A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  His recently honed self-confidence now weakened, Ripley was learning that a talented artist wasn’t automatically a talented cartoonist.

  Many of his early efforts suffered from clutter and cliché, a hodgepodge of recycled techniques. His drawings were top-notch and his talent shined bright when he sketched realistic portraits of sports stars, especially facial close-ups. But his cartoony cartoons just weren’t that funny, distinguished, or sophisticated. Ripley struggled with a nagging feeling that he didn’t quite belong. “It was a hard grind,” he’d later confess.

  His boss seemed to agree. Four months after hiring him, he changed his mind.

  RIPLEY WASN’T ANGRY about getting fired in June of 1909. Like Miss O’Meara and Carol Ennis, Hy Baggerly had taken a chance on him, and Ripley would remain “everlastingly in debt.” He would similarly dote on O’Meara and Ennis, one day lavishing them with gifts, flowers, and limousine rides, signing letters “ever devotedly.” Still, losing his job confirmed the feeling that had gnawed at Ripley during his early months in San Francisco, that he was still just an “uncultured” boob.

  “My fellow workers felt sorry for me … and did everything possible to help me along,” he’d later say. “But my work was poor. I was too young.”

  Maybe his mother had been right—with no art training, he had been unequipped for an artistic career and should have kept working with tombstones. He remained a fatherless kid from the country, thrown into the sophisticated big city whose societal rules he’d yet to master.

  “I’m as yet a stranger in a strange world,” he wrote to Nell. “And such a strange world, too!”

  He had hoped to convince Nell to join him in San Francisco, suggesting by letter that they could be together “forever.” Now he was jobless.

  After his firing, he wandered the narrow, spice-scented streets and alleys of Chinatown, where he could mingle unselfconsciously, slurping cheap noodles and listening to shopkeepers tell stories of the old country in chopped-up English while puffing on their bamboo pipes. Just as Santa Rosa’s small Chinatown had been an enticement, he was fascinated by the exotic people in their long gowns, the shops and aromas of the nation’s liveliest Chinatown. At a time of loneliness and near poverty, having lost his first real job, with a $5 weekly rent to cover and a widowed mother counting on his contributions, he found the Chinese to be kind and generous, a “truly civilized people.”

  “When I was hungry, they fed me,” he’d say years later when asked about the origins of his love of all things Oriental.

  He would soon meet men who had actually visited the places he learned about in Chinatown—Peking and Nanking, Shanghai and Canton—further stoking a passion for Asia that would slowly grow into an obsession. But before he could even dream of visiting China, he needed a job.

  He had made it to San Francisco, but it might as well be Peking without an income.

  Three years after the earthquake, San Francisco had rebounded beautifully, as had its journalism—the Call, News, Post, Chronicle, Examiner, and Bulletin all thriving in modern new buildings. The city that launched the careers of Mark Twain (the Call) and Sinclair Lewis (the Bulletin) continued to bolster its reputation as a lively literary town whose competitive cluster of publications vied for the attentions of more than half a million readers.

  Determined to remain a San Francisco newsman and not skulk back to Santa Rosa, Ripley gathered a portfolio of drawings and one foggy June morning slipped through the front doors of the Chronicle, whose post-quake headquarters was just a block up Market Street from the Bulletin. His timing was just right. The Chronicle’s sports cartoonist, Harry Hershfield, had injured his eye and was unable to keep up with his assignments. When Ripley arrived—admittedly scared and “mute as a dumbwaiter”—Hershfield suggested, Let this young fellow do it.

  “The boy is good,” Hershfield told sports editor Harry B. Smith, after looking at Ripley’s work. “Give him a chance.”

  Smith offered Ripley a trial run at $10 a week, two dollars more than he’d been making at the Bulletin. Barely two weeks after his final cartoon had run in the Bulletin, his work was suddenly appearing in the pages of his former competitor, sometimes on the front page.

  This time, Ripley wasn’t taking any chances. Immediately after starting at the Chronicle, he signed up for his first-ever art classes.

  Five mornings a week he studied in a downtown classroom, learning about the proper size of an ear, proper head-to-body proportions (an eight-to-one ratio), and the best materials (Gillott’s pens and Bristol or Ross board). After class, he’d report to the Chronicle’s art room and toil “like a madman,” drawing hundreds of cartoons and seeking advice from anyone willing to critique him. Most nights, he stayed until ten—long after the others had left. He ate cheap Chinatown meals, collapsed in his basement apartment, and was back at art school by eight thirty a.m.

  Within a few months, Ripley felt he had finally become “a passable artist.”

  RIPLEY HAD LEARNED a valuable lesson about his new profession: fear and uncertainty were the side effects of being paid to do what he loved. “An artist is a natural coward,” he’d tell an interviewer years later. “He’s always afraid of losing his job.”

  That fear inspired him to draw constantly, obsessively: editorial-page cartoons, slice-of-life scenes, political rallies, car shows, dog shows. He caricatured theater stars and businessmen, no topic too insignificant that it couldn’t be rendered by his pen. For a short article about a drunk cat that jumped to its death, he offered two sketches. (Said the cat, midair: “Farewell cruel woild.”) He sketched actors, comedians, acrobats, magicians, and once, a man who could “walk” up and down stairs on his head.

  “The Chronicle is an excellent place to work,” he wrote to Nell Griffith late that summer of 1909. “And everything is most agreeable.”

  Editors loved his enthusiastic productivity and rewarded him with steady raises that would lift his weekly salary to $20. He had been sending money home to his family but now decided he was making enough to invite his mother and brother to join him in the big city. When his sixteen-year-old sister, Ethel, got married and left home, Lillie and Doug moved into the small McAllister Street apartment. Ripley reported to Nell that Santa Rosa now “seems well rid of the Ripleys.”

  By letter, he repeatedly urged Nell to visit too. “I tell you it is hell to live so apart!” he wrote.

  In the fall of 1909, Nell finally gave in. She stayed at his apartment for two days and toured the city with Ripley, his mother, and his brother. Before heading back to Santa Rosa, she gave him a sultry picture of herself. Ripley soon wrote to tell her the photo had become “a stimulant to my imagination of you.”

  In increasingly romantic letters, calling her “honey girl” and “dearest friend in the world,” he practically begged her to move to San Francisco. “I don’t know of anything more pleasing or beautiful than that friendship in which each one trusts the other, and where frankness is enjoyed by both!” Ripley wrote. “I hope ours is, or will be of that kind. Do you?”

  But Nell soon began backing away, telling him they lived too far apart. Then, when Ripley visited Santa Rosa that Christmas, Nell broke his heart. She didn’t envision a future as Mrs. LeRoy Ripley, she said. In fact, she’d begun dating another ex-classmate, a handsome Santa Rosa High football star.

  Ripley kept writing letters—“I want to see you!”—but in time he reluctantly accepted that he might become nothing more than a warm memory of Nell’s youth, “something to look back upon, maybe to think about sometimes,” he told her.

  In one of his final letters to Nell, he somewhat pathetically told her that he hoped his own life mate would appear “in the misty distance of the future,” and that she and Nell might become friends. But so far, “that girlie of the future is not in sight yet,” he wrote. “If she was, I would be too busy to look.”

  Fortunately, after the breakup, Ripley found himself distracted by the assignment of a lifetime.

  AFTER L
ESS THAN A YEAR at the Chronicle, Ripley was picked as lead cartoonist to cover the upcoming fight between retired champion Jim Jeffries and Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champ. Under pressure from sportswriters and cartoonists, including Ripley, Jeffries had agreed to emerge from retirement. Scheduled for July 4, 1910, the highly anticipated and racially charged battle—“The Great White Hope” versus “The Big Black Menace”—had grown into one of the biggest sporting events in US history. A few Chronicle old-timers grumbled about the new kid getting such a plum assignment, but sports editor Harry B. Smith insisted the job was Ripley’s.

  He spent a few weeks at Jeffries’s training camp north of Santa Cruz, drawing daily cartoons of the aging boxer’s workouts. At night, Ripley and the other journalists would gather for drinks on the hotel’s front porch or around a campfire. A newsman’s uniform at the time was typically a slouchy gray suit, wrinkled white shirt, dark tie, and fedora. Ripley stood out in his straw hat and knickers, sitting awkwardly among rumpled older men. He kept his head down and legs tucked beneath him in the humble, protective pose he often struck in the face of intimidation or embarrassment.

  Photos of Ripley at Jeffries’s camp show a clean-shaven man-boy among mustachioed men, a timid child who’d been allowed to stay up late with the grown-ups.

  Yet, when the old-timers got him talking, they found Ripley to be an oddly funny fellow, and a bit of a perky smart aleck. They particularly liked one of Ripley’s cartoons that showed a huddle of sportswriters rolling dice outside Jeffries’s gym. (“Seven! Come eleven!”)

  He’d been assigned plenty of sports events during his first year as a cartoonist, and had used those opportunities to study the habits and language of more experienced artists and writers. Having lost his father at such a young age, Ripley looked to other men for lessons on how to be manly. He was savvy enough to know that the upcoming fight loomed larger than any event he’d covered. If he played it right, it could be a turning point in his journalistic apprenticeship.

  THREE WEEKS BEFORE the big day, the fight was moved from San Francisco to Reno, Nevada. Writers, celebrities, and fans stormed the lawless desert city, conquering its saloons and gambling houses. Ripley considered Reno “a riot—a seething cauldron of the sporting clan.”

  He was soon mingling with the biggest names in newspapers. At dinner one night, he met two of his Bulletin predecessors, Rube Goldberg and Tad Dorgan. Also sitting at the table was the famous and famously troubled Call of the Wild author, Jack London, who had been hired as part of the Chronicle’s “fight team”—making Ripley, for the moment, colleagues with America’s most famous writer.

  Full-page Chronicle ads touting its “corps of experts” showed a pubescent-looking LeRoy Ripley, who would be stationed ringside with London. When London learned that Ripley was from Santa Rosa, just a few miles from his estate at Glen Ellen, he offered to take a look at Ripley’s drawings, which had taken on a grittier, moodier quality during the weeks leading up to the fight. Despite the many racist depictions of Johnson—big lips and an apelike head—Ripley had drawn one serious portrait, a near-perfect likeness titled “The Dusky Champion—And His Golden Smile.” London was impressed by Ripley’s work and encouraged him to keep at it.

  Ripley became so “overawed” by his encounters with London and others that he almost missed the fight, nearly sick with nervous indigestion. On fight day, more than 16,000 spectators gathered to watch “The Battle of the Century,” scheduled for forty-five rounds. Sitting a few feet from center ring in the journalists’ section with London, Ripley watched as Johnson slowly ripped Jeffries apart.

  In Ripley’s post-fight cartoon, Jeffries is depicted lying on his side as a wide-eyed crowd looks on.

  “When the old champion went down and out,” reads the caption, “there was not one cheer for the victor!”

  THE FIGHT HAD been an exhilarating chance for Ripley to meet the top men in his field, including journalist and author Peter B. Kyne, a California newsman turned novelist who advised Ripley to take his talents to a bigger stage. “If I was a kid your age, you know what I’d do?” Kyne said. “I’d go to New York.”

  Others, including London, also suggested that Ripley leave San Francisco behind. Noted New York World columnist Ned Brown even offered a letter of introduction if Ripley made it to Manhattan. “You should be in New York with Tad and Goldberg,” said Brown.

  By the time he’d returned to San Francisco, Ripley was fixated on the idea, even though New York was “a long way off—almost out of the question.” Plus, with his mother and brother now living with him, and the whole family dependent upon his income, Lillie would never comprehend his need to ditch a steady job for the hope of a better life nearly three thousand miles away. Yet, from Reno onward, he dreamed about nothing else.

  The theme of Ripley’s tenure in Nevada could be distilled into two words: go east. Meeting London, a model of masculinity to Ripley’s generation, had a particularly lasting effect. In fact, London’s success story—a poor California kid who succeeded in his art form and became an adventurer-traveler and a wealthy but sad-drunk celebrity—would echo throughout Ripley’s life.

  He told Nell Griffith by mail that while he was still “getting along swimmingly” at the Chronicle, “I hope to be in New York in a while—and from there to Europe!”

  IT HAD BEEN nice to come home to McAllister Street each night and serve as a father figure to brother Doug, who never knew his dad. For Ripley, his own father figures had become newsmen like London and Kyne, whose influence far outweighed Ripley’s mother’s view of a sensible future. Ripley loved the work of a sports cartoonist, loved being around elite athletes and cheering/jeering crowds and important journalists, especially people who might help advance his career.

  The encouragement from men he’d met in Reno and the maturing of his cartoons emboldened Ripley to finally take a chance and ask for a raise. Ripley walked into the office of the Chronicle’s bulldog managing editor, John Young, and asked for another $2.50 per week.

  “Who are you?” Young demanded of the cartoonist whose name appeared daily in the man’s paper. “And in which department do you work?”

  Ripley later heard that Young often played dumb when he suspected someone was looking for money. The editor told him he’d “look into the matter,” but each time Ripley renewed his request, he got the same Who are you? brush-off.

  Finally, he boldly told Young one day that if he didn’t start getting $25 a week, he would quit.

  “Very well, Mr. Ripley,” Young said. “We’re a happy family here, and we don’t want any dissatisfied employees on this newspaper. You are free to leave immediately.”

  Realizing too late that he’d accidentally quit, Ripley did what he often did to clear his head.

  He walked through Chinatown.

  UNABLE TO FACE his mother with the bad news, and barely able to breathe, he wandered for hours and finally stopped at the San Francisco Press Club, where he planned to throw back his last drinks as a member and then resign. Fortunately, just hours after losing his job, Ripley found Peter Kyne at the bar.

  “I’m in a fine fix,” he told Kyne. “I’ve been fired from two papers here in two years. I’m a failure even before I start.”

  Kyne told Ripley the same thing he’d told him in Reno.

  “Take a chance, kid. Go to New York,” he said. “You’ll never get anywhere unless you start somewhere.”

  Kyne also told Ripley not to panic about his sudden lack of employment. “We’ll try to get you something,” he said.

  Something appeared quickly in the form of an aging actor, singer, and self-proclaimed womanizing brawler looking for someone to illustrate his autobiography.

  As a child, Joe Taylor had crisscrossed America with a minstrel show, then ventured in his teens to Hawaii. In his twenties, he joined a troupe touring Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore, surviving knife-slashing pirates and killer typhoons. In China he witnessed twelve prisoners beheaded by a sword-wieldi
ng executioner.

  Ripley was enthralled by Taylor’s tales, such as getting a shave in Manila from a barber using a butcher’s cleaver. Ripley chose that particular scene as one of twenty-five he illustrated for Taylor’s memoir. The result of the unlikely collaboration between eighty-three-year-old Taylor and young Ripley was a 250-page book, Joe Taylor: Barnstormer. Taylor gave Ripley a much-needed dose of cash—$100—and a book credit: “Illustrated by Ripley.”

  “Accidents have always been a boon to me,” Ripley would later say, counting Taylor’s memoir among the turning points of his charmed post-quake career.

  Equally important, Taylor had stoked Ripley’s curiosity about the great wide world beyond California, especially the Orient.

  ALTHOUGH SAN FRANCISCO was just a three-year stint, a way station between Santa Rosa and his soon-to-be-real home of New York, Ripley’s time in the reborn city had been transformative, a period he would come to view as more educational than any college.

  As Ripley grew from tentative teen into cocksure young adult, San Francisco had exposed him to the competitive world of newspaper cartooning and the riskier world of possibility. He met men who had traveled the globe, hedonists and self-indulgers who had tasted the fruits and women of exotic lands, men who wrote books and drank whiskey, smoked opium, got divorced and made lots of money, men who knew how to live large.

  Though Ripley would become one of the great global travelers of his day, he had thus far never ventured beyond Northern California, except for the head-spinning visit to the Babylonian streets of Reno. He considered San Francisco “my hometown” and referred to himself as “a westerner at heart.”