A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  He was an artist, not a businessman, but he now needed to be both. His popularity and fame had grown so quickly, he suddenly found himself with “no time for anything,” as he put it in a woe-is-me story for Reader’s Digest.

  I am blessed with an indolent nature. I detest business. But since the publication of my Believe It or Not book, I have not had time, nor rest nor peace.… There are lectures, talking pictures, radio; syndicate features to prepare and illustrate, more books to write.… All this pressure has taught me the necessity of tightly packed entertainment, recreation, self-instruction, into the little, scattered, ten-minute fragments of time that are left to me.

  What he needed most was a vacation. And a companion.

  The boy who once ran from girls was now being chased by them. Even with his bad teeth (which he was thinking of getting fixed, now that he could afford to), he was among the most eligible men in New York, often seen with an attractive young actress, singer, or dancer on his arm. He had come close to proposing a time or two, but always reminded himself he was not spousal material. Monogamy, he had learned, was not his forte.

  Three years after Hearst and King Features hoisted him onto a global stage, he had become rich, famous, and beloved. But he also wanted to love and to be loved. Or at least not be alone. He had discovered there were plenty of women who wanted to spend time with a needy cartoonist. Even married women.

  Part of Dick Hyman’s job was to manage the love interests that were playing a larger role in Ripley’s daily life. If Ripley wanted to be alone with a lover, they had to meet in hotels, since women weren’t allowed at the NYAC. Wary of seeing his name in the gossip pages, he would instruct Hyman to pack a heavy telephone book or two into an empty suitcase, take it to the hotel, then check in under an assumed name. Hyman would later hand a key to Ripley, who would slip into the hotel room later that night, where his girlfriend would be waiting.

  Despite such attempts at discretion, one lover refused to stay in the shadows. Her name was Marion Ohnick, but she went by the stage name Haru Onuki. “That delectable morsel of Japanese femininity,” the Los Angeles Times once called her. Onuki performed on Broadway and in traveling vaudeville shows from 1916 through the late 1920s, making her operatic debut in 1926 as the lead in Madame Butterfly with the touring San Carlo Opera Company. The New York Times described Onuki’s “striking entrance” and “dramatic talent,” but added that her voice “was not quite heavy enough for the tragic demands of the role.”

  Ripley had known Onuki since the mid-1920s and had featured her in a 1926 cartoon, calling her the “beautiful Japanese prima donna” who took a full day to fix her hair. Now thirty-seven, she was past her prima donna days but still regal and glamorous. Ripley had been seeing Onuki on and off for years, and proposed to her in 1931. At least, that’s what Onuki would claim. He apparently kept delaying the event and soon started avoiding her. In September of that year, Onuki waited in the lobby of the NYAC, demanding to see “Bobbie.” When Ripley repeatedly refused to come downstairs, she lay down on the lobby floor.

  “I won’t move until I get five hundred dollars from him!” she yelled.

  Ripley eventually sent down the cash and Onuki left New York to be with her family in California. Shortly afterward, she sued, accusing Ripley of breaking his promise to marry her and seeking $500,000 in damages. The lawsuit initially went unnoticed by the press until Ripley’s lawyer challenged Onuki’s lawsuit due to her “diversity of citizenship.” (Ohnick’s father was Japanese.) A New York State Supreme Court judge agreed to transfer the case to the US District Court, and that’s when word leaked to the newspapers—Ripley sued by scorned lover.

  The breakup and lawsuit were reported in Time magazine, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others, putting Ripley’s love life back in the headlines, ten years after the divorce from Beatrice earned similar notoriety. As before, Onuki wanted Ripley to pay for his alleged wrongs.

  “I love Bobbie as much as I did when I first promised to be his little Japanese sister,” she told Time.

  One benefit of his wealth was the ability to quickly escape such troubles. So when Onuki moved back to New York, to the St. Moritz Hotel—right next to the NYAC—Ripley made sure he got as far away as possible. By March 1932, he was on the opposite side of the globe “seeking new incredible facts,” as Time put it.

  He was also seeking love—and Onuki’s replacement.

  THE SS MARIPOSA was a speedy, triple-smokestack liner that, if tipped on its nose, would reach almost halfway up the newly built Empire State Building. She began her maiden voyage on January 16, leaving New York with five hundred passengers. Ripley caught up with the ship in Los Angeles and began sailing toward the South Pacific, to explore “the wonderlands of the south seas,” as the travel brochure promised.

  With first-class dining halls, a hardwood dance pavilion, a library, two outdoor swimming pools, and the largest promenade deck of any American ship, the vessel would be Ripley’s home for nearly three months and thirty thousand miles.

  Capt. J. H. Trask, who had been sailing the Pacific for as long as Ripley had been alive, was entrusted with such notable passengers as former Hawaiian territorial governor George R. Carter and filmmaker Howard Hawks, who had just finished work on his latest film, Scarface. Ripley’s entourage included a small radio crew to help conduct long-distance NBC broadcasts along the way, and a young man from Utah named Joe Simpson, who had been hired by King Features as Ripley’s traveling secretary and cameraman. Simpson would film and photograph the journey for use in future Vitaphone films. (Based on the passenger logs of the Mariposa and many other ships Ripley had sailed, it seems Norbert Pearlroth never joined Ripley on any of his overseas travels.)

  Ripley promised Joe Connolly he’d mail home a steady supply of cartoons. In the meantime, he intended to forget about the pending lawsuit and his near-miss second marriage to the litigious Onuki, and unwind with his feisty young female companion in their two-room suite with a private balcony.

  Entrusted to Ripley’s care was the woman he referred to in his journal only as “M.” An employee would later describe her as “some pretty young thing he was hanging around with at the time” and a friend referred to her as “a beautiful, amusing woman whom he doted upon.”

  Based on photographs, passenger logs, and other documents, it seems Ripley’s “pretty little shipmate” was actually Ruth Ross, a woman he’d met in the late 1920s in Europe who would become a constant traveling companion, employee, and, in time, his secret lover.

  She was Eastern European (from either Russia or Hungary; Ripley’s friends were never sure) and had left home to study in Paris. By the time Ripley met her she had become a successful antiques dealer. One colleague would describe her as “a flashing-eyed Jewess, handsome, intelligent, and vital.” Ripley had initially hired Ross to accompany him during a tour of France and Germany and to serve as his translator and cultural guide.

  During their European travels they fell in love—or, at least, Ripley fell for her. By 1930 she had moved to New York, and friends came to believe Ripley had pulled strings to help her immigrate, though he was vague about her route to America, as well as her country of origin. Her English was good and Ripley adored her accent—“OK” sounded like “oakie,” and she frequently used the term “okie-dokie,” which he found cute. He nicknamed her Oakie.

  Ripley kept a detailed journal, which provides a blow-by-blow account of the trip and, at times, the intimacy he and Oakie shared in their lovers’ suite.

  RIPLEY AROSE EACH MORNING around five o’clock to wander the decks barefoot, stopping to read National Geographic in the library. By late morning he’d find Oakie beside the pool, slowly turning brown. The two of them spent their days wearing only bathing suits—“or less,” he wrote in his journal. By the time they reached Fiji, Oakie’s skin had turned deep tan—“that golden brown is so attractive,” said Ripley—while his own skin was the “ugly color of sickening pink and white.” As on previous trips
to Asia, Ripley sometimes felt self-conscious about the extreme whiteness of his skin, in contrast to the exotic darkness of the “natives.”

  Though Ripley enjoyed the multinational city of Suva, he wanted to see native Fijians, with their wild and reddish hair, whose ancestors were known cannibals. He was never much interested in postcards and typical tourist trinkets, but he did like the idea of bringing a “cannibal fork” home with him.

  BELIEVE IT!

  A Fiji chieftain named Ratu Udre Udre was believed to have eaten nine hundred people in his lifetime.

  In a rural village north of Suva, Ripley and Oakie toured among grass-roofed huts and watched native “spear dances” and a fire-walking demonstration, then reluctantly agreed to participate in a “kava ceremony.” Villagers chewed the leaves of a kava plant, spit the juice into a bowl, and handed it to Ripley, who sipped the leaf-and-saliva concoction, winced, and told his hosts it tasted like soapy water with pepper sprinkled into it, but no worse than the liquor back home.

  Before leaving Suva, Ripley befriended a bartender who sold him a few bottles, and over the next few days he and Oakie drank by the Mariposa’s pool while Ripley nursed his feet, which had become swollen and sore after his walking tour in Fiji. Ripley and Oakie sometimes spent whole days in their cabin, emerging only for dinner and some nights not dressing at all. Ripley hinted in his journal at Oakie’s “free-air fiendishness” and how she’d get so “goofy about Bob” he’d wake up in the mornings with a sore back and neck. One morning he awoke with such a raging headache that he vowed not to allow himself to “be duped with drink and beautiful women.”

  Of course, Ripley’s Believe It or Not duties were never far away. While crossing the Tasman Sea, Ripley and his NBC crew set up equipment for a planned radio broadcast to be sent back to New York—billed as the first South Seas–New York radio show. One of his guests was Czech pianist Rudolf Friml, formerly a Ziegfeld Follies composer. A known tippler, Friml forgot his lines and cues despite two days of practice. “Well, what do you want me to do,” Friml said when Ripley introduced him on-air, but Ripley managed to keep him more or less on track and had him play a few songs.

  When the ship stopped in Sydney, Ripley was confronted by a throng of newsmen and spent three days giving lectures and meeting with editors at Hearst’s newspaper, The Sun. He and Oakie had an awkward dinner with his friend Whupsie Strelitz, the woman he’d dated in Buenos Aires in 1925 and had stayed in touch with. (Oakie was not happy; Ripley told his journal he was tempted to throw her overboard.) His last night in Sydney called for another complicated transoceanic radio broadcast, linking the show to New York via a network of Australian stations. Captain Trask agreed to delay the Mariposa’s departure to allow Ripley to finish his broadcast, but the show ran late and Ripley sprinted to the ship to meet the angry stares of passengers and crew.

  Over the next month, the Mariposa sailed among tropical islands, hopping from port to port as Ripley and Oakie drank gin and dined with Rudolf Friml. In New Guinea, Ripley posed for photos with beautiful narrow-waisted and topless Papuan women, who warned him not to venture into the nearby jungle. A local tribe had recently invited another tribe to a peace conference, but the visitors slaughtered their hosts—“quartered them and ate their flesh,” Ripley reported. As guests at the home of the Port Moresby police chief, Ripley and Oakie drank cocktails while watching performances by native dancers, including a prohibited “sex dance.” He and Oakie were again the last passengers back aboard the Mariposa that night, just barely reaching the gangplank before it was pulled up.

  WHAT RIPLEY LOVED most about traveling were the slow-paced moments of “delightful fatigue,” far from New York’s madness—walking barefoot on the empty decks at sunrise, hitting golf balls out over schools of flying fish, watching Oakie spread tanning oil on her glistening body.

  He also loved visiting exotic locales that felt original and untouched by modernity. He found Bali to be one of the most peaceful, beautiful places he had ever seen, inhabited by “lovable, brown-skinned people” who were “the most artistic on earth.” Ripley preferred his “natives” to be authentically native—barefoot and bare breasted, living simply in their huts of grass. In Bali and throughout Java, he eagerly captured more film footage of native dances and ceremonial rituals.

  In Singapore, Ripley introduced Oakie to John Little’s bar, where he had first tasted Singapore Slings in 1923. The bar seemed more run-down than he remembered, though after a few midday Slings he decided it looked pretty good after all. He had to practically carry Oakie back to the ship, where she collapsed unconscious into her bunk, but rebounded for a late night on the town. They got back to the ship at four a.m., and found a monkey and a parrot in their cabin.

  Sailing into Bangkok, Ripley watched children diving off the horns of a partially submerged water buffalo. That night, he experienced the “wonderful quality” of Thai opium before watching a performance by Siamese dancers, whose kaleidoscopic costumes were “the most magnificent I have ever seen.”

  Days later, the Mariposa entered Hong Kong Harbor, its pale-green waters jammed with thousands of sampans, fishing boats, and ferries. Thrilled to be back in the Orient, Ripley quickly immersed himself, riding rickshaws down ancient narrow alleys and exploring streets alive with clicking mahjong games and clubs overflowing with the gaudy music of singsong girls—his China. After two heady days in Hong Kong he decided he wasn’t ready to leave and made a last-minute decision to visit Shanghai. Twenty minutes before the scheduled departure from Hong Kong, he, Oakie, and Joe Simpson packed a bag, disembarked, and watched the Mariposa sail away.

  The New York Times advertisement for the Mariposa tour had promised “a dramatic journey with a scintillating prologue.” Now, the South Seas prologue of semi-clad native dancers and Singapore Slings was about to be replaced by the drama of war.

  RIPLEY AND HIS COMPANIONS reached Shanghai at a volatile and dangerous time. Seven months earlier, Japanese troops had invaded the Manchuria region of northeast China and just two months before Ripley’s arrival Japan had attacked Shanghai. The Chinese Army had pulled back, but sporadic fighting continued and Ripley witnessed evidence of the conflict: corpses and unexploded shells, charred buildings and fifty-foot bomb craters. He was stopped and questioned often by Japanese soldiers, who confiscated his movie camera and film. (Simpson managed to retrieve the camera and Ripley would return to the States with grisly footage of an execution: A group of prisoners is led through the streets, lined up on their knees, then shot in the head by a firing squad. It’s unknown whether he purchased the film or if he and Simpson shot it. Years later, Ripley would admit during a lecture, “I have seen numbers of people executed because they disagreed politically.”)

  In some sections of town, Japanese soldiers dined easily in Chinese restaurants. Elsewhere, machine-gun fire popped and dark smoke curled into the sky. Ripley tried to cheer himself by visiting clubs he’d sampled years earlier. At the St. Georges, he was recognized by American sailors, who bought him a beer. To his surprise, he didn’t feel like drinking. At the Del Monte, a group of Japanese naval officers invited Ripley to drink with them. As the Japanese officers drank beer, Ripley sipped coffee, then walked sullenly and alone back to his hotel.

  “Felt low all day due to the influence of the war,” he wrote in his journal.

  The next morning, despite Ripley’s fear of flying, he and his companions boarded an American seaplane and flew above a crazy quilt of rice paddies to Nanking. There, they toured past the conference hall where peace talks were being held and past the home of Chiang Kai-shek, who was quietly preparing for all-out war with Japan. Ripley also had dinner with Pearl S. Buck, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel The Good Earth. “It is very tense here,” Buck had recently told a friend, and Ripley was about to discover just how tense his favorite country had become.

  Unlike his previous visit, touring China was now risky and disturbing. On a crowded train to Peiping (as Westerners called Be
ijing at the time), Ripley was refused service in the dining car and forced to sit in a passenger car crammed with Chinese men drinking brandy and smoking cigars, many of the men staring intensely at the only white people aboard. He had always considered China peaceful and loving, but now he felt threatened and unsafe—which helped explain the scarcity of other American or Western travelers.

  Still, he tried to pretend it was just a vacation and not an error in judgment. He and Oakie toured the Great Wall in sedan chairs and walked through the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven, where he was startled to meet two former Santa Rosa classmates. In a market Ripley found a comfortable pair of Chinese slippers for his aching feet, the sight of which earned some laughs from passengers on that afternoon’s steamer journey to Dairen.

  From Dairen (as Dalian was called at the time), they traveled north to war-shredded Mukden. The city, now under martial law, felt spooky and on edge. On the pier, Ripley was met by a man who called himself Chris Shibuya, who worked for the “News Bureau” and offered to give Ripley a tour. When Ripley explained who he was, the man abruptly turned and walked off. Ripley assumed Shibuya was a spy, and over the next two days felt as if he was being followed.

  Mukden proved to be a stressful stop for the American tourists. Just days before Ripley’s arrival, twelve suspected bandits had been executed and decapitated, their heads hung from the arch of the city gate. By day, shops remained closed and citizens walked nervously through town, eyeing Ripley with suspicion. Each night, machine guns sputtered. Ripley was forbidden from taking photographs or even scribbling notes. He had to secretly send cables to New York addressed “Dear Elsie …” to prevent his messages from being intercepted by the Japanese military.

  Despite the dangers and images of war, he left China as enchanted and beguiled as ever. Though besieged by Japanese invaders, the country struck him as resilient and magical, a place “of superstition and religion, of mercy and goodness,” as Pearl Buck once put it, “of dreams and miracles, of dragons and gods and goddesses and priests …”