A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  A few weeks later Ripley spoke at a society luncheon in New York, where he introduced himself as the man who had been called a liar “more often than any other living person.” Seemingly overnight, Ripley found himself entering a new career phase, the moment when “unbelievable” and “liar” converged.

  Instead of acting defensively, Ripley immediately struck the pose of the noble truth-teller who considered it high praise to be called a fibber. Being accused of lying by so many people, Ripley realized, was the best publicity he could have hoped for. If someone tagged him as a fabulist, he’d say, “I do not mind it a bit … I feel flattered!” He was becoming the embodiment of what H. L. Mencken once said about liars: “The men that American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest the most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”

  EVER SINCE CHILDHOOD, Ripley had displayed what an early profile writer called a “bottomless, off-kilter curiosity.” Nothing was safe from the musings of a man whose mind was “uncluttered by culture,” as one colleague put it: “Everything was new to him.”

  Indeed, inspiration could come from anywhere. One night a friend’s casual use of “hi-ho” as a form of address got stuck in Ripley’s brain and became spiced with remnants of his Chinese dinner, inspiring a vivid dream about the Chinese men he’d once seen carrying bundles and marching along the Bund singing, “Hi! Ho!” He awoke at dawn and sketched his dream. Days later, on April 5, 1928, the Evening Post published a cartoon entitled “The Marching Chinese,” featuring seemingly endless rows of Chinese men. The caption declared that if all the Chinese people in the world were to march four abreast past a given point, “they would never finish passing though they marched forever and ever!”

  Befuddled readers had to wait a week for Ripley’s explanation. Based on the estimated Chinese population (600 million) and the estimated birth rate (10 percent), he calculated that each new generation of Chinese marchers would replace the previous one, which meant the Chinese could “march on and on, forever.”

  The Marching Chinese was a bigger hit than Lindbergh, and would remain one of Ripley’s personal favorites.

  With Pearlroth now in on the scheme, Ripley created more cartoons that seemed intentionally designed to earn skeptical if not outright angry letters. Napoleon crossed the Red Sea—on dry land. Buffalo Bill never shot a buffalo in his life. (He shot bison.) US naval hero John Paul Jones was not an American citizen, did not command a fleet of American ships, and his name wasn’t Jones. Ripley even found a way to state that “George Washington was not the first president of the United States.” The subsequent explanation was that John Hanson, when he signed the Articles of Confederation, was briefly “president of the United States in Congress assembled.”

  Ripley encouraged Pearlroth to help him find such startling statements, to engage and enrage readers. In short, Ripley loved to be called a liar because of the mischievous joy he took in proving his shockers true. One admiring writer said Ripley was “always waiting, with his authority in his hand, like a club.”

  By mid-1928, Believe It or Not was syndicated in a hundred papers in North America, and Associated Newspapers claimed that Ripley had ten million loyal readers. Other papers in the Associated Newspapers family began claiming Ripley as their own, crowing in print that he “worked” for them, with ads appearing in the Kansas City Star, Chicago Daily News, Pittsburgh Chronicle-Telegraph, and even Ripley’s former hometown paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

  An editor at Louisville’s Courier-Journal called Ripley “more than a sports cartoonist … He is a student, an artist and a popular psychologist.”

  WITH THIS NOTORIETY came speaking invitations, and Ripley discovered that a cupful of liquor could tame the stage fright that had dogged him since childhood. So when the Nomad Lecture Bureau asked him to talk on stage about his travels and draw a few sketches, Ripley agreed to take his Believe It or Not stories on the road.

  He gave dozens of lectures—to schools and art clubs, to the Brooklyn Rotary Club, at the annual convention of the Kelvinator Corporation, and once sailed for a month aboard a Canadian cruise ship to perform as part of the nightly “Programme of Entertainment.” At some lectures he was billed as the “World’s Biggest Liar,” and Ripley kept stoking the theme. In a speech to a group of athletes, he joked, “It makes no difference what I say, you won’t believe me anyway.” At most of his lectures, he was asked the same question: Where do you find the things you draw about? Speaking to the Advertising Club of New York, he explained that he got some ideas from readers, some from encyclopedias, and some, like the “Marching Chinese,” in his dreams. Instead of thanking Pearlroth as a collaborator, Ripley claimed full credit, telling audiences that he found his material “here and there, day and night; through observation, conversation, and edification. I am constantly searching … Everywhere, all the time.”

  By mid-1928 he was receiving at least a hundred letters a day, many purporting to have found an error in Ripley’s work, others gushing with praise. One Evening Post reader wrote, “My favorite article in your paper is ‘Believe It or Not’ by Ripley.” A competing newspaper even praised Ripley’s sports sketches as “better than photographs, because his pictures show the real action and the spirit of the contestants.”

  After just two years at the Post, he was becoming something of a celebrity. The Post hired an extra person just to read Ripley’s mail, and offered to hire Pearlroth full-time. Thanks in large part to Ripley’s sudden infamy, the Post’s circulation more than doubled between 1926 and 1928.

  THE SCHOOLBOY NOTEBOOKS Ripley had started compiling years earlier were initially filled with clipped-out articles and handwritten notes about sports, with a particular preference for endurance and going the distance: the hundred-hour dance marathon, the seventy-four-day swim marathon, the man who ran two and a half miles every hour of every day for forty days, or the men (they were almost always men) who biked or walked or rode motorcycles from New York to Los Angeles.

  After his Asian and South American travels, the notebooks became cluttered with freakier foreign entries—shocking or nauseating tidbits like the West African tribe that played rugby using a human skull instead of a ball. More recent notebook entries had grown playful and diverse, with fun facts and puzzles and unsolved mysteries, which Ripley called “queeriosities”—there is no lead in a lead pencil (it’s graphite); a cuttlefish is not a fish (it’s an octopus); it takes two years to make a billiard ball.

  Armed with these notebooks, and fueled by Pearlroth’s findings, Ripley continued to expand beyond sports and to explore the pull of his eccentric inquisitiveness.

  He had always had an affinity for underdogs and outcasts, since he often felt like one himself. Now he could more fully indulge his fascination with the characters that P. T. Barnum and his progeny had been exploiting for decades on the carny circuit. For the first time, Ripley gave sideshow freaks a place in the daily newspaper, introducing readers to a widening cast of oddballs: sword swallowers, people who ate glass, a man who nailed his tongue to a piece of wood, another who lifted weights with a hook sunk through his tongue, a woman missing the lower half of her body. Other notables included the one-armed paperhanger, the man who hypnotized fish, and the man burned by an electrical wire whose brain was permanently exposed. He sketched men with horns, a child cyclops, an armless golfer, a fork-tongued woman. There were fish that climbed trees, wingless birds, four-legged chickens, peg-legged cows.

  He also loved quirks of language, word puzzles, and palindromes. What was the longest curse word? Forty letters. How many four-letter words are there for God? Thirty-seven. Though he never finished high school, he had developed his own unique mathematical skills. One cartoon, featuring a man with a knife in his chest, said that if three witnesses to a midnight murder told two people, who told two more people, and so on, “everyone on earth would know about it by morning.”

  Everything had a Believe It or Not to offer—science, reli
gion, literature. A coin the size of a nickel made of star matter would weigh 200 pounds; a bundle of spiderwebs no larger than a pea, if untangled and straightened out, would reach 350 miles; a ship weighs less sailing east than sailing west. And the shortest letter ever mailed? That would be Victor Hugo’s one-character missive to his publishers, inquiring about his Les Miserables manuscript. The letter:? And the reply:!

  Clearly, Ripley was no longer a sports cartoonist. A decade past that December day when he’d stumbled into his first “Champs and Chumps” cartoon (and twenty years after his first cartoon in LIFE), Believe It or Not had become not only a regular feature in US newspapers, but a catchphrase that was seeping into the nation’s consciousness.

  The Believe It or Not concept was like some gold mine he’d been sitting atop, unsure of how to mine it or how deep to dig.

  THE 1920s were evolving into a decade of the possible. New technologies—radio, moving pictures, vacuum cleaners, electric razors—had reached mainstream status. Recently unveiled mass-produced products were flying off shelves and influencing the nation’s brand-conscious allegiances: Wonder Bread, Eskimo Pies, Kleenex, Wheaties, Butterfinger candy bars, and Chanel No. 5 perfume. Ripley’s brand was that of a liar who always told the truth.

  He now regularly provoked readers, I dare you to prove me wrong. That was his trademark. His cartoon now carried a new tagline: “Full proof and details on request.” And the Evening Post helped market their “falsely accused liar” with advertisements promising, “Ripley Will Prove It” and “He Will Send You Proof.”

  In reality, he couldn’t always prove it. In striving for a folksy style, he sometimes erred, and there were frequent efforts to trip him up. A man who signed his letter R. Van Winkle griped that in an effort to be “independent and funny” Ripley sometimes distorted history. The writer asked, “What is the use of writing nonsense instead of facts?” When one cartoon described how a Frenchman poured thirteen pints of wine into a vase and quaffed it in one breath, Time magazine consulted two doctors who declared it “impossible.” Ripley was able to refer Time to the French history book in which Pearlroth had found the story.

  Ripley tried to deliver it all with a wink, and most readers accepted the hint of charlatanism, knowing that some of Ripley’s statements couldn’t possibly be proven or disproven, that it was all for fun. Yet, while he loved being called a liar, he hated to be wrong, knowing it would damage the cartoon if he developed a reputation for sloppy reportage. More than ever, he needed Pearlroth to prove him right.

  Pearlroth had by now quit his bank job to work full-time on Ripley’s staff, which had grown to include a secretary and two assistants who handled Ripley’s mail and checked facts. Pearlroth’s official title was “linguist,” his facility for multiple languages allowing Ripley to accurately publish oddities from places he didn’t actually visit. As a stickler for accuracy, Pearlroth helped Ripley provoke with confidence, to push Believe It or Not to the brink of falsehood without tumbling over.

  “When I first started to draw these cartoons, I wasn’t so careful about details,” Ripley admitted in a late-1920s interview. “But now I want things to be right. If a costume is to be of a certain period, I make it of that period. People write to me from Singapore, from Calcutta, from all over the world about my cartoons, and it gives me great satisfaction when they tell me, ‘I’ve been there’ or ‘I’ve seen that fellow and your cartoon was right.’ ”

  But for Ripley to remain the fact-wielding authority, he couldn’t admit that his secret helper was a brainy ex-banker from Brooklyn.

  They may have been partners, but they lived in very different worlds.

  ONE OF RIPLEY’S favorite haunts was the 300 Club on West Fifty-fourth Street, the speakeasy run by Mary Louise “Texas” Guinan, an actress and chorus girl who had divorced her cartoonist husband and found her calling as a saloon keeper. With scantily clad dancers and free-flowing alcohol, Guinan’s place became a favorite of such celebrities as Al Jolson, George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Walter Winchell, and Guinan’s greeting to patrons—“Hello, suckers”—would enter the lexicon.

  BELIEVE IT!

  The most infamous of New York’s Prohibition-era gin joints, Guinan’s 300 Club netted $700,000 in 1926 alone. Each time she was arrested, Guinan swore she never sold an alcoholic drink in her life—patrons brought their own, she’d claim. And the dancers? The club was so small they had to dance in patrons’ laps.

  Other nights Ripley attended rowdy parties at Rube Goldberg’s apartment with Bugs Baer and Damon Runyon, sharing cocktails with the Marx Brothers, George Gershwin, and Fanny Brice. One night, the petite shimmy-and-shake Ziegfeld star Anne Pennington performed a raucous dance on the hardwood floors while Harry Houdini swallowed sewing needles and pulled them out of his throat, all threaded on a string.

  Pearlroth, meanwhile, didn’t seem to mind toiling in the shadows, happy to be quietly contributing to Ripley’s “fairy tales for grown-ups.”

  Early each morning Pearlroth rode the subway into Manhattan. Most days he’d go straight to the New York Public Library’s main branch on Fifth Avenue, and he’d be one of the first to ascend the front steps between the twin lion statues. He’d grab a card catalogue tray, sift through it and select ten or more books, then find a spot in the cavernous third-floor reading room. He always turned off the reading lamps, preferring the natural light beneath the towering carved-wood ceiling.

  Skipping lunch, he’d wander about, scanning shelves, collecting more books, scribbling notes until his eyesight grew blurry. He learned to make Photostat copies, so that Ripley had pictures to copy for his sketches. Librarians came to know Pearlroth by name and would often have to ask him to leave at closing time. He’d arrive home well past dinner, and rarely saw his wife and children during the week.

  Though the hours he devoted to his employer caused friction within his family, Pearlroth felt he had found, somewhat remarkably, the dream job. Research and information had long been his hobby, but now he got paid to spend time among dusty history and reference books. What Pearlroth sought day in and day out were facts and truths that made his heart race, evidence that life wasn’t “boringly uniform,” that there were “glorious exceptions”—the Moroccan emperor who fathered 888 children; the Hindu who married his daughter to a tree; the Slovak who ate 150 hard-boiled eggs for dinner; the two German railroad workers who drank 352 glasses of beer in seventeen hours. “Curiosity is a fundamental human trait,” Pearlroth would gush.

  Even if they aren’t aware of it, people hunger for the “astonishing but true.” Pearlroth was proud to be contributing to cartoons that “satisfied a human urge to flee from the daily grind into the realm of the incredible.”

  By now, Ripley had also learned that what readers loved more than the elite celebrity athletes he’d spent his career featuring were pictures and stories of underdogs and misfits. They wanted the grotesques, the geeks, the goofballs—they wanted less champ, more chump. For someone who often felt like the ultimate “goofy” outsider, he had at long last begun featuring the imperfect people and performers who were a reflection of the less-than-perfect LeRoy Ripley.

  As something of a misfit himself—obsessive, eccentric, monomaniacal—Norbert Pearlroth also left his mark on Believe It or Not, but it was Ripley’s show, and always would be. Pearlroth’s complicated and semivisible role, established from the start, would be that of Ripley’s behind-the-bushes voice of authority—his Cyrano.

  As he helped Ripley stoke and feed his newly invigorated cartoon, Pearlroth offered to expand his job duties and help prepare travel itineraries for his boss, knowing that Ripley considered travel “an unfailing source of oddities.” In fact, Pearlroth seemed to want Ripley to more regularly flee his daily grind, but, for the benefit of the cartoon, in a way that involved more precision, preparation, and purpose. “You can’t just take off for a country and ask the natives where their curiosities are,” he once told Ripley. “You have to come primed, you have to alread
y know about them.”

  So when Pearlroth learned that Ripley would soon travel to Amsterdam for the 1928 Olympic Games, he suggested a side trip—to Hell.

  INSTEAD OF SAILING directly to Europe, Ripley first visited Iceland and then Scandinavia. In Norway, in the coastal city of Trondheim, he bought a train ticket for the town that was on Pearlroth’s itinerary. Ripley’s visit to the small village of Hell would ever after loom among his proudest little side trips. Though hardly an adventure, it was a perfect reflection of his offbeat explorer’s sensibilities and his appreciation for tongue-in-cheek travel. He loved describing his “descent into Hell.”

  There wasn’t much to see. Just a train station and a few vine-covered cottages. Ripley had befriended a woman (either on the train or on the ship from Greenland) and she snapped photos of him standing beneath the HELL sign, looking dapper in a three-piece wool suit and tie, a wool cap tilted just so.

  Ripley wrote an article and drew a cartoon depicting himself and his lady friend having a cocktail—“Skaal!”—beside the train station. (Ripley would later tell a colleague that he’d spent the night with his new friend—a one-night tryst in Hell. Another new discovery: for some hard-to-believe reason, women liked him!)

  The subsequent headlines in US papers would read: RIPLEY GOES TO HELL.

  “It has frequently been suggested that I come here,” Ripley wrote. “Hell is delightful!…Hell is restful, quiet and pleasant … Dante must be mistaken.”

  In a nod to the letter writers who were always asking for proof and information, he explained that Hell meant “gentle slope” in Norwegian.

  “Go to Hell!” Ripley advised his readers. “I mean it.”

  The Evening Post admen had a field day. Not only had he visited fifty-three countries, Ripley had been to Hell and back.

  M. Lincoln “Max” Schuster was a savvy editor and marketer, with a nose for the public’s tastes. With his equally acute partner, Richard L. “Dick” Simon, he’d published the first-ever book of crossword puzzles in 1924, inspired by Simon’s aunt, a fanatic crossworder who wanted more than her newspaper’s one-a-day puzzle.