A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  On July 9, 1929, Ripley’s first day with King Features, Connolly threw a lavish dinner party aboard the SS Vulcania ocean liner. He invited dozens of Ripley’s friends—artists, journalists, athletes, and actors, including Al Jolson and Eddie Cantor. Cartoonist Harry Hershfield roasted Ripley and crooner Rudy Vallee devoted a new song, written by Irving Berlin, called “Believe It or Not.”

  It was Hearst’s way of saying to Ripley, Welcome to the family.

  Hearst then followed up his generous salary offer with a barrage of supportive publicity. Via internal memo distributed shortly after he hired Ripley, Hearst ordered his empire: “Please instruct all our papers using Ripley to promote him heavily in full page and half page advertisements in other papers and also on billboards.”

  In response to The Chief’s instructions, Ripley’s likeness began to appear in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the San Antonio Light, the Detroit Times, the Shreveport Times, the Asheville Citizen, and scores of other King Features papers, announcing that Ripley had “joined the staff” or “Rip’s coming” or “Ripley starts work tomorrow!” Profile writers dug up and repackaged the story of Ripley’s tryout with the New York Giants, many of them claiming Ripley had been a starting pitcher. Hearst’s New York American ran a half-page ad announcing “another brilliant star to shine on the sports pages.”

  Though Ripley had worked at three different New York newspapers since 1912, his true home had been Associated Newspapers, and his ultimate boss had been the syndicate’s general manager, H. H. McClure, who had played the role of mentor, father figure, and friend. McClure and Ripley’s day-to-day editors, like Walter St. Denis, had mostly given him a long leash, allowing him to do his own thing, to pursue new ideas or write about non-sports topics or sail to Europe on a whim. Connolly would be the first to actively manage Ripley, to mold and shape his magic. And Hearst would be the first to issue edicts and restrictions from on high.

  In a mid-1929 telegraph message to “cartoonist Ripley,” for example, Hearst insisted that Ripley stop drawing for magazine ads, which “injures the paper and also the artist.” He reminded Ripley that his contract required him to “devote all time, attention, and energy” to the cartoon and “not work gratuitously or for hire …”

  “The effect on your work is something for you to decide but the effect on the paper I can surely say would be unfortunate,” Hearst said.

  Hearst closed by adding, “We are happy in your association with our papers and hope everything will continue happily.”

  The message was clear: Do as I say, and all will be well.

  THREE MONTHS into his new job, Ripley learned that his Hearst contract was the gift that kept giving.

  Connolly informed him in late October that King Features had decided to start selling Believe It or Not cartoons overseas. Since this hadn’t been addressed in the initial contract, Connolly suggested that they apply the same fifty-fifty split they’d set for profits from the full-page Sunday cartoons. “I believe that we can build up a worthwhile foreign business,” Connolly said, adding that Believe It or Not could be as big in China and Australia as it was in the United States.

  Ripley was given office space at the New York American in Lower Manhattan, but he often chose to work from home. The NYAC had opened a new clubhouse in 1927, a block east of its previous clubhouse on Central Park South. (Ripley helped design the new handball courts). As a longtime resident, he was given one of the two-room bachelor’s suites, with a front-room parlor that he converted into an art studio and a bedroom in back. Room #1801 was the biggest place he’d lived in since leaving Santa Rosa twenty years earlier.

  For someone who considered himself “indolent” and “the laziest man in the world,” Ripley was soon working harder than ever. To produce the required quota of cartoons, he honed a new routine: starting work at dawn, drawing sketches in a robe and bare feet, eating a light breakfast, and skipping lunch. Though he always wore suits and ties in public, at home he could be downright slobbish. After a few hours of work, his hands would be caked with ink and charcoal, his fingernails black. When he ran out of socks, he’d rinse a pair in the sink.

  He had been a NYAC resident for a decade but still treated the club more like a hotel than a home, just a temporary stopover between travels. The apartment had become cluttered with souvenirs and artwork accumulated from overseas trips, some of which he had begun putting into storage. On his Central America trip he had picked up a foulmouthed parrot that he taught to say “Hello, Rip” and “Good-bye, Rip.” From its previous owners, the bird had learned more colorful words. As one writer put it, Ripley’s pet was capable of as “sulfurous a flow of potent language as ever horrified delicate ears.”

  When the bird got too loud and raunchy, Ripley turned up his radio. When the apartment got stuffy, he stripped off his robe and worked in gym shorts, chatting with the parrot above the crackling squawk of the radio. Sometimes he invited one of his cute new secretaries up to dictate a letter, all the while listening to his music, sketching at his easel, and taunting his parrot, wearing nothing but skimpy shorts.

  As the workload increased, Ripley tried to keep his drinking in check. He established a new rule for himself: no drinks before four or after seven. Under this odd but productive arrangement, Ripley quickly made good on Hearst’s hefty investment.

  WITH THE FINANCIAL CRISIS looming that fall of 1929, Hearst feared that readers would have less time to spend on their daily paper. In order to present news “briefly as well as brightly,” he gave the American a tabloid-like makeover—expanding the Sunday comics page and putting cartoons on the front page—jazzy touches that prompted the New Yorker to praise Hearst’s “journalistic sixth sense.” Hearst seemed to feel that Ripley’s jazzy everyman appeal could keep and attract readers, especially working-class and ethnic readers. Ripley’s cartoon and sensibilities meshed nicely with Hearst’s love of contests and stunts.

  BELIEVE IT!

  After Lindbergh’s 1927 transatlantic feat, Hearst had sponsored a New York-to-Rome flying contest. One of his editors, Phil Payne, joined the crew of a Hearst-sponsored plane, Old Glory, which crashed into the Atlantic, killing Payne and the others aboard.

  Ripley already knew how to goad readers with a tricky puzzler or far-fetched declaration. On November 3, a week after the stock market crash, as the markets continued their historic plunge, Ripley made this provocative statement in his first Sunday cartoon for Hearst: “America Has No National Anthem.”

  The sketch featured a chubby man raising a glass, singing to a packed barroom, with a caption that said Congress had repeatedly refused to endorse “The Star-Spangled Banner” as America’s official anthem. Furthermore, “The Star-Spangled Banner” melody was based on “a vulgar old English drinking song.” According to Ripley (with details provided by Pearlroth), while the lyrics to America’s unofficial national anthem were written by Francis Scott Key, the music was based on the song “To Anacreon in Heaven,” written around 1780 by members of the Anacreontic Society, a men’s club in London. Intended as a homage to Greek poet Anacreon, known for his erotic poems, it became a popular drinking song whose lyrics celebrated wine and women—nine feisty maids, the myrtle of Venus, and Bacchus’s vine made cameos.

  With the nation’s financial system in turmoil, some viewed this as indelicate timing, if not treasonous. One furious columnist called the cartoon “scurrilous” and derided Ripley as “one of the most offensive animals in the Hearst stable of odiferous zebras.” Others were tickled, or inspired into patriotic action.

  Letters poured in from all camps, demanding that Congress officially adopt the anthem. Within a year, Veterans of Foreign Wars activists and others would collect a petition with five million signatures. A one-sentence bill would make its way through Congress and on March 3, 1931, President Herbert Hoover would sign Public Law 823, making “The Star-Spangled Banner” America’s national anthem. (The Hearst machine would credit Ripley in print for this achievement, and Ripley would become a
devoted Hoover supporter and friend.)

  IN AROUSING READERS, Ripley sometimes went too far for Hearst’s tastes.

  “St. Patrick was neither a Catholic, a saint, nor an Irishman! And his name was not Patrick!” Ripley declared in a late-1929 cartoon, which generated more animosity than any Ripley cartoon to date. Besieged by irate phone calls from offended Catholics, Hearst personally telegrammed all King Features papers, telling them to kill the cartoon. But it was too late and only a few afternoon papers were able to scrap it.

  An Irish priest editorialized that Ripley should steer clear of religion and stick with “interesting little facts of nature or trick problems in arithmetic.” A priest in Hawaii told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin the cartoon was “unpardonably inaccurate” and “stupid.” When Ripley responded with a letter accurately explaining that Saint Patrick was not born in Ireland and not officially canonized, the priest shot back that “nobody pays attention to the silly cartoons of Ripley to question their exactitude.”

  It was just the kind of publicity Ripley thrived on, even if it angered Hearst, who was wary of offending immigrant Catholic readers. (In an effort to appeal to Italians, Hearst once hired Benito Mussolini to write a column.) Hearst’s support for Ripley barely wavered, though. In fact, King Features launched a series of contests, offering autographed Believe It or Not books or cash to readers with the best strange-but-true items.

  Submission letters poured in by the tens of thousands. One winner submitted the shortest sentence containing all the letters of the alphabet (“A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”), only to be outdone a week later by a sentence one letter shorter (“Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs”).

  Such contests were an ingenious scheme for the man contractually required to produce seven cartoons a week, each containing as many as six unbelievably true tidbits. Ripley’s readers were now carrying some of the load and by the end of 1929, as he told one lecture crowd, he had Believe It or Not ideas “piled up three years ahead.” With such a cache of believe-it-or-nots, he was hoping to get back on the road.

  THOUGH THE GREAT DEPRESSION would soon consume the nation, forcing most Americans to hunker down and travel little or not at all, Ripley would see his fortunes and global travels soar in reverse correlation. His brand of printed entertainment—See the world with Ripley for just a few cents! A thrill a day for less than a nickel!—would grow to become just the kind of affordable diversion a troubled nation craved. Now that he was making more money every few weeks than he’d previously earned in a full year, he began planning an expanded list of alien lands to visit—North Africa! The Holy Land! The Middle East! Russia!

  Back in Santa Rosa, Ripley’s former hometown paper summed up his hard-earned success. ROY RIPLEY HAS WON FAME: SANTA ROSA BOY REACHES TOP OF LADDER, blared a Press Democrat headline, above a story calling him “one of the leading cartoonists of America, if not of the world … while a few years back he was a mere school boy with a hobby.”

  Ripley’s Believe It or Not book finished the year ranked among 1929’s top sellers, in the elite company of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms as well as books by Edith Wharton, Bertrand Russell, Sinclair Lewis, Will Rogers, and Ripley’s old San Francisco pal Peter B. Kyne, who had encouraged him to move to New York back in 1912.

  His path had been rockier than that of his peers, and Believe It or Not had hardly been an overnight success. But now, at age thirty-nine, the obsessive pursuit of the aberrations of humanity had at long last become Roy Ripley’s entire life. The kooky cartoonist and his kooky cartoon were inextricably entwined.

  “Now it looks as though I will never do anything else,” he had written in the introduction to his book. “And I don’t care if I do.”

  Within weeks of agreeing to join Ripley’s staff, Dick Hyman found himself shivering and trapped in a snowstorm, stranded at a southern Indiana railroad depot, wondering what he’d gotten himself into by agreeing to become Ripley’s new business manager and publicity director.

  Since meeting Ripley years earlier in Rio, Hyman had been working as a reporter in Rhode Island. When Ripley lured him to New York, his first assignment was to visit the town of Santa Claus, Indiana, to mail thousands of pre-addressed letters just before Christmas, a scheme hatched at the last minute. He learned this was typical of Ripley.

  A blizzard had shut the railroad, leaving Hyman stuck far short of Santa Claus. He was forced to travel the final miles by horse-drawn sleigh. When he finally reached the town—population thirty-two—he found the postmaster, who also ran the general store, lugging sacks of potatoes in from the snow. Hyman convinced the man to pose for pictures and to postmark Ripley’s letters, then wrote a story about it all for King Features.

  When the letters reached their recipients, hundreds of newspapers around the world published photographs of the envelopes, each bearing a note preprinted on the front—Believe It or Not, This Is a Letter from Santa Claus—with an arrow pointing to the now-stamped “Santa Claus” postmark. Hyman learned that Ripley could be disorganized and unpredictable and difficult to work for, but his publicity instincts were impeccable.

  “He never missed a beat,” Hyman said years later, looking back on the start of his long partnership with Ripley.

  Just as Ripley needed Pearlroth’s research skills at a critical moment in his career, he now needed someone like Hyman to help him promote and manage himself. In Hyman, Ripley found the loyal aide he’d need to control the coming explosion of his career—the fame, the wealth, and the women.

  BY MID-1930, nearing his first year of employment with Hearst and having just turned forty, Ripley looked back on the headiest months of his life.

  The year began with a nonstop publicity blitz. In Akron, Ohio, he spoke to university students and then soared above the city in a blimp, terrified but waving gamely to the photographers. In Michigan, he spent an afternoon with Henry Ford at his Dearborn estate. In Washington, DC, he spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at Central High School, gave a midnight lecture at the Earle Theater, and the next day visited disabled veterans at Walter Reed Hospital. During a three-day visit to Boston, he met the mayor and governor, lectured and signed books, visited sick kids at Children’s Hospital, and played pool at the Boston Boys Club, sinking fifteen in a row. Each night he appeared in a vaudeville-style show, outdrawing stage favorites Amos and Andy, who were performing at a rival theater. Suddenly, everywhere he went, Ripley was trailed by photographers and autograph seekers. A Boston Daily Record editorial raved, “Believe It or Not is more than a feature, it’s a craze.”

  Followers began calling themselves Bonfans (Believe It or Not fans) or “Rip-O-Maniacs.” Even his former paper, the Post, acknowledged that Ripley had become “a nation-wide vogue … a one-man fad.” According to one news report, he received more mail than Will Rogers, Rudy Vallee, and Herbert Hoover. He had received a million letters in 1929, nearly three thousand a day, and was considered to have broken all records for mail received by one person. In 1930, he became the target of some of the oddest envelopes ever to pass through the postal system.

  One correspondent taped Ripley’s photograph to an envelope, pasted on a two-cent stamp, and mailed it with no address. The letter would normally have been dumped into the dead-letter office, but postal workers by now knew where to send it. When King Features published a story about this feat—and awarded the letter writer a cash prize—it triggered waves of mischievous missives. One sent only a stamp, with the address and a forty-seven-word message inked on the back. Another sent an envelope with a drawing of a bird in place of an address. It took a magnifying glass to reveal the words “Robert Ripley” repeated thousands of times in the shape of the bird. Others sent letters addressed in Confederate Army code, in Boy Scout semaphore, or simply addressed to “the damndest liar in the world.”

  Ripley, meanwhile, was a terrible correspondent, and horribly disorganized when it came to paperwork. For a while, he simply threw it all away, until Hyman suggested it might
be good publicity to respond now and then. Ripley then began saving all his mail, reluctant to toss it but unwilling to process it. When secretaries tried to categorize the letters, he’d say, “Just put it aside, put it aside. I’ll decide later.” Occasionally, before heading out of town, he’d grab a stack of letters and stuff it in his bag, with plans to write to a few correspondents. Friends loved to repeat the story about the stack of unopened mail Ripley flung from the window of an airplane above the African plains. Back in New York, the same letters were waiting for him.

  Finally, the US postmaster general decided his employees had better things to do than manage Ripley’s fan mail. On April 19, 1930, Walter Brown issued a directive to all postal workers, instructing that “such letters hereafter will either be returned to the sender or sent to the dead letter office.”

  Said Brown: “Postal clerks have had to devote too much time recently to deciphering freak letters intended for Ripley.”

  When King Features published Brown’s directive, word for word, in hundreds of Hearst newspapers, it only inspired the letter writers to get freakier.

  KING FEATURES had exposed Ripley to a massive, global audience, and except for a minority of curmudgeons who considered Ripley’s tastes too downscale and creepy—“devoid of conscience or brains or both,” said one critic—the public mostly loved him. Hearst had given him a huge new stage, and Ripley found he was ready for the spotlight. No longer a mere reporter, he was now the man other reporters sought to interview.

  He would invite interviewers up to his NYAC apartment and spend an hour casually answering their questions, whether it was a national magazine correspondent or a student reporter from Julia Richman High School’s Bluebird newsletter. “Go right ahead, I’m not busy,” he would insist, putting aside his nub of charcoal.