu with her parents, and as the Cleveland left she stood on the pier waving up at Ripley and the others, wiping tears from her eyes.

  While sailing toward home—just ahead of warnings that a tidal wave was roaring toward Hawaii—Ripley told Storer that he wanted to design a memorial for the Arizona, some monument that could become a national shrine and forever honor the men who had died there. Ripley even hoped to convince the Navy to raise the Arizona and give the dead sailors a proper burial. Storer promised he would get the idea and a few drawings into the right hands, and Ripley began sketching various designs during the final days of the three-week, 26,000-mile journey.

  ON THE LAST LEG to San Francisco, the Storers, McMillin, and Ed Dunham (NBC’s radio manager) held a small party for Ripley in his stateroom. Dunham performed a mock radio skit, pretending to be Ripley celebrating his ninety-second birthday. But the party was cut short by stormy seas; not quite the predicted tidal wave but a violent thrashing that tossed the ship and caused Ripley to miss his final radio broadcast, scheduled for that night in San Francisco. It was the only show he missed during the journey.

  In San Francisco, as he often did during visits there, he stopped briefly at McAllister Street to look into the basement windows of his first apartment. He and the others then traveled by train to Los Angeles for one more Truth or Consequences show. That night, Ripley invited McMillin to dinner at the Brown Derby, along with two beautiful blond Hungarian actresses, Mitzi Bruce and Ilona Massey. Massey gave McMillin her phone number and told him, “Call me sometime.”

  McMillin had fallen in love a dozen times during his weeks abroad, and noticed that Ripley—who “dresses colorfully and in good taste for a big man”—seemed to attract beautiful women, seemingly without trying. The trip had been a young man’s fantasy and McMillin filled his diary with giddy descriptions of all the stunning women he’d met. Though he had seen little of Ripley during the cruise, he was suddenly sitting at Ripley’s side in the company of two Hollywood starlets.

  Ripley left the next morning for a train ride to San Simeon, to meet with William Randolph Hearst. McMillin, meanwhile, was soon back with his widowed mother, unemployed and planning to look for a job. Yet, as he put it in the final line of his diary, he’d always be able to say, “I went to the Orient with Bob Ripley.

  “I could learn more facts in 10 minutes of conversation with Mr. Ripley than I could in reading a whole volume of Book of Knowledge. What a guy.”

  Those who’d watched Ripley grow moodier and more unpredictable in recent years had hoped that the trip to Hawaii, the Philippines, China, and Japan would refresh him. Instead, he returned home crankier and more volatile than ever.

  He snapped at employees and friends. He fired and rehired one of his personal secretaries, Bill McDonald, almost weekly. Once during a dinner party he barked at Ming Jung, telling her not to speak to the other guests, saying, “Get off to your room.” He even took his frustrations out on Doug Storer. When one show ran behind schedule, Storer interrupted Ripley during the final moments in order to reach the commercial break in time. Ripley seethed for days and then sent Storer a furious letter. “I don’t recall being so disturbed or humiliated as I was on the last program when you cut me off on the air,” he wrote, complaining that the dramatic sketches were too long. “This definitely I will never permit again under any circumstances whatever.”

  Storer dutifully wrote a lengthy letter of apology, blaming the director and promising, “It won’t happen again.”

  King Features was also a target of Ripley’s wrath. In a 1948 memo to his editor, Brad Kelly, he complained about changes to a cartoon in which an artist who drew the caption had covered up a small portion of the drawing and, in Ripley’s view, ruined the whole thing. “I seriously object to any change being made in the Sunday cartoon,” he wrote. “Certainly the greatest newspaper feature in the history of the newspaper business should not be cut down at any time.”

  Doctors had continued warning Ripley to work less and lose weight, to relax and slow down. Instead, he kept plunging into new projects, including one that he hoped might outlive him. It seemed Ripley had begun giving serious thought to his legacy, to what he would leave behind, and for the past few years he’d been looking for a location for a permanent Believe It or Not museum, ideally one in his former hometown.

  In 1945, he had come close to buying a building on the former Santa Rosa estate of Luther Burbank (who’d died in 1926), but the deal fell through. Then, just before the ship left San Francisco for his 1948 Far East trip, Ripley made a quick drive north to Santa Rosa with his sister, Ethel. They visited their parents’ graves at the Odd Fellows Cemetery and their mother’s church, which was in bad shape. Ripley told Ethel he was thinking of buying the run-down Church Built of One Tree and turning it into his personal museum. It could be a memorial to Lillie Belle, he said, and a place to display his thousands of collected curios.

  Back in New York in mid-1948, he contacted Santa Rosa’s city manager and offered to pay half the cost of restoring the church, if the city would pay the other half. He suggested moving the building to a new location and adding a special museum wing while keeping the original church intact. The city council initially agreed to the idea, but then a new city manager was hired and argued that the church was too old and would cost too much to move. “Besides,” said the new city manager, Ed Blom, “the building is not fireproof and not a good place for housing valuable curios.”

  While waiting for his hometown to make a final decision, Ripley continued to work on his Pearl Harbor memorial.

  He’d initially proposed raising the Arizona and removing the bodies, but the secretary of the Navy’s office informed
him by letter that it had already decided that recovering the bodies would inflict “needless cruelty” on the victims’ families. Ripley agreed to modify his proposal, the design for which included a marble causeway that would give visitors access to the Arizona from land. He even wrote to William Randolph Hearst, seeking help with the costs.

  “I feel so very deeply about this,” he told Hearst, adding that he was ready to appeal to readers and listeners for support.

  Storer felt that, with Hearst behind the memorial and Ripley promoting it on radio, it could be “a monument of great importance.” He encouraged Ripley in letters through the summer of 1948, reminding him that the Navy was receptive to his idea and that top Navy officials were awaiting Ripley’s sketches. Storer nudged him to “send them along shortly.” When Ripley finally finished his designs, Storer sent them to Rear Admiral John J. Manning, head of the Navy’s yards and docks bureau, who called Ripley’s idea “most commendable” and “one that would give me great pride.”

  Manning offered to provide $8.7 million in military funding, but suggested that the memorial become one that honored not just those killed aboard the Arizona but “all of the heroic Pearl Harbor dead.” He further suggested building the memorial in a different location, so it could be viewed by ships entering Pearl Harbor, the Hawaiian equivalent of the Statue of Liberty.

  Storer then watched in frustration as Ripley slowly, inexplicably backed away from the project through the latter half of 1948, distracted by other tasks and apparently unwilling to modify his designs to meet the Navy’s suggestions. Ripley also pulled away from his plans for a Santa Rosa museum after the city hesitated to cooperate.

  In no time, both opportunities were lost.

  BELIEVE IT!

  It would take another fourteen years for the USS Arizona to be declared a national shrine. A memorial would be built above the ship’s sunken remains; instead of Ripley’s causeway, the memorial is now reached by boat.

  TOWARD LATE 1948, at the end of his current radio program’s cycle, Ripley made plans to travel once again, arranging to join a four-day trip around the world by airplane. By now, however, it had become clear that his hair-trigger temper and angry outbursts weren’t solely emotional but were physical manifestations of his increasingly bad health. His doctors refused to allow him to make the trip. Doug Storer wondered if the small stroke Ripley had apparently suffered a few years earlier was partly to blame for his erratic behavior.

  Then again, in his recent travels Ripley had discovered the world to be a much different place. His cruise on the Cleveland had taken him to or past the battlefields and morgues of the Pacific war, all of which had ruffled and saddened him, as had China’s unstoppable slump toward communism. He’d returned home in an exhausted state but continued to work at a frenzied pace, and now the doctors were telling him: No more traveling.

  What he needed most was to take a real vacation and recuperate. To escape to Florida and lounge beside his pool. To dawdle aboard the Mon Lei, which now sat docked behind his house like a neglected toy. Instead, he added yet another massive commitment to his perpetually overbooked life: a television show.

  THOUGH TWENTY YEARS of live radio had prepared Ripley reasonably well for a transition to television, it turned out the mediums were hardly interchangeable.

  As Ripley sat on a soundstage behind a hand-carved desk and cameras began to roll during the filming of his pilot episode, he seemed startled when co-host Norman Brokenshire (a popular radio announcer) appeared beside him, accompanied by a spectacularly beautiful young woman. “We-elll, who’s this pretty lady,” Ripley asked, and Brokenshire introduced Nellie Jane Cannon, a cover model whom LIFE magazine referred to as one of “New York’s loveliest girls.” Ripley seemed flustered and promptly mangled her name, welcoming “Miss Jennie Ling” to his show. It’s possible he’d leaned too heavily on his radio-show crutch and tossed back too much drink.

  When Brokenshire asked Ripley if he still actually drew all of his own cartoons, Ripley insisted that he got up at six o’clock every morning to draw. Brokenshire dared him to prove it, and Ripley turned to Nellie/Jennie and asked what she’d like him to draw.

  “How about the strangest man you’ve ever seen?”

  Ripley walked over to an easel, picked up a piece of charcoal and quickly slashed a few thick lines, then scratched some waves and squiggles that seemed to be hair. As he stroked and swished, the vague shape of a man’s face appeared. Ripley smeared parts of his drawing with his fingers and palm and, as if by magic, the disjointed black scribbles came into focus. The man was clearly African, practically a caricature, with a wide nose and high forehead.

  It was an impressive impromptu drawing, but as Brokenshire quickly pointed out, there didn’t seem to be anything strange or unique about the face. Ripley then explained: “The reason he really is so strange is because on his head he has horns…”—and here he drew on his man’s forehead a long, black horn—“twenty … eight … inches … long!” Ripley said that years earlier in Africa he had met the humble man, who shed his horns the way deer shed antlers.

  “Each year they grew again,” Ripley told Nellie Jane. “He is without a doubt the strangest man I’ve ever seen.”

  Despite Ripley’s awkward hesitations and occasional stumbles, NBC executives decided they liked what they saw in the pilot, which also featured Nellie Jane gamely choking down a bite of a hundred-year-old Chinese egg that Ripley fed her with a spoon. The network decided the Believe It or Not brand was ready for prime time and offered Ripley a weekly show that would launch on March 1, 1949.

  While Storer was thrilled to introduce his best client to the untested waters of broadcast television, he was worried about Ripley, who was clearly unwell. Ripley promised Storer he’d take it easy during an upcoming Florida vacation. But first he closed out 1948 in style, dressed in a checked suit and sporting a fake mustache.

  In mid-December, King Features hosted a massive celebration for the thirtieth anniversary of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. The Gay Nineties–themed costume party was held at Toots Shor’s on West Fifty-first Street. Ripley and Baer had become fans of the restaurant/bar and its wisecracking owner, Bernard “Toots” Shor, a rough-edged storyteller beloved by such celebrity eater-drinkers as Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, Orson Welles, and Ernest Hemingway.

  All the top King Features executives attended, as did many syndicated Hearst columnists and cartoonists. Dressed in a baggy houndstooth suit and wearing a derby and his fake mustache, Ripley posed for silly pictures and signed autographs for King Features employees who’d worked for him for years but who rarely got the chance to see the man in person. Liese Wisse looked stunning in an extremely low-cut burlesque outfit and Li Ling-Ai came dressed as a sexy Chinese peasant. Surrounded by so many friends and colleagues—Vyvyan Donner, Cygna Conly, Bugs Baer, and many others—Ripley drank and sang and danced all night, having the time of his life.

  EVER SINCE HIS STEEP RISE to fame in the 1930s, Ripley had been nursing a plan. He’d explained it in a 1935 interview with one of his first editors, Harry B. Smith, who was still working as a columnist at the San Francisco Chronicle. During the interview, Smith asked about the sudden wealth and renown, remembering Ripley as so shy and seemingly vulnerable to exploitation. But Ripley assured Smith that stardom didn’t trouble him because once he’d earned enough money he would buy a dream house on the Atlantic coast and, as he put it, “spend his last years in leisure and ease.”

  Fourteen years later, he’d found the house but not the leisure and ease.

  Into 1949, he spent busy weeks obsessively sprucing up Hi-Mount. He’d already moved some of his household staff down from New York and now had ten people working at the house or on the Mon Lei. His longtime carpenter came south to install new cabinets and fixtures throughout the house, to build a special ramp beside the saltwater swimming pool, to help Ripley’s dogs get in and out of the water. It was all in preparation for what Ripley intended would soon become his permanent rel
ocation to Florida, the dream he’d described to Smith.

  Doug and Hazel visited for a few weeks so that Ripley and Storer could discuss the upcoming TV show. At first, Ripley seemed like his old entertaining self. He invited another couple to visit and they all rang in 1949 together, swimming in the pool and strolling on the vast lawn that sloped down to Lake Worth.

  Ripley one day invited a dozen friends over for a floating cocktail party on the Mon Lei, handing everyone colorful straw hats as they boarded. Despite heavy winds and protests from his captain, Ripley insisted on sailing beyond Lake Worth, through an inlet into the Atlantic. Waves battered the flat-bottomed boat and Ripley’s guests were nearly tossed overboard. The captain quickly returned to the calmer waters of Lake Worth and the party continued on Ripley’s dock. That night, the Storers watched Ripley slip into a sodden funk. He complained that his guests had taken the valuable Chinese hats he’d handed out, thinking they were souvenirs.

  Soon, there were more signs of instability. One day, Hazel walked into the living room to find Ripley’s secretary, Cygna Conly, holding a hand to her face and seething with anger. Conly and Ripley had argued about some business matter and he’d slapped her. He later apologized and bought Conly a mink coat—not the first time a mink served as an apology. (Ripley once enlisted Li Ling-Ai’s help in buying twelve mink coats for “the ladies that he went out with once in a while,” as Li put it years later. When Ripley gave Li the money to make the purchase, he told her, “Choose one for yourself.”)

  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.”