“Bob, they’re absolutely astonishing,” Corday continued, trying to keep the show rolling.
As Ripley slumped slightly, his eyes still open, Corday stepped closer and put her arm on his shoulder, to prevent him from falling over. Storer was amazed at Corday’s poise but knew he needed to intervene. Just as he was about to walk onto the stage, Ripley emerged from his stupor and, with Corday’s help, haltingly carried on.
After mumbling an introduction to a dramatization on the life of King Henry the Fourth, Ripley groggily introduced the planned reenactment of the story behind the funereal bugle call taps. He repeated the oft-told but apocryphal version of the song’s origins in which a Union captain found the music in the pocket of his dead son, a Confederate soldier. (Taps was actually composed by Union general Daniel Butterfield in 1862 and later played by buglers at both Union and Confederate funerals.)
Instead of closing the show with his usual good-night prayer, Ripley looked into the camera and explained in a somewhat shaky voice that the program would end with the playing of taps, in honor of all the veterans whose ultimate sacrifice to their country was being commemorated that Memorial Day.
“May this call be a requiem not only for our dead but for the very act of war which took their lives,” he said. “And to that all mankind must say Amen.”
As the program began fading to black, a lone bugler played the familiar notes of taps, his figure silhouetted against a backdrop of clouds.
When the final note expired, the show closed with the sound of a gong.
IT’S UNCLEAR what exactly happened to Ripley onstage that night—there is no known film footage of the episode, and eyewitnesses later shared differing accounts of what occurred next. Some witnesses said Ripley grew weary again after the show, passed out, and fell to the floor. Others said he collapsed on the air and was rushed to the hospital. One employee speculated that Ripley had suffered a small stroke, while others assumed that his heart problems had caused a temporarily sluggish flow of blood to his brain. (As a producer for the show, Doug Storer witnessed the entire scene, making his version the most reliable.)
In a detailed account written years later, Storer said he cornered Ripley in the studio while crews disassembled the set and the audience filed out.
“Stop,” Storer said. “I want to talk to you about something.”
Storer knew Ripley was physically in bad shape and that his doctor had been warning him to get a more complete checkup.
“You’ve got to go into the hospital and get those checkups,” Storer said. “You’re going to do it this week.”
“No, no. I’m not going to do it this week,” Ripley said. “Maybe next week.”
“Bob, I don’t care if we cancel the show. I’m not going to have you do what you did tonight and make it permanent,” Storer insisted.
Storer was a few inches shorter than Ripley, who patted him on the shoulder as if he were a child and said, “Oh, Doug, Doug, stop worrying.”
But Storer was familiar with Ripley’s often-irrational optimism and well-honed delay tactics. He made Ripley promise to visit the hospital as soon as possible.
“You win, Doug,” Ripley finally agreed. “I’m going to the hospital for a checkup at once.”
But Ripley didn’t check in the next day. Instead, he threw a party.
When Ripley called Li Ling-Ai the next morning and told her he wanted to host her birthday party, she told him he’d mixed up the dates and it wasn’t her birthday yet. But he seemed desperate for an excuse to defer his promise to Storer, so Li relented. She could tell Ripley was nervous about the hospital visit and assumed he wanted to enjoy one more get-together with friends before letting doctors poke and prod him.
The day after that—Thursday, May 26—Ripley checked into Harkness Pavilion at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, where technicians administered tests that confirmed what he already knew: like his dad, he had a bad heart.
His condition was hardly critical, though, and Ripley remained in fairly good spirits, even when doctors decided to keep him overnight for more tests. That night, Bugs Baer paid a quick visit, sneaking in a bottle of booze to ease his friend’s discomfort.
The next morning, Ripley used his bedside phone to call other friends and start making plans for the weekend. One doctor, Ralph Boots, then arrived with two well-known heart specialists, who agreed that even more tests were needed. The specialists administered an injection of some kind, but Ripley insisted he still felt good and expected to be released soon. Li had promised to stop by for lunch and Ripley told his nurses that Madame Chiang Kai-shek was going to pay him a visit. When Li arrived, the nurses assumed she really was Madame Chiang until Ripley confessed to the gag.
But Li grew worried when she saw Ripley. Liese Wisse was already there, having volunteered to spend the day by Ripley’s side, and she seemed troubled too.
“His face was a little lonely,” Li said years later. She tried to cheer him up by ordering lunch from a nurse, asking if they had pheasant lips on the menu. Ripley laughed but then got back to business. He had previously asked Li to enlist a group of scientists and doctors for an upcoming episode about believe-it-or-nots in medicine and, specifically, Chinese herbs. Li said she was meeting with two scientists and a doctor that very night. When she left him, she could tell Ripley seemed anxious.
“I sensed an unease,” she later said, recalling that he was “a trifle scared.”
Still, Ripley tried to convince himself it wasn’t serious and continued making future plans. At around five o’clock, at the end of his second day in the hospital, he called Baer, who now lived in Connecticut, not far from Ripley’s home in Mamaroneck.
Ripley told Baer he was still suffering through his doctor’s “checkup,” but that he expected to be home for the weekend and wanted to see him.
“I’m going to get home this week,” he said. “I don’t care what happens. I’m going to go home and be home.”
“Come on,” Baer offered. “Join me. We’ll do something.”
Ripley seemed thrilled with the idea. “I’ll be out to your farm tomorrow afternoon,” he said.
When Ripley hung up the phone, he asked Liese to take some dictation, then suddenly clutched his chest and began to convulse.
Liese jumped from her seat and rushed to his side, calling out wildly for help. When no one responded, she raced down the hall to beckon a nurse, who quickly found the doctor on call. They all sprinted back to Ripley’s room, but it was too late.
LeRoy Robert Ripley was dead, the victim of a massive heart attack. He was fifty-nine.
WITHIN THE HOUR, Liese found herself all alone and tasked with making a series of painful, tearful phone calls—to Ripley’s brother, to Norbert Pearlroth, to Robert Hyland, Doug Storer, and many others.
“Mr. Ripley is dead,” she told each one, over and over. “He’s dead.”
Liese next reached Cygna Conly, who in turn broke the news to Li Ling-Ai. Li couldn’t believe that the man who’d just hosted her premature birthday party, who seemed so full of jokes and optimism just hours earlier, was dead. She gripped the phone in shock. How could Ripley be gone? “It is no good to be that famous and work that hard,” she told Conly. “Because you die young.”
A group of friends gathered that night at the hospital. Amid the gloom, Pearlroth quietly commented on how strange it was that Ripley’s final broadcast had been his thirteenth, that the show had featured the story of a funeral song. He further told the others that ten years earlier Ripley had actually predicted his life might end in 1949.
They’d been having dinner together when Ripley observed that his life had thus far gone in ten-year cycles. Ever attuned to a hard-to-believe story, he explained how he’d started his cartooning career in 1909, had launched his Believe It or Not series ten years after that, and in 1929 had joined King Features. Ripley told Pearlroth that night in 1939 that he hoped Providence would allow him “another ten years of the same life.”
Li told the o
thers how Ripley once spoke to her about his hope to be reincarnated—in China. She said she believed Ripley had “the Chinese attitude.”
“We are all born lonely,” Li said. “We are all what we create.”
Bizarrely, the day Ripley died was also a day of death for China. The last of the Nationalist Army troops retreated from Shanghai while others surrendered to Mao’s soldiers, who then marched them off to POW camps. The world’s fourth-largest city was now fully in the hands of the Communists.
NEWS OF RIPLEY’S DEATH spread quickly. Hazel Storer was listening to music on the radio when an announcer broke in with a news flash. When Bugs Baer learned that his friend was dead, he immediately started writing a column, which would appear the next morning in Hearst’s New York Journal-American and across America, via the International News Service.
“This one is tough to believe,” it began. “The Believe-It-Or-Not man will not answer the gong [on his TV show] Tuesday night. It rang for the last time Friday afternoon when Ripley dissolved into the mysterious past whence came his amazing truths.”
Baer had known Ripley for more than thirty years. They had grown up together, become famous and rich together. They’d shared innumerable drinks, laughs, and women. Baer had been with Ripley the night he created his first “Believe It or Not” (that is, “Champs and Chumps”) cartoon, and the night he’d met Beatrice. Ripley had been with Baer when his first wife died, and earlier in 1949 had hosted a New York Heart Association fund-raiser for his second wife, Louise, who was ill. Now Ripley was gone and Baer was in mourning. But print was his life, his outlet, as it had been for Ripley, so he forced himself to mourn publicly. His column continued:
He had the pride of craftsmanship in his drawings and the authority of knowledge in his statements. Nobody ever proved him wrong. If Ripley told me I had two heads, I would go out and buy two hats. And tip them both to the greatest cartoonist in the history of American journalism.
FOUR DAYS LATER, a funeral service was held at St. James Episcopal Church, a half-dozen blocks from Ripley’s apartment. Though he’d nurtured a lifelong fascination with religion, he was never a churchgoer. The Episcopal church had been Storer’s idea, and he asked the Rev. Dr. James W. Hyde to officiate.
More than four hundred attended, with hundreds more waiting outside. William Randolph Hearst’s son, William Jr., served as an honorary pallbearer, alongside publisher Max Schuster. Former heavyweight champs Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey attended, as did famed aviators Eddie Rickenbacker and James Doolittle; numerous celebrities, journalists, and athletes; and a large contingent of artists and cartoonists, including such long-ago colleagues as Paul Terry and Herb Roth.
One by one, Ripley’s lovers arrived, including Ming Jung, now married. She and a few other former BION Island inhabitants (the voluntary signers of Ripley’s waiver) sat together in a pew, weeping behind black veils, an awkward reunion. Eight men carried the coffin, staggering at one point and almost losing their grip. Thousands lined the streets to watch the bronze, rose-covered casket roll toward Grand Central Station, where it would begin traveling by rail back to Ripley’s native California. A group of his companions, including Liese and Ling-Ai, entered a black limousine behind the hearse as onlookers rubbernecked to see who was behind the veils.
One man on his lunch break turned to a man beside him and said, “They must be his models.” A woman nearby made a crude joke (“You mean his whores?”) and they all shared a laugh. Hazel Storer overheard and scowled at them.
Ripley then began his final transcontinental journey, loaded onto The Chicagoan, accompanied by his brother and sister. In Chicago, his body was transferred to a City of San Francisco train for the two-day trip west, back to the town where his cartooning career had begun. Nell Griffith, Ripley’s first friend and first love, met the casket at the San Francisco depot and traveled in the hearse, led by police escort, for the last fifty-mile leg back to Santa Rosa. It was a suitable final journey.
SANTA ROSANS TURNED OUT by the thousands to say farewell, lining the streets and spilling out of Lillie Belle’s Church Built of One Tree.
Classmates and neighbors told stories to the papers about young Ripley the obsessed doodler, the aspiring ballplayer; how he never forgot his hometown, especially Miss O’Meara; how proud they were of the rangy and curious barefoot boy who left town and followed his whimsical dreams.
Nell Griffith wrote a story for the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, describing the LeRoy Ripley she once knew: “a shy and rather awkward boy … a boy dressed in a brown suit with knee pants … a boy with a great gift and a driving ambition.” Nell’s husband had died two years earlier. Now widowed and raising her children alone, Nell said of Ripley’s death, “It shouldn’t have happened so soon.”
Compared to the average Joe, Ripley seemed to have lived the life of twenty men. He had also poured everything he had into Believe It or Not, which became his life, his identity, his true religion. That commitment had fully consumed him, professionally and personally, leaving little room for anything or anyone else.
Some, like Hazel Storer, believed that losing China to a Communist regime had contributed to Ripley’s ill health. (Mao Zedong would officially establish the People’s Republic of China five months after Ripley’s death.) His sister, Ethel, on the other hand, wondered if his inability to create a museum and a legacy in the Church Built of One Tree had been a factor. “He felt pretty bad about not being able to make it a memorial for his curios,” she told a reporter after the funeral.
The likeliest reason for Ripley’s health problems and turbulent behavior was one he’d been hinting at in print for decades.
An insatiable, incurable romantic, he loved women so much (and, apparently, so often) but had never managed to find his one true love—except Oakie. In fact, his physical and emotional decline seemed to have begun in full after Oakie died. In a revealing 1947 interview with True Confession magazine, entitled “Ripley Wants a Wife!” he admitted that for all the material success he had gained, what he still lacked was “the one thing that really matters to a man.”
“I’ve discovered that fame and good fortune don’t mean a thing unless you can share them with the right woman,” he said.
After a prayer service at Lillie Belle’s church, the church Isaac had helped build, LeRoy Ripley was buried beside his father and mother at Odd Fellows Cemetery, less than twenty blocks from his childhood home. Li stood beside his grave, tearfully praying that he’d get his wish to be reincarnated.
“He was such a mystery, like the Chinese. He loved the mystery of an idea,” she said. “He loved life so much.”
On one of his final Mon Lei trips, while moored in Savannah, Ripley told a reporter that his staff was so well organized he expected Believe It or Not to continue “many, many years after I die.” In the weeks following his death, however, there were no guarantees Ripley’s legacy would survive, let alone thrive. In fact, it seemed as if everything he’d built up might collapse into rubble without his stewardship.
At first, the television show limped ahead, airing Tuesday nights through the summer of 1949. A bearded announcer named Robert St. John introduced himself as the new host and “guest custodian” of Ripley’s sketch books. Joined by Li Ling-Ai for a few shows, they’d flip through pages of Ripley cartoons, then introduce a dramatic reenactment, with no on-air mention of Ripley’s demise. (The show would last another year. It would be revived in the 1980s, hosted by Jack Palance, and again in 2000.)
The daily cartoon also lurched onward. King Features editor Ward Greene announced that the cartoon would continue because Ripley’s research files contained so much “interesting material.” Norbert Pearlroth kept mining the library for hard-to-believe facts, as he had for twenty-six years, and Paul Frehm became the lead artist.
BELIEVE IT!
Ripley’s Believe It or Not remains one of the longest-running cartoons in history. In 2012 it was being drawn by John Graziano.
Even with the television show an
d cartoon on seemingly stable ground, the rest of Ripley’s empire—all the strange objects, peculiar people, and amazing performers he’d collected—began splitting apart and dispersing, and it seemed as if the magical Believe It or Not world might disappear altogether.
Earlier in 1949, when a secretary overheard a loud argument with Doug Storer, Ripley had ominously warned, “You think that was bad? It’s nothing compared to the arguments and fights and lawsuits that will take place after I’ve gone.” Indeed, a power struggle erupted within days of Ripley’s demise as various factions, including Doug Ripley and Doug Storer, competed for control of the orphaned remains of Ripley’s kingdom.
PARTLY THIS WAS Ripley’s fault for never officially designating a successor. Months before his “many, many years” prediction to a Savannah reporter, he had signed his will and stashed it aboard the Mon Lei, where it was found in the days after his death. In it, Ripley was very specific about cash awards—bequests ranging from $500 to $5,000 to longtime employees and friends—but excruciatingly vague about what should be done with the lucrative brand he’d created.
The names in the will read like a guest list to Ripley’s biggest party, among them patrons who’d helped early in Ripley’s career—Carol Ennis, Vyvyan Donner, and his old editor Walter St. Denis; secretaries, housekeepers, and female companions; such longtime employees as Norbert Pearlroth, Doug Storer, and two captains of the Mon Lei; as well as close friends such as Bugs Baer and Li Ling-Ai.
Ripley instructed that the rest of his estate be formed into a trust, whose income and profits would be shared by his sister and brother.
Though Ripley did not specify who should actually run things, Doug had hoped to take charge of the company and keep his brother’s menagerie of peculiarities intact. But he soon allowed the lawyers to auction off the estate, then watched in horror as moving vans pulled away from BION Island, loaded with Ripley’s curios and collectibles. Unable to keep the employees on board, Doug watched them disappear too.
A Curious Man Page 33
