A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  Ripley had declared, to friends and in print, that he “never had a voyage as rough as that one on the sea of matrimony.” But there was something unresolved about his drawn-out split from Beatrice, some emptiness that handball and boxing couldn’t fulfill.

  If he couldn’t find what he needed in New York, he decided it was probably time once again to search abroad for what was lacking. His global Ramble had changed him. And when the world got bumpy and life became a torment, he now knew, the surest cure was to skedaddle.

  Then again, with Prohibition soon to celebrate its fifth birthday, maybe all he really needed was a stiff drink in a less puritanical land.

  In the Peruvian town of Juliaca, twelve thousand feet above the Pacific, Ripley trudged through the rain toward his hotel, across a small plaza and past huddled groups of Peruvians who seemed “as joyless and sullen as this bleak and bare highland.”

  It had been a long day’s train ride, followed by a soggy walk through town, and he was soaked and shivering. At the hotel, he asked the proprietor to start a fire so he could dry off. The proprietor refused: “No fire in Juliaca.”

  Stunned, Ripley asked how he was supposed to get warm.

  “Go to bed,” said the proprietor.

  Ripley stormed off into the cold, rainy night, muttering that he was “not going to bed at seven o’clock in the afternoon if I can help it.” Finding no bars or anything of interest except a windmill, he walked back to the hotel and went to bed in his dank, windowless room.

  The next morning, after a chilly, sleepless night, Ripley walked back to the town plaza and stopped in front of the windmill. He started counting the windmill’s revolutions, hopping from one foot to the other to stay warm, wondering why he’d again decided to roam so far from the comforts of home.

  As if on cue, a stranger tapped him on the shoulder. His name was Miller. He was English, now living in Juliaca. Curious to see another Westerner in town, Miller invited Ripley to dinner that night, along with his wife and an American couple, also named Miller. “We’re the only white people in this place,” Miller said.

  At dinner with the four Millers, Ripley huddled beside the kitchen stove, warming himself while describing to his hosts his latest adventure—a lengthy tour through South America. He described his sail through the Panama Canal and his recent visit to the corpse of Saint Rose, in Lima, casually mentioning that his California hometown was named for Saint Rose. The wife of the American Mr. Miller then jumped up, realizing the cartoonist was the former “LeRoy” Ripley.

  “That’s my home! I went to Santa Rosa High,” she practically shouted. “I remember you. You used to play on the baseball team!”

  And suddenly Ripley was reminded why he traveled. Because even in a place like Juliaca—“the most dreary, dismal spot on Earth”—life could surprise him.

  Ripley laughed and reminisced with his new friends, joking that it really is “a small world after all.”

  HE HAD LEFT NEW YORK in late January of 1925 aboard the SS Santa Luisa, a remodeled World War I transport ship. Associated Newspapers announced Ripley’s Ramble ’Round South America in a series of promotional ads, promising readers they’d “learn things about South America that are not found in books.”

  Though Ripley was toting stacks of research material supplied by Pearlroth—about Peruvian guano production, Chilean gauchos, Uruguayan silver mining, and the life of conquistador Francisco Pizarro—what readers would mostly learn about was Ripley’s pursuit of women and wine.

  Ripley made it clear from the start that he’d be taking this Ramble less seriously than his previous journey to Asia. He began this trip, thanks to a farewell party with friends, nursing a throbbing hangover. While passing through the Panama Canal, the ship stopped in Cristobal, a city straddling Prohibition-restricted American territory and unrestricted Panama. Ripley’s first great South American discovery, therefore, was how quickly waiters at the Washington Hotel could scamper into Panamanian territory and return with cold champagne.

  Freed from Prohibition’s shackles, Ripley drank like an acquitted convict. One night he met Panama’s president, Rodolfo Chiari, who spoke enthusiastically to Ripley in Spanish, while Ripley slurred right back—in English. Life aboard ship began too early for Ripley’s tastes, a dilemma he solved by staying up all night. In Lima, he was invited to dinner with city officials, but his dress clothes had been sent ahead to the next city, and Ripley arrived in less-than-formal attire. In his eagerness to loosen up, he ignored the local custom of offering a toast before each sip of wine and began to drink at will. Every time he lifted his glass, the others scrambled to do the same. Sheepish and exhausted, woozy from a lack of sleep and too much wine, he topped off the night with an embarrassing bloody nose.

  Such episodes did little to prompt an attempt at sobriety. During a stopover in Pisco, he walked off the ship, down the pier, and straight to the Gran Hotel in search of Pisco Punch, a cocktail made of the Peruvian-Chilean liquor pisco, which he’d first tasted in San Francisco. His drinking partner, an Italian count, called it “agua ardiente” (fire water) and Ripley called it “kerosene,” then announced, “We’re both correct!”

  “Give me the tropics!” he crowed in print. “They suit my indolent nature well.” At one point Ripley seemed to realize how his dispatches might be perceived by readers, and he soon admitted he had been on a quest. He never mentioned Beatrice or the recent divorce but made it clear he’d been looking for love.

  BEFORE LEAVING NEW YORK, Ripley had sent a telegram to Carmela, the “dark-eyed señorita from Lima” he’d met in Paris. He had promised to visit her, never imagining he would ever reach Peru. Then came his divorce and an unexpected assignment to South America. He wired Carmela and apologized for the two-year lag, but reminded her that he was “a man of my word,” and said he desperately hoped she’d be happy to see him.

  Carmela never responded, but from the moment he left New York he had been praying she would be waiting at the pier. When he disembarked in Lima, Ripley anxiously scanned the crowds but never found Carmela’s lovely face. He soon learned that his señorita was a señora, married with two children.

  Unabashedly, Ripley confessed all this to his readers. “A woe is me,” he wrote, sounding like a moody schoolboy with hurt feelings—like Demon Dug. “I am indeed a woe; I never did have any luck.”

  After the failed reunion, Ripley was determined to find another dark-eyed señorita. Like a romantic adolescent, he was back on the prowl.

  In the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa, beneath the smoky pinnacle of the volcano El Misti, he stayed at a well-known boardinghouse run by Ana Bates, a salty-tongued woman who called everyone “Sonny Boy” and whom guests called Tia. The Quinta Bates boardinghouse was a favorite destination of movie stars, writers, and royalty. Clark Gable loved to visit and drink Pisco Sours; Noël Coward came for a two-day visit that turned into a month.

  There, Ripley met Bates’s stunning niece, Consuelo, which in Spanish means “consolation.” At eighteen, she was half his age, shy and beautiful, and “chic and charming,” Ripley wrote in his journal. “When she speaks Spanish it is like a rippling brook, and her English is sweet melody.”

  One night, he and Consuelo ascended to the roof garden and looked out at the moonlit El Misti. Ripley told Consuelo the volcano reminded him of Mount Fuji in Japan, and when she asked which was more beautiful, he confessed that he preferred Fuji.

  “I could never lie to you,” he told her. “And I am a pretty good liar, too, by the way.”

  Ripley later described the scene atop Misti in a dispatch home, telling readers things he should have told Consuelo: “She is modest and unspoiled and when she talks with you, tingling half-moons of guilt creep up your spine, although you have done nothing wrong; and you feel ashamed of the life you are leading, although it is nobody’s business but your own.”

  Readers might have found it strange and even a bit creepy to read such confessional revelations from a newsman, but he seemed unable
to hide his desperate and almost juvenile romantic pursuits—early signs of an earnestness, an unfiltered honesty, and naiveté that would endear him to readers.

  ACROSS LAKE TITICACA and into Bolivia, he found that a bruised heart could be healed by a stunning landscape and a fiery cocktail. When he first spotted the city of La Paz, tucked into a chasm between towering mountains, he was dumbstruck. It looked exactly like someone had flung the city of Reno into the Grand Canyon and he declared the high-altitude city of clouds to be “the most startling sight I have ever seen!”

  Inspired by La Paz, and shamed by his recent sullenness, Ripley did what he often did when he felt aflutter. He drank. As he had on his first Ramble, Ripley spilled much ink on the topic of drink, openly declaring himself a Prohibition violator by complaining that the Inca corn liquor chicha tasted “almost as bad as the stuff we get in New York.” He described how the Incas attached bouquets of flowers to poles outside their saloons: “Beautiful, isn’t it? Flowers instead of padlocks!” When he met drinking partners, he amiably introduced them to readers, who thus became acquainted with an Irishman named Heavy and a Scotsman named Ferguson, whom Ripley dubbed one of his three favorite Scots, along with Haig & Haig (a brand of scotch).

  While descending from the jagged Bolivian highlands to the Pacific coast, a fourteen-thousand-foot drop in half a day, he visited a tribe that once decapitated enemies, skinned their heads, and shrank them to the size of a baseball—his first exposure to the shrunken heads that would become a Believe It or Not emblem. (He bought one for $100.)

  Pearlroth had provided history books for Ripley to mine, but Ripley only dug into this cache when there wasn’t a woman or a drinking partner worth mentioning. His favorite book was William H. Prescott’s Conquest of Peru, which chronicled Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro’s plunder of the Inca Empire. “I am traveling the same road Pizarro trod!” he boasted to readers. “How I admire that villainous old fellow.”

  For days, he remained fixated on Pizarro. Passing through once-great cities such as Cuzco, he was horrified to witness how completely the Spanish conqueror and his men had trashed Inca culture. Ripley felt Pizarro’s greed for gold and his treatment of the Incas were black spots on “the darkest page in all Spanish history.”

  BELIEVE IT!

  In Cuzco, Pizarro had imprisoned Inca emperor Atahualpa for refusing to cede control of Peru. Pizarro offered to spare the emperor’s life if he filled a room with gold, silver, and jewels. Atahualpa complied. But instead of freeing the emperor, Pizarro had Atahualpa executed.

  In between drinking bouts, he occasionally found his poetic travel-writer voice, vividly describing “Indians with burden-bent backs trudging silently and stolidly” and “little fields where grim-faced Indians are plowing the unwilling land with bent sticks.” One day he could be lyrical—“bright ponchos gleamed through the twilight of the nave and a faint chant came from the cloister”—and the next philosophical: “The vanity of man grows weak before the majesty of the mountains.”

  But on this trip, with or without Pearlroth’s well-intended research materials, Ripley was at his most entertaining as the goofball American traveler. While traversing the Andes toward Buenos Aires, his train stopped for the night and passengers swarmed the town’s few hotels. Ripley had been drinking with a German named Hans, who spoke fluent Spanish and offered to get them each a room. Hans secured two rooms but then bumped into a fellow German and gave away Ripley’s key.

  When Ripley learned Hans had double-crossed him, he begged the hotel clerk for a room, but there were none. The clerk offered Ripley a bunk in a room with three Chilean men. Afraid to be alone with three dark-skinned strangers, Ripley sat in the lobby, writing in his journal by kerosene lamp, wishing he’d stayed in Santiago, where he’d briefly met a woman whose smile had warmed his “soft and vagrant heart,” as he put it in his journal. When his roommates were asleep, he crept into the room, slept a few hours in his clothes, then left the “evil-looking hombres” before dawn.

  BY NOW, Ripley had grown keenly aware of the typical American’s unworldliness and national arrogance. He knew South Americans laughed at the ignorance of their northern neighbors. “We are too prone to think of South America as one country when as a matter of fact it is made up of a dozen different countries,” he added, proving his point.

  In Buenos Aires, he continued to play the bumbling gringo. Among stylish men and women in Parisian-influenced clothes, Ripley stood in the hundred-degree heat of a midday plaza wearing the cream-colored linen suit he’d bought in India. With his sweat-darkened armpits and his sunburned and peeling skin, he was not a pretty sight. He wondered why people seemed to be staring at him until he realized he was the only man wearing a light-colored (and sweat-stained) suit.

  Ripley was hardly a typical yokel, even if it was becoming his shtick. He continued to boast that learning other languages was “more a pleasure than necessity” and that his California dialect had served him well. And while he enjoyed meeting new people from other lands, all conversations had to be conducted in English.

  SIX WEEKS into his Ramble he had explored more of South America than an average American might see in a lifetime. After journeying by rail into the Andes and across the continent’s belly, Ripley finally felt a weight lifting, relieved to be far from “the static and cross-word puzzles and the rest of the wrangling world,” as he put it.

  Still, on this particular trip, with the shadow of divorce still looming, what he yearned for more than natives and their culture was the company of a stiff drink and/or a fiery young woman. In Buenos Aires, he managed to coax an attractive Australian named Whupsie Strelitz to spend an afternoon with him. She agreed to meet the next morning in her hotel lobby, and Ripley arrived to find Whupsie’s stern-looking mother standing beside her, wanting to know their destination.

  “To the cemetery!” he told Whupsie’s mother. For their date, Ripley took Whupsie to the “City of the Dead,” as La Recoleta Cemetery was known. They strolled among the graves of Argentine presidents, poets, scientists, and soldiers.

  Two days later, Ripley met Maggie, a New Yorker who had been living in Buenos Aires. Maggie agreed to spend a day with Ripley and they walked along the Rio Tigre, then drank champagne at the High Life café with another couple. But when Ripley invited Maggie to dinner, she said no, claiming she didn’t want to send the wrong message to the locals that she was “a bad woman.”

  “You must remember that Buenos Aires is not the Bronx,” she said.

  The next morning he waved good-bye to Maggie, who grew smaller and smaller on the pier as Ripley sailed to Uruguay and then up the coast to Brazil. At sea, he reflected on his eight weeks on the southern continent, and somewhat morosely summarized his limited success with women, a failure he blamed partly on the women. The movies and musicals back in New York had led him to expect streets filled with dancing Latinas wrapped in shawls, roses clenched in their teeth.

  “I am beginning to believe that the famous Spanish señoritas are a myth,” he said.

  Playing the lovestruck Yankee was part of the woe-is-me persona he’d begun honing in print. And he reluctantly one day acknowledged to readers that maybe Latina women simply weren’t interested in him. At the thought of it, Ripley spent a melancholy and reflective few days sailing toward Brazil.

  The reason Ripley so desperately sought female companionship was that he hated being alone. And he wasn’t much for drinking alone, either. His first stop in Rio was a beachside bar, where he met an American journalist, Dick Hyman, and happily agreed to let Hyman interview him for the Brazilian American Weekly. While watching a rainbow of locals stroll past. Ripley joked that the biracial couples “would make a Southern gentleman forget himself.”

  The following day, Ripley again sought out Dick Hyman (soon to become a business partner and a lifelong companion), who found Ripley to be nothing like the man he expected. Ripley was appealingly shy, thought Hyman, a man primarily interested in his work—and women. At din
ner that night, Ripley couldn’t take his eyes off Hyman’s girlfriend, Helena, whom he described without chagrin as “beautiful, with black eyes and snowy teeth, a true Brazilian.”

  In a sign of Ripley’s still-strong readership back home, Hyman’s father read Ripley’s “Ramble” in his local paper, the Kansas City Star. Ripley had incorrectly described Helena as Hyman’s fiancée, and Hyman’s father sent an urgent telegram begging his son to reconsider.

  Helena thought Ripley was adorable, and even coaxed him into trying a few words of Portuguese.

  “Luco! Luco!” she said.

  Ripley agreed that he was a bit crazy, until Helena explained that luco meant “good,” or at least that’s what it sounded like to Ripley.

  ABOARD THE USMS American Legion for the two-week journey home, Ripley rejoined his Scottish friend Ferguson. He was happy to be at sea, sleeping late, roaming the decks, warming himself at night with cocktails. He considered a good ship on smooth seas to be “a floating paradise to lazy people.”

  During those last days, Ripley seemed to realize how often he had written about two particular topics. In the last of his South American dispatches he wrote:

  I have talked so much about South American drinks and women that I guess you think I am too fond of both … I admit that they have had their moments; and you must admit that they are interesting subjects. Or would you have rather heard about the “business opportunities of the Southland” or the “cattle-raising statistics for the fiscal year”?

  He may not have found love, but Ripley returned to New York with a rekindled love of travel and a broader perception of the world. The seventy-two-day trip had cost $750—ten bucks a day. Ripley considered it a pittance, and felt that Americans were too stingy when it came to spending on travel.