A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  Ripley considered himself “an ardent follower of the great health-preacher.” Into his late twenties, he remained obsessed with “firm hard flesh, supple muscles, the alertness of health,” as he once put it.

  It wasn’t mere vanity. A late bloomer, Ripley had begun dating. To make himself attractive to women, he had his work cut out for himself. There wasn’t much he could do about his fanged teeth or jug ears, so he exploited what he had—dressing colorfully and maintaining a muscular physique.

  Having spent the bulk of his adulthood among the nation’s finest athletes, he had learned to emulate their workouts. After taking up boxing in San Francisco, he began sparring at the New York Athletic Club, occasionally entering the ring with his heroes, including Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier, both club regulars. He also visited the New Jersey health farm and gymnasium created by his boxer friend Freddie Welsh, another Bernarr Macfadden apostle.

  BELIEVE IT!

  One of Welsh’s camp visitors was F. Scott Fitzgerald, and some historians believe Freddie Welsh (real name Frederick Thomas) was the model for Jay Gatsby (real name James Gatz). One clue is that a woman named Myrtle Wilson had been injured in a car accident with Welsh. In The Great Gatsby, Myrtle Wilson is struck by Daisy Buchanan, driving Gatsby’s car.

  Ripley also took up tennis and golf, partly because they relaxed him but also, judging by photographs, because they allowed him to wear knee pants, argyle socks, and wool caps. He wasn’t much for running—“Laborious exercise, to my mind, is harmful,” he once said—but he loved a good long walk. He’d often forgo buses and taxis and walk from event to event, at times covering five miles on foot.

  Ripley found that when he wasn’t exercising or walking, he became tense and grumpy. This renewed vigor for physical fitness led him to take his New York Athletic Club membership to a new level by joining the subset of members, the so-called confirmed bachelors, who actually lived there.

  Known mostly by its acronym, the NYAC had been founded in 1868 by a group trying to promote amateur “manly sports” in America. Thirty years later it moved into a spectacular new headquarters on Central Park South. With a marble swimming pool, billiards and card rooms, a dark wood-paneled dining hall, full gymnasium, and handball courts on the roof, it was the ultimate boys’ club.

  Some of the world’s top athletes called the NYAC home, including Olympic medalists whose success in the 1908 and 1912 Games contributed to its prestige. By the time Ripley moved in, around 1919, membership had reached an all-time high of roughly five thousand. George M. Cohan was a member and had introduced his World War I tune “Over There” at the NYAC; Teddy Roosevelt, who died earlier in 1919, had been an honorary member.

  Ripley wasn’t interested in the NYAC’s more popular sports—trap shooting, swimming, water polo. Instead, he joined a small group known as the Killers’ Club, devotees of handball, the sport that would captivate him to the point of obsession. He didn’t have many hobbies, but when he found one he loved, he immersed himself.

  IN CHOOSING THE NYAC as his new residence, Ripley joined nearly two hundred others who lived at the main headquarters. Ripley’s room, number 59, was more like a large closet than an apartment. The low-ceilinged studio barely contained his bed and drawing table. He showered in a communal bathroom. But it cost just a dollar a day, as did dinner. Plus, he spent very little time in his room. After a day at the Globe, he’d pull on his sweatshirt and shorts, lace up his high-top sneakers, then head to the handball courts.

  “It is the most natural thing in the world to slap a ball with the hand,” he once said of his new favorite sport. “It quickens the eye. It refreshes the nervous system, it gives the body an electric vitality and resilience.” The modern game was said to have originated in English prisons of the Middle Ages—inmates bounced balls against cell walls. In New York the sport took root on street corners, Irish immigrant kids hitting balls against tenement walls. As handball’s popularity grew, NYAC members converted their roof into courts and shoveled off winter’s snow to play year-round.

  Ripley’s first and most frequent opponent was his pal Bugs Baer, a competitive and testy foe who flung his pudgy little body heedlessly about the court, as if rubberized. Sometimes the two teamed up for doubles matches, winning so often they began entering citywide tournaments.

  Over the next few years Ripley would play in dozens of tournaments, including the annual national championship tournament, traveling regularly to Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. One newspaper would later refer to him as “one of the leading handball players of the country.”

  Ripley viewed handball as the perfect all-around athletic endeavor: “It polishes down my raw nerves after I’ve been working overtime.” He would encourage anyone who’d listen to play handball “when you’re emotionally wrought up … You simply cannot play this game hard and think of your troubles at the same time.”

  THE NYAC and its handball courts offered Ripley an invigorating male culture, a place where his buckteeth and stutter mattered less than his competitiveness and physical performance. Being an athlete made him feel special, just as being a talented high school artist had helped him feel less of a misfit.

  In the same way that his loud clothes sought to draw attention away from his face and teeth, Ripley’s athleticism offset his odd looks and mannerisms. Sportsmen were supposed to be eccentric, he’d learned after years of covering athletes. In fact, for a man who still felt like the only bumpkin in New York, the NYAC was a perfect home. Because, for all his insecurities, Ripley loved to be around people and hated to be alone. At the bustling club, with its meat-and-potatoes restaurant, its amply stocked bar ringed by a brass foot rail, its parties and sporting events, he had access to a built-in network of friends.

  Ripley also learned, thanks to Bugs Baer, that being an athlete earned other privileges—mainly women. Baer had recently moved to the gossip-savvy New York American. William Randolph Hearst hired him after reading Baer’s description of Yankees baseball player Frank Stephen “Ping” Bodie (whom Ripley had known in California’s bush leagues) and Bodie’s failed attempt to steal second base. “His head was full of larceny,” Baer wrote. “But his feet were too honest.”

  With a hefty new salary from Hearst, and a growing reputation as a hard-drinking night owl who could crack wise on cue, Baer introduced Ripley to a repertoire of lively nightspots: Perry’s Gluepot, the Times Gate, and Churchill’s. They’d gorge on lobster at Rector’s or head up to Columbus Circle to eat wild game at Tom Healy’s Golden Glades Cafe, where ice-skaters performed on an indoor rink. Or they’d visit the stage doors of Broadway’s theaters, waiting for actresses and dancers to emerge and invite them out for drinks. At times, his and Baer’s saucy exploits were recounted in the gossip pages.

  A favorite haunt was Jack Doyle’s Billiard Academy, a renowned newspaper hangout. Doyle once hosted a pool tournament for journalism’s elite, and Ripley beat one famous newsman or cartoonist after another to become co-champion.

  Ripley found himself caught up in a giddy postwar euphoria, embracing a heady new lifestyle rich with athletic and social pursuits and hobnobbing with celebrities. He started taking dancing lessons. His taste in clothes grew incrementally flashier—three-piece suits with knicker-length pants, bow ties, two-tone shoes and spats. He sometimes wielded a walking stick. Baer liked to tell his friend that he looked like “a paint factory that got hit by lightning.”

  The idea was to prove that the bumpkin could fit in, that the big city wasn’t too big for Roy Ripley. He had money in his pocket too, thanks to his cheap new living quarters and some cash earned from drawing illustrations for another book, a retired Army colonel’s memoir, to be published later in 1919.

  With his bachelor’s lifestyle revolving around clubs, cafés, and bars, it was a great disappointment when America launched its nationwide experiment in abstinence. Ripley called the Eighteenth Amendment, which would prohibit alcohol consumption starting in 1920, a “foolish law.”

&
nbsp; Possibly inspired by the looming threat of limited access to legal drink, Ripley decided in the spring of 1919 to treat himself to a journey. On his passport application he wrote that he was traveling to Havana for “health and recreation.” It would be his first departure from American soil since his 1913 travels to Egypt and Europe.

  NOT LONG AFTER his return from Cuba, Ripley stunned Baer and other friends with the news that he was engaged to be married.

  Ripley had previously expressed pride in his bachelorhood and, typical of the boys’ club attitudes of the day, an immature understanding of the fairer sex. Maybe it was inevitable that amid so much testosterone Ripley would develop caveman-like views toward women. He swapped dirty jokes in the NYAC’s locker room and at the Friars Club bar. In print, he would acknowledge a passion for the company of a shapely woman and a well-made cocktail. Yet, for someone who was mostly raised by his mother and who remained close to his sister, he revealed an astonishing lack of savvy about women.

  In general, he felt women required too much time and effort—“Time to woo ’em, win ’em, and time to keep ’em,” he’d grouse—and that women had become “spoiled with the gallantries of the ages.” After losing his first love, Nell Griffith, he often professed doubts that he’d ever find the right woman. In more petulant moments, he’d disparage Manhattan’s female office workers as “the most tragic sight in our cities.”

  Terrified of finding himself in a “matrimonial wreck,” he had seemed happy to pursue the single life. Then again, his petite bride-to-be was no office girl.

  SOME NEWSPAPER ACCOUNTS said Beatrice Roberts was born in Manhattan to a well-heeled Jewish family. Other accounts said she was a Texas-bred Italian from the cowboy flat-lands outside Waco. In truth, she came from a blue-blood Boston family with lineage to the Mayflower. Born in Medford, Massachusetts, one of six kids, she had been a teen beauty queen before moving to New York, harboring dreams of a dancer’s life.

  Her first New York jobs were modeling. Curvy and dark-eyed, with pouty, twin-peaked lips, her face appeared on billboards and in magazines. Beatrice danced on Broadway and in shows directed by Ned Wayburn, a Ziegfeld Follies choreographer. She played piano and sang, but her most bankable talents were her high-kicking legs and a pretty face, talents recognized by a man who knew how to nurture young girls’ dreams.

  Florenz Ziegfeld had created his Follies in 1907 and launched many careers over the next quarter century, including W. C. Fields, the actress-singer Fanny Brice, and the singing Cherokee-American Will Rogers. Future Hollywood stars such as Lillian Gish and Bette Davis got their start as Follies Girls. The Ziegfeld Follies combined music, comedy, and dance, shot through with innuendo and sex appeal. One Ziegfeld biographer called the 1919 Follies, featuring a nude Lady Godiva character atop a horse, “a union of lovely music and lovely girlflesh.”

  Many Follies dancers found their way to an audition with Mr. Ziegfeld at age thirteen or fourteen, and were onstage soon after. Marrying one of Ziegfeld’s teens was considered a badge of honor, as impressive as landing a young starlet would be years later. (Bugs Baer would marry a Follies Girl too.) Beatrice briefly danced alongside a Follies Girl named Marion Davies, soon to become William Randolph Hearst’s infamously public mistress.

  Ripley’s first date with Beatrice had been the night he drew his “Champs and Chumps” cartoon in late 1918. She would have been a week past her eighteenth birthday at the time; Ripley was a decade older. They may have been introduced by Bugs Baer, who’d started performing comedy routines in vaudeville shows and would invite Ripley to parties with dancers and singers. Or maybe one of Ripley’s NYAC pals—Ziegfeld comedian W. C. Fields or Follies composer Robert Baral—introduced them. One writer described her as “a prominent figure in the Ziegfeld Follies on account of her statuesque beauty.”

  Despite his affinity for the single life, Ripley was moved by her beauty. In a pattern that would later repeat itself regularly, Ripley fell in love quickly, poetically, and passionately. She called him Roy, he called her Bea. They played tennis, walked through Central Park, went to dinners and Broadway shows. In the summer of 1919, he posed for a portrait—his hair slicked back, wearing a bow tie and a suit—and gave her a framed copy: “To Beatrice, With Affection, Roy.” She responded with a photograph of herself, posed in mid-pirouette: “To Roy—My Boy.”

  They married on October 23, 1919, in Newark, New Jersey, then honeymooned in Atlantic City, strolling along the boardwalk and posing for touristy photos. Ripley wore his NYAC handball uniform to the beach—a tank top and tight shorts that revealed his muscular limbs—while Beatrice wore a black bathing suit and a polka-dot sun hat. In photographs, Ripley seems truly happy. Possibly, after so many years of insecurity about his strange looks, he was elated to have landed a model and a dancer.

  Back in New York, however, they both began to wonder if they’d been hasty.

  MAYBE HE’D HAD an inkling from the start, for when Ripley told friends about the end of his bachelorhood, he seemed uncomfortable with the news, and not particularly enthused. “We’re married,” he’d say, with no further explanation.

  One sign of ambivalence was his unwillingness to give up his room at the NYAC. He told Beatrice he wasn’t ready to cohabit, that he would be traveling too much and didn’t want to commit to a house or apartment just yet. The newlyweds spent nights in midtown hotels—a suite at the Tavern Inn on West Forty-eighth Street or at the spectacular Hotel Marie Antoinette on Broadway. Though Beatrice didn’t mind the nice hotels, she must have wondered what she’d gotten herself into.

  Prior to wedlock, Ripley had dated other young women, and Beatrice apparently didn’t trust her new husband to entirely give up his old lifestyle. It didn’t help that Ripley, in addition to spending nights alone at the NYAC, would disappear for days at a time—on assignments or touring with boxer pals—while Beatrice remained in Manhattan. She phoned him constantly, suspicious that Ripley might be seeing other women, but he always insisted he was being faithful.

  Still, the whole arrangement felt too bizarre for Beatrice, who had expected a more conventional union. She wanted to be doted on, and her husband’s failure to meet her marital expectations triggered loud arguments on the nights they actually shared a room. She would accuse him of drinking too much or flirting with waitresses, and he’d argue that she had too much time on her hands and too vivid an imagination.

  “There should be a law to compel suspended animation among wives during the afternoons,” he once said. “A wife can get into more trouble to present her hardworking spouse on his return at night than a chorus of Pandoras.”

  In more introspective moments, Ripley would admit that for a devoted bachelor with limited knowledge of the female mind, an attempt at domestic stability was probably a bad idea. While he truly cared for Beatrice, he had gotten used to living simply and somewhat rootlessly. His NYAC apartment was more a locker room than a home, a sloppy place to change clothes or sleep before getting back to the clubs, the baseball stadiums, the handball courts. Regardless of whom was to blame, the marriage was on the rocks and coming apart fast. Ripley was relieved, then, when the Globe decided in mid-1920 to send him on the road.

  THE FIRST CARTOON to actually carry the Believe It or Not title had appeared on October 16, 1919, a week before Ripley and Beatrice wed and ten months after the initial “Champs and Chumps” cartoon. After settling into his uneasy union with Beatrice, Ripley’s interest in the year-old feature seemed suddenly rejuvenated.

  Each of the Believe It or Not cartoons he produced in the first half of 1920 featured a medley of odd athletic feats—a wrestler who tested his neck strength by hanging himself (he survived); a pool shark who sank 23,000 balls; a Babe Ruth home run that flew 600 feet. Ripley also weaved random sketches that skewed from modern sports: Alexander the Great’s courier, who ran 150 miles in a day, or Olympic hero Melancomas, who stood with arms outstretched for two days.

  In response to this new energy, Ripley’s editors decided t
o send him to cover the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium, which would be one of the crowning journalistic achievements of his early career, placing him in the front row for another important moment in sports history, just like the Jeffries-Johnson fight. For Ripley, the Olympics also offered a much-needed escape from his marital woes and his disgruntled wife. But it wasn’t the cushiest assignment.

  In late July, he sailed to Europe with the US teams, including three dozen NYAC members. Athletes and newsmen complained about the bad food on the USS Princess Matoika, the cramped sleeping quarters, and the lack of training facilities. Ripley sketched athletes on the Matoika’s deck praying for land and complaining that the ship was just “a cattle boat.” In Antwerp, events were scattered miles apart and frequent rains turned running tracks into muddy ruts. Water for swimming events was dank, dirty, and frigid. Ripley found Belgians to be rude, overweight, and uninterested in the Games.

  BELIEVE IT!

  Hawaiian swimmer Duke Kahanamoku (controversial, due to his darkish skin) won two of the forty-one gold medals taken by the United States: more than twice as many as the next most successful team, Sweden.

  But the Games gave Ripley the chance to veer further from covering traditional sports and to stoke his curiosity about the history and oddities of sport. One dispatch described the origins of the marathon, the fabled run by a foot soldier from the Battle of Marathon to the city of Athens. After delivering his message, “Rejoice, we conquer!” the runner collapsed and died. In September, after a month away, Ripley sailed home on the SS Imperator. His spoiling marriage awaited.

  RIPLEY AND BEATRICE passed their first wedding anniversary in the fall of 1920. Though they’d lived apart for most of that year, they were still husband and wife and they tried occasionally to reconcile, usually with terrible results. They once got into a marathon shouting match at the Hotel Marie Antoinette. Another night, beckoned by an anonymous caller, Beatrice found her husband dancing with another woman at a Broadway café. When she confronted him, he dragged her to the street and put her in a cab.