A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  Three months after Ripley’s death, nearly a thousand artworks and curios—collected from BION, the New York apartment, the Florida house, and the Mon Lei—were sold during a four-day session at the Plaza Art Gallery in New York. Scores of bidders competed for Ripley’s totem poles, beer steins, Buddhas, Ugandan masks, opium pipes, and shrunken heads, along with the Makovsky paintings and the lifelike Masakichi statue. Among the bidders was Francis Cardinal Spellman, who was outbid for a statue of Saint Patrick, and a young couple from Queens vying for statuettes and brass dragons. “Oh what an apartment we’re going to have,” the woman whispered to her fiancé. “I can hardly wait till we’re married.”

  The auction, featured in the pages of LIFE and The New Yorker, netted $90,000—no small sum, but a fraction of the booty’s true value. The main bidder was John Arthur, who LIFE said was “trying to step into Ripley’s shoes.” Arthur spent $50,000 for “several vanloads of stuff,” as LIFE put it, and paid another $5,500 for the Mon Lei.

  BION Island sold for $50,000 to Ferruccio Tagliavini, a Metropolitan Opera star, who never moved in. The mansion was sold a few years later and razed to make room for two new houses; the site remained vacant for years.

  Proceeds from the auction and the sale of Ripley’s homes netted $500,000 for Doug Ripley, who was forced to buy back from the estate any items of sentimental value. In 1951, he and Storer together purchased all shares of Believe It or Not, Inc., with Storer taking over as company president and Doug chairing the board of directors. It was an uneasy partnership from the start, and through the mid-1950s both men scuffled in court, as did Robert Hyland and John Arthur. When Doug Ripley was diagnosed with cancer, Storer saw a chance to take over, and Doug Ripley seemed to realize he’d been outplayed.

  “He didn’t know what to do without Roy,” Doug’s granddaughter, Rebecca Ripley, said decades later, using the family name for Robert/LeRoy. Doug’s son, Robert, said his father was never entirely comfortable in his big brother’s world. “I don’t think it was my father’s cup of tea,” he said. “I think he was out of his element there.”

  Doug Ripley died in 1956. His sons, Robert and Douglas Ripley, were still living in Mamaroneck in 2012.

  Storer took sole possession of the company, calling it “a frightening responsibility.” He managed the cartoon and sold comic books and published new editions of Believe It or Not books, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies through the 1950s.

  But the legal battles continued, as Ripley had predicted they would. In 1959, Storer sold out to John Arthur, the man who’d purchased so much of the estate at auction. Arthur had put his purchases on permanent display in an Odditorium-style museum housed in a former castle in St. Augustine, Florida, which opened in 1950 and was followed by Ripley museums in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and Times Square. Arthur had also hoped to create a floating museum aboard the Mon Lei. But storage and repair costs, plus a threatened lawsuit, prompted Arthur to sell the boat, which fell into private hands.

  In 1969, a Canadian named Alec Rigby bought out Arthur, moved the headquarters from New York to Toronto, and began expanding the company, opening museums in Niagara Falls; San Francisco; Chicago; Gatlinburg, Tennessee; and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

  In 1971, Lillie Belle’s church was finally restored and turned into the museum Ripley had once hoped for. Among the displays: a two-headed calf with six legs. The church/museum closed in 1998 and fell into disrepair; it was restored in 2010 by the city of Santa Rosa, which turned it into a community meeting hall.

  In 1985, Rigby sold the company to Jim Pattison, one of Canada’s wealthiest men, whom Toronto’s Saturday Post credited with resurrecting Ripley’s “multimedia entertainment conglomerate.” The newly named Ripley Entertainment, Inc., relocated to Orlando and opened more museums and other attractions.

  There are now dozens of Ripley-themed attractions worldwide—haunted houses, aquariums, mini golf courses—in Australia, England, South Korea, Thailand, and even India.

  THROUGHOUT THE VARIOUS POST-1949 corporate iterations, Ripley’s core staff scattered, and no one seemed to keep track of the whereabouts of his many secretaries, housekeepers, chefs, butlers, and lovers such as Liese Wisse, Cygna Conly, and Ming Jung. Though the brand had survived, quite impressively, the strange and international and eccentric family Ripley had gathered together on BION Island and beneath his Believe It or Not umbrella did not.

  In 1959, after selling his interest in Believe It or Not, Inc., Doug Storer founded his own brand, Amazing But True, an attempt to reinvent himself as the new Ripley, with a similar multimedia array of books, radio shows, and newspaper columns. Using Ripley as his model, Storer traveled extensively through the 1960s and ’70s, collecting stories and photographs. He eventually retired to Florida, where he died in 1985, at age eighty-six. His wife, Hazel, died in 2005 and bequeathed to the University of North Carolina Doug’s trove of Believe It or Not materials (now known as the Doug and Hazel Storer Collection).

  Norbert Pearlroth’s association with Believe It or Not lasted longer than even Ripley’s. He continued to work for King Features, visiting the New York Public Library daily to dig up new material for the cartoon. In 1972, he told the Wall Street Journal he never got bored. “It’s just like being an explorer,” said the man Ripley referred to as “the human encyclopedia.” Pearlroth retired in 1975, at the age of eighty-one.

  But after a fifty-two-year commitment to Believe It or Not, Pearlroth missed his days at the New York Library. (“He lived there,” said grandson Jonathan.) Pearlroth died in 1983, a month before the ninetieth-birthday party scheduled for him at the library.

  Li Ling-Ai, after co-hosting the Believe It or Not TV show, worked briefly with Doug Storer as his Amazing But True “Far East consultant.” In 1973, she published a book about her parents, Life Is for a Long Time, whose mottoes and maxims seemed to be part commentary on Ripley’s life. (Example: “Learn what it is to be a whole person in this new world.”) Li also wrote children’s books and over the years gave lectures and spoke regularly on radio and onstage about Chinese history, cooking, and culture. She died in 2003 at age ninety-five.

  Before her death, in an interview for a documentary about Ripley’s life, Li described him as “a special institution” who found his life and the world around him endlessly interesting and exciting, who felt compelled to share that shameless enthusiasm with his fans—and with anyone else who’d listen.

  “He understood the psychology of the American public,” she said. “He didn’t really have hobbies. He liked to draw. He didn’t talk about the stock market or good scotch or wine … because it doesn’t matter whether you have caviar and Champagne or mink coats. It is life that is exciting and interesting, no matter what.

  “That’s all,” said Li. “That’s Ripley.”

  WHILE BELIEVE IT OR NOT has endured, as Ripley predicted it would, the brand is safeguarded by the spirit of its long-dead creator. This haunting has actually been more of a boon than anyone might have anticipated, an added mystique to Ripley’s lasting appeal. At tourist-packed Believe It or Not museums on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco or Times Square in New York, Ripley is a spooky presence, a beneficent ghost, his face grinning from deep within faded black-and-white photographs.

  Then again, he is something of a cardboard mascot. In today’s world, it’s hard to imagine an incarnation of such a man, a shy, goofy, portly, bucktoothed stutterer who becomes a world traveler, a multimedia pioneer, a rich and famous ladies’ man, and one of the most popular men in America. Consumers of the twenty-first century are a jaded lot. In the belief that there’s nothing new to discover, purveyors of popular culture created reality TV instead. The revelations that made Ripley gasp—burning ghats in India, shrunken heads in Ecuador, armless/legless girl wonders—seem archaic compared to the intentional extremes of shows like Jackass and Survivor, the exploits of the masses on Fear Factor and American Idol, or the televised Burton Holmes–esque travels of Andrew Zimmern in Bizarr
e World and Bizarre Foods.

  And yet, the phrase Ripley coined remains part of the English lexicon nearly a century later.

  In 2011, “believe it or not” appeared more than twelve thousand times in the New York Times and on its website, and a mid-2012 Google search landed more than seventy million “believe it or not” hits. The spirit of Ripley lives on in shows like Myth-Busters and River Monsters, on America’s Funniest Home Videos and all across YouTube. Also thriving, on the Internet, on TV, and on radio, are the aspirations that Ripley embodied—to show people something they didn’t know, to entertain and educate and titillate, to question and challenge the truth—as are the driving passions of voyeurism, exhibitionism, and the base appreciation of freakishness, oddities, and pranks of nature.

  The man who considered himself a rube and a farm boy, who indulged in a lifestyle as risky as that of any character in his cartoons, who taught readers to gape with respect at the weirdness of man and nature, who contributed to the adoption of America’s national anthem and the creation of the Pearl Harbor memorial and so much more…

  LeRoy Ripley, it turns out, may have been the most unbelievable oddity of all.

  Use your phone and the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! app to scan the following pages. See videos, cartoons, and photos!

  On Friday, August 24, 2007, while skimming the New York Times, I came across a story that diverted me from the book project I’d been working on and set me on the five-year path that led to this book. Headlined O, BELIEVERS, PREPARE TO BE AMAZED!, the story profiled a new museum that had opened in Times Square: the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Odditorium. Reporter Edward Rothstein seemed genuinely shocked at the “entertaining and provocative” displays inside, and described the “voyeuristic sense of gaining entry to a forbidden, exotic and at times unsettling realm.”

  Channeling Ripley, Rothstein mused a bit about the people and places that celebrate the freakish: “The freakish is the ultimate avant-garde, a finger in the eye of the buttoned-up bourgeois vision of ordered life, like a tattoo parlor in the midst of a holistic spa.”

  Midway into the story, Rothstein introduced the proprietor of the metaphorical tattoo parlor—“a cross between the Coney Island barker and the cultural anthropologist”—and cited the 1936 newspaper poll that had ranked Robert Ripley as the most popular man in America.

  As a former newspaper reporter and a lifelong newspaper reader, I had read and known about Ripley’s cartoons since childhood. But I’d never stopped to consider the man behind it all. I grabbed a pen and started underlining the Times reporter’s words—“something refreshing about Ripley’s enthusiastic refusal to homogenize humanity’s extremes … his gaze roamed across his own culture’s peculiarities too, treating them with the same amazement.”

  My curiosity aroused, I visited Amazon.com and quickly learned that there existed no definitive biography of Ripley. In fact, it seemed as if the only biographical retelling of any kind had been a slim 1961 volume, Ripley, the Modern Marco Polo, by Bob Considine, a used copy of which I ordered from Amazon. Unable to wait a few days, I scoured the Internet and in minutes found and began printing a PDF of that same book. By that afternoon, I was in awe of the life Ripley had lived, and soon decided to attempt to write the first full story about the freakish man who celebrated the freakishness of the world.

  My early research led me to the Orlando-based Ripley Entertainment Inc., which manages the Ripley empire and publishes those fat and weird annual Believe It or Not! books. Through the generous cooperation of VP Norm Deska and archivist Edward Meyer, I was granted unfettered access to the climate-controlled room containing the company’s archives, a one-stop-shopping trove of Ripley’s personal and business papers, journals, photographs, home movies, letters, and more. It’s no exaggeration to say this was a reporter’s jackpot—this project could never have happened without the help of Ripley Entertainment, especially Meyer.

  Six months after immersing myself in Ripley’s life, almost by accident I learned about the Doug and Hazel Storer Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Doug Storer, Ripley’s business manager, had died in 1985, and his wife Hazel died in 2005, after which the family’s papers were donated to UNC. After two years of being organized and catalogued, the collection was opened to the public in 2008. I spent many long hours in the manuscripts department at Wilson Library, taking digital photographs of thousands of documents that proved invaluable to this project.

  In addition to gaining access to such long-buried treasures at Ripley Entertainment and UNC, I was grateful for the cooperation I received from Sidney Kirkpatrick, who had previously begun exploring Ripley’s life and who agreed to share with me his many boxes of research. I’m humbled by his generosity.

  Last but not least, I’m very thankful that Ripley’s nephew Robert and grandniece, Rebecca, graciously accommodated my many phone calls and finally agreed to speak with me about Ripley and his brother, Doug. Their cooperation helped shed some light on one of the mysteries of this story, and I hope my portrayal of the brothers and their complicated but loving relationship is accurate. Any errors are my own.

  For more information on sources—including samples of Ripley’s personal journals, business letters, travel photos, home movies, and more—visit www.nealthompson.com/books/curiousman.

  KEY

  Ripley Entertainment archives = RE

  Ripley personal scrapbooks (Note: exact titles, dates, and even publication names are occasionally missing) = SCRAP

  Doug and Hazel Storer Collection = DHS

  (http://www.lib.unc.edu/mss/inv/s/Storer,Doug_and_Hazel_Anderson.html)

  Believe It or Not cartoon (and/or essay) = BION

  Sidney Kirkpatrick papers = SID

  Gaye LeBaron Collection = GLB

  (http://library.sonoma.edu/regional/lebaron/)

  Sonoma Historian, journal of the Sonoma County Historical

  Society = SH

  Santa Rosa Press Democrat = SRD

  San Francisco Chronicle = SFC

  San Francisco Bulletin = SFB

  New York Globe = NYG

  Associated Newspapers = AN

  New York Post = NYP

  New York Times = NYT

  King Features Syndicate = KFS

  The Incredible Life and Times of Robert Ripley: Believe It or Not, TBS Productions, Turner Home Entertainment, 1994 = TBS

  CHAPTER 1

  On Ripley’s childhood and family, see the following: RE “Ripley’s Ramble ’Round the World,” Associated Newspapers, December 4, 1922; “Strange Things Under the Sun,” by Hugh Leamy, The American, October 1929; “Famous Cartoonist Tells Story of His Life,” by Robert Boyd, The Success Magazine, January 1926; SH (“Robert Ripley, His Own Greatest Oddity,” by H. Lightfoot, Fall 1967); SCRAP (untitled profile by Edgar T. “Scoop” Gleeson, San Francisco Bulletin, 1915; “Where a Globetrotter Hangs His Hat,” Liberty Magazine, May 11, 1946); GLB (Ethel letter to Roy); SID (interview with Bruce Bailey, January 14, 2002); SID (interview with George Proctor, May 12, 2002); SID (interview with Nancy Jo Black Cafo, February 15, 2002); “I Remember When,” unpublished essay by Clara VanWormer Black, 1958; SRD (Ripley obituary, May 28, 1949); SRD (“As Nell Wilson Knew Him,” May 28, 1949); SRD (August 24, 2005); Li Ling-Ai interview with TBS, 1993; RE (“How to Draw,” unpublished Robert Ripley manuscript, n.d.); “Recollections of Ripley,” unpublished essay by Frances O’Meara; GLB (assorted SRD columns); “Believe It or Not, Ripley Was Almost as Odd as His Items,” by Donald Dale Jackson, Smithsonian, January 1995; Ripley, the Modern Marco Polo, by Bob Considine, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1961 (hereafter referred to as MMP); DHS (interviews, letters, and handwritten notes by Hazel Storer).

  Note on Ripley’s birth date: Census records from 1900 and 1910 show Ripley’s birth year as 1890; so does his headstone. Family photos further confirm Ripley’s birth in early 1890. A photo taken in July 1890 says “at six months.”

  Santa Rosa history: Santa Rosa: A Twentieth
Century Town, by Gaye LeBaron and Joanne Mitchell; How Plants Are Trained to Work for Man, by Luther Burbank, PF Collier & Son, 1914, NY; Images of America, Santa Rosa, by Simone Wilson, Arcadia Publishing, 2004; Santa Rosa California in Vintage Postcards, by Bob and Kay Voliva, Arcadia Publishing, 1999; SH (Volume 1, 2006); The Garden of Invention, by Jane S. Smith, Penguin Press, 2009.

  CHAPTER 2

  Santa Rosa history and earthquake: SRD (assorted clips); GLB (SRD columns and Santa Rosa: A Twentieth Century Town); author interview with Jeremy Nichols; SRD (anniversary story, April 19, 2006); assorted unpublished memoirs; “The Story of an Eyewitness,” by Jack London, Collier’s, May 5, 1906; RE “Ripley’s Ramble ’Round the World,” December 10, 1922; SRD (June 13, 1908); SH (“1906 Earthquake Issue,” 2006).

  Note on the higher death per capita compared to San Francisco: Santa Rosa had 64 to 100 deaths and 6,700 to 8,700 residents—1 in 80 died; San Francisco had 500 deaths and 400,000 residents—1 in 800.

  Ripley at school, and home life: SH (“Robert Ripley, His Own Greatest Oddity,” by H. Lightfoot, Fall 1967); SID (interview with George Proctor, May 12, 2002); SRD (Ripley obituary, May 28, 1949, including recollections by Helen Proctor and others); DHS (interviews, letters, and handwritten notes by Hazel Storer); “Recollections of Ripley,” unpublished essay by Frances O’Meara; “Panther Profile,” Santa Rosa High School newsletter story, 1989; “Famous Cartoonist Tells Story of His Life,” by Robert Boyd, The Success Magazine, January 1926; SCRAP (untitled profile by Edgar T. “Scoop” Gleeson, San Francisco Bulletin, 1915; SCRAP (untitled Pittsburgh Chronicle Telegraph story, date unknown, circa spring of 1916); “Odd Man,” by Geoffrey T. Hellman, two-part profile in The New Yorker, August 31, 1940 and September 7, 1940.