A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  Dufour told Pyle to find better acts, like Callahan. His advice: less vaudeville, more torture. “The public loves to suffer,” he liked to say. Dufour offered to help Pyle find more interesting performers—a man who could drive long nails into his nose and stick hatpins through his cheeks, one who licked red-hot bars with his tongue—in exchange for 3 percent of the ticket receipts. But Pyle was hesitant to create a blatant freak show.

  “People will faint,” he protested.

  Dufour assured him, “That’s when the business will start.”

  Ripley had by this point stepped back to let Pyle take charge, having learned in recent years that he could hardly manage his empire alone, that he was still a better traveling artist than a businessman. Though he had grown wary in recent years of tainting the Believe It or Not brand and was quick to sue anyone who misused his trademark, with a fellow Santa Rosan in charge he freely turned over the “Ripley” name and hoped for the best.

  Meanwhile, as Pyle worked to save the struggling Odditorium that summer of 1933, Ripley was in a Jerusalem hotel, wondering how to find the Garden of Eden.

  RIPLEY COULD BE CYNICAL when he spoke or wrote about religion, but he was still a Christian and believed in the stories of the Bible, which he read frequently. (If caught, he’d claim he was just searching for Believe It or Not material, but close friends could tell the book was more than a research tool.) Whenever he found himself at some holy site, he always thought to himself, Christ was here. While sitting alone at the King David Hotel leafing through the Bible, he read from the Book of Genesis: “And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden.” Suddenly, he decided to see Eden for himself.

  Though his initial destination had been the Middle East, he now wanted to push ahead to Iraq and Iran (then called Persia), since Iraq was home to the alleged site of the real Garden of Eden. He contacted the Persian minister in Washington, whose office arranged for a letter of introduction. Persian consul general Phiroz D. Saklatvala assured Ripley that by presenting the letter to the first official he encountered in Persia, he would “receive courteous treatment.”

  Ripley first traveled north along the coast to Haifa, then stopped in Nazareth and Cana, where he visited a display of the two clay jars in which Jesus was said to have converted water into wine. In Damascus, Syria, he dined on pigeons and watched a cabaret show but found the beggars “more annoying than ever.” Joining up with a caravan of buses and cars headed east, Ripley and his one-man camera crew, Simpson, bounced and bucked five hundred miles through the rock-strewn desert. Their chariot was a modified bus whose twelve balloon tires helped it surf over inches-deep sand. With no sign of anything that could be called a road, the whole stifling hot expanse of flat desert was a gritty-dusty highway. Ripley sent home a Believe It or Not featuring “The Widest Road in the World! It is wider than it is long!”

  The caravan drove all day, stopping occasionally for sandwiches (Ripley preferred scotch and sodas), and finally parking for the night at a sprawling compound in the middle of the desert, the fortress of Rutbah Wells, where Ripley was confronted by the drawling voice of his friend, Will Rogers, who was on his way to Damascus.

  The two men ate fish for dinner and spent a few evening hours touring the fortress, walking atop the walls and looking out at the fires of the thousands camped outside.

  AFTER A MUCH-NEEDED BATH at Baghdad’s Tigris Palace Hotel, Ripley found a tour guide to help him explore his 152nd country. The guide arrived in a brand-new Studebaker. Folded in Ripley’s pocket was the letter from the Persian minister’s office, which he hoped would ease his travels through this unfamiliar terrain.

  At the police station in Karbala, Ripley pulled out the minister’s letter and was provided a police escort through the city, “to protect us from any fanatical outbreak on the part of the devout Mohammedans,” he wrote in his journal. He witnessed plenty of devotion on the road to Najaf, clogged with Iraqis delivering their dead—in cars and on donkeys—to the massive cemetery in one of the holiest Islamic cities. But the “magic letter,” as he called it, failed to protect him and Simpson in Najaf. A group of men started shouting when they saw Simpson’s camera aimed at their Koran studies. Simpson was scratched and punched while shoving his way to the Studebaker.

  After the roughing-up in Najaf they toured the crumbling remains of the alleged site of the Tower of Babel, which Ripley found to be “a glorified pigeon house.” He was even more disappointed upon reaching the alleged site of the Garden of Eden, which was just a barren patch on the banks of the Euphrates. In a forthcoming Believe It or Not panel he would dispute the biblical tale of Adam and Eve and speculate that mankind’s original transgression was probably eating a fig, not an apple.

  Ripley called rural Iraq a land “where ancient history is written in sweat and blood, where life is mixed with horror.” Baghdad, on the other hand, was “a man’s town, the most masculine place I have ever seen.” He spent two more days in Baghdad, filming circular “guffa” boats bobbing along the Tigris River and learning a few of the thousand words for “sword.” After a few German beers at a café, Ripley donned the white robe and headdress he’d purchased at a bazaar.

  Later, when photos of Ripley in Bedouin garb were transmitted to Hearst’s papers, eager copy editors added a bogus description of how Ripley traveled “in disguise during a trip through forbidden country of Near East.” An overnight train ride took him to Persia, where he ate herring and drank beer for breakfast. His magic letter barely prevented his film from being confiscated, and he became mesmerized by Persia’s women, swathed in black veils and head-to-toe blouses and pantaloons.

  RIPLEY’S LETTER from Persia’s minister eventually turned out to be an invaluable traveling aid. During the seventeen-hour drive from the Iraq border to Tehran, he was stopped nearly every hour by police. He noted in his journal that even with the letter his passage across Persia became entangled in red tape, and “we almost wished we had never heard of this police controlled country.” It took a full day to get permission to visit Isfahan, but he soon appreciated the access to “the most beautiful city in Persia.”

  As usual, Ripley managed to find a drink in the most unlikely of places. In Isfahan he bought strange-tasting beer for $1.25 a bottle and sampled two local drinks, which he soon regretted. He spent his last day and a half in Persia complaining about “too much pelo and mastique.”

  On his final night in Tehran—a “much overrated” city—he attacked his nagging hangover with a bottle of warm wine and cheap caviar. As on many previous travels, Ripley was hardly squeamish about sampling local foods, the more exotic the better. He had particularly enjoyed cold tongue salad and oxtail ragout in Baghdad.

  Driving north to the Soviet border for a planned crossing into Azerbaijan, Ripley was again stopped often by police, and at every stop a swarm of beggars surrounded his car. He considered Persian beggars “the raggedest and dirtiest of any place in the world.” Of course, they may have been just curious locals—Ripley often viewed rural villagers as “beggars.” He was an intrepid traveler but not always a compassionate one.

  After exiting the many gates of Tehran, Ripley’s car, his bags tied atop, slogged for hours through dozens of small towns and walled cities, bypassing nomadic families and their sheep and camels. As the starry night descended Ripley felt the first reluctant stirrings for the age-old beauty of Persia. Stopping for the night in Zingan (later called Zanjan), Ripley followed a tall blond tourist around town but soon learned she was married. He spent his final hours in Persia sulking on his balcony.

  At the Aras River Bridge crossing, Ripley and Simpson were forced to wait for hours—at first held up by sluggish Persian border guards savoring their afternoon tea, then by stone-faced Russian solders on the Soviet side, toting rifles and aiming their bayonets at the unarmed cartoonist and his Mormon sidekick.

  Ripley jumped when he heard a loud pop. It was only the huge bottle of disinfectant he’d been carrying for the past five thousand miles, expecti
ng to need it in Russia. One of the guards had dropped it on the bridge.

  BACK IN CHICAGO, C. C. Pyle had enlivened his exhibit with a cast of performers that gave the Odditorium a kinky new reputation. Pyle had dropped all pretense, replacing gee-whiz novelty acts with freak-show entertainers. By late summer, as Lou Dufour put it, the Odditorium was “packing them in like sardines in a tin.”

  Among the new acts: “Crocodile Man” and “Leopard-Skinned Man” (both victims of skin disease); “Rubber-Skinned Girl” (Agnes C. Schmidt, whose skin ailment caused thick skin on her hips to droop to her knees); “Mule-Faced Lady” (Grace McDaniels, who had enormous, disfiguring facial tumors); and “The Armless Wonder” (who shaved himself, brushed his hair, lit a cigar, and threw knives at a female model—with his toes).

  A crowd favorite was Betty Lou Williams, “The Girl with Four Legs and Three Arms.” Betty Lou was born two years earlier to a poor family in rural Georgia with the remains of her twin sister’s undeveloped body emerging grotesquely from her torso—two lifeless legs, pelvis, and one arm. Odditorium visitors were told that X-rays showed the “perfectly developed” head of Betty Lou’s parasitic twin inside her abdomen. Doctors had been unable to remove the extremities of Betty Lou’s sister, so her parents agreed to let a sideshow man take her to New York. Pyle paid Betty Lou’s parents $250 a week to appear in Ripley’s show—more than five times what other performers received. The toddler stood in diapers and white booties, or sat in the arms of a nurse, her deformed body exposed to bug-eyed crowds for twelve hours a day.

  Another popular new performer was Martin Laurello, the “Human Owl.” Laurello had spent three years in training, twisting his head and neck farther and farther until he could turn his head 180 degrees and look backward. Equally unsettling were the feats of Singlee, the “Hindu Fire Worshipper,” who aimed a flaming blowtorch at his face, and Leo Kongee, “The Human Pin Cushion,” who nailed pins into his head, sewed buttons into his flesh, and fastened socks to his legs with safety pins.

  Then there was adorable Frieda Pushnik, the “Armless, Legless Girl Wonder.” A healthy baby, except for her missing arms and legs (the result of a botched appendectomy performed during pregnancy), Frieda grew to be impressively independent, learning to dress and feed herself, to sew, write, and draw using her teeth, chin, and the small nubs where her arms should have been. Frieda traveled the sideshow circuit with her mother and sister but always introduced her own performances, sitting atop a pillow and telling audiences, “I’m Frieda Kathryn Pushnik. I’m nine years old and I attend public school.” She would thread a needle and sew a few stitches, piece together a jigsaw puzzle, then write a few words on a notepad by wedging a pencil beneath her chin. Her show lasted just a few minutes, but she repeated it over and over, sometimes sixteen hours a day. Frieda earned extra money signing souvenir photographs in her near-perfect, swooping script, “Best Wishes, Frieda.” (Her handwriting had received a national penmanship award from the creators of the Palmer Method.)

  Said one newspaper reporter, “At the Ripley ‘Believe-It-or-Not’ Odditorium her cheery smile has won her a host of friends.”

  RIPLEY OFTEN CLAIMED to detest the word “freak,” preferring to think of his religious fanatics and disfigured performers as “oddities” or “queeriosities.” But as more spectators sought out Cash & Carry Pyle’s revamped exhibit that summer and fall in Chicago, it quickly became obvious that Ripley’s Odditorium had become nothing less than a spiffed-up adaptation of a Barnum-esque freak show.

  P. T. Barnum had launched his own showbiz career by tight-roping between entertainment and exploitation, starting in 1835 when he toured with a blind, emaciated slave billed as George Washington’s 161-year-old former nurse. Barnum gave his acts catchy names, nearly identical to the ones Ripley now used—“Human Pincushion” and “Armless Wonder”—while avoiding the term “freak.” Barnum preferred to call his performers “living wonders” or “human curiosities.”

  After Barnum’s death in 1891 (and the death of his partner, James Bailey), his shows were bought by five Wisconsin brothers named Ringling, who turned the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus into the largest purveyor of human oddities during the first decades of the 1900s. Many Ringling Bros. sideshow performers were featured in a controversial 1932 film called Freaks, whose graphic portrayal of Siamese twins and fat ladies, half boys and armless girls disgusted critics and viewers alike. Some theaters posted warnings: “Children positively not admitted. Adults not in normal health are not advised to see this picture.” The film was banned in many cities, which may have heightened the public’s curiosity and lured them to Ripley’s 1933 show.

  Burton Holmes roamed the fairgrounds, too, filming and photographing the sites—“Midget Village,” nudie shows, the smallest couple in the world, and “the world’s tallest man”—having “the time of my life,” as he put it, collecting footage for a travelogue about the fair that he’d present in 1934.

  With the Odditorium costing forty cents and most exhibits and rides costing a quarter, Variety magazine called it all “a poor man’s carnival.” There was plenty of traditional wholesomeness—carousels, Ferris wheels, and the midway; roving clowns and jugglers; nightly fireworks. But the dominant theme was guilty pleasure, with the most popular concessions and nightclubs peddling sexuality or freakishness. Even Texas Guinan, Ripley’s friend and speakeasy matron from New York, brought a troupe of beautiful, barely clad women to her “Dance Ship” exhibit.

  BUGS BAER, in his Hearst-syndicated column, called the Odditorium the fair’s highlight. “Rip has collected every amazing freak in the world,” Baer wrote.

  Ripley later claimed he had to keep six beds on hand for the hundred people a day who fainted. Despite the exaggeration, people did faint after seeing some performances, and Pyle stowed cots in an alley, a makeshift hospital where a nurse cracked smelling salts beneath the noses of queasy or unconscious patrons.

  Though Ripley wouldn’t learn the details until returning from his travels later that fall, the Odditorium was an unexpectedly huge success, earning $400,000—proof that makeshift sideshows were another lucrative outlet for his Believe It or Not franchise, even if it also earned some harsh accusations of exploitation. Syndicated Chicago Tribune columnist Westbrook Pegler had mercilessly mocked Pyle that summer for his “exotic educational innovations.” Pegler reminded readers of Pyle’s failed Bunion Derby and his ownership of the Oklahoma Outlaw corpse, calling Pyle “an insidious teacher who stoops to conquer ignorance.” The implication was that, by association, Ripley was insidious as well.

  Until now, Ripley had mostly avoided any close affiliation with the sideshow world of the deformed and the abnormal. If his cartoons featured people with birth defects or disfiguring injuries, they were often long dead or distant foreigners—the Chinese man with two sets of pupils, for example, or the horned African. But by leasing his name to Pyle’s show, he had crossed a boundary, moving further away from athletes or prodigies or even religious fanatics as his hard-to-believe subjects.

  In truth, the terrain had beckoned for years. Ripley’s contorted teeth had fostered a kinship with those afflicted by bodies or faces that had failed them, sometimes horribly, but who still managed to live useful or at least hopeful lives. It’s that attitude that allowed Harry Overdurff, whose bones had fused and turned his body stiff and boardlike, to earn money at Ripley’s Odditorium as the “Ossified Man.” To Ripley, such people were the ultimate underdogs, wonders of nature and worthy of attention.

  Now that he was famous enough to pursue personal obsessions, he had grown comfortable filling his cartoons, radio shows, and now his Odditorium with such people. He had also grown more comfortable exploiting the legions of devotees who did bizarre things to their bodies in order to gain Ripley’s attention. If these people were willing to invest the time necessary to learn how to swallow three gallons of water and regurgitate it into a jar, Ripley had no problem giving “The Human Fountain” a moment in the spotligh
t.

  “A man may be too foolish for his own good, but not for mine,” he once said. “Their folly is my fortune. I’ll get rich off the ridiculous yet.”

  ALTHOUGH IT OCCURRED during one of the lowest points in the Depression, the Century of Progress Exhibition succeeded far beyond its organizers’ hopes. Even recently inaugurated president Franklin Roosevelt went so far as to encourage Chicago officials to resurrect the fair for a second year. Ripley’s Odditorium was among the concessions that would be invited back for an encore run in the summer of 1934.

  Instead of sending his performers home until mid-1934, Pyle quickly put together a traveling show, loading entertainers onto buses and driving to Cleveland, where a temporary downtown Odditorium was created, and from there onward to Pittsburgh and Washington. A Pittsburgh sports editor who had previously worked with Ripley wrote, “Who would have thought that the young Bob Ripley we knew as a sports cartoonist some years ago would put together a show such as this one? Bob was such a quiet, bashful guy, and now he’s knocking the world’s eye out with his amazing exhibit.”

  At that moment, Ripley had finally embarked on the last legs of his most exhaustive—and controversial—journey in years, performing his part in the broader Believe It or Not show. Because, while freaks onstage were clearly profitable, for the formula to succeed Ripley needed to maintain his reputation as an outlandish traveler.

  AFTER BEING FORCED to wait for hours in no-man’s-land, halfway between Persia and Azerbaijan, Ripley was finally allowed to cross into Soviet territory. His bags were delivered late that night by ox-pulled dray to an inn, where he and Simpson dined hungrily on canned salmon and slept a few hours in a dirty room, then awoke before dawn to board a train. They immediately fell asleep, but woke at sunrise to catch Mount Ararat out their window as they passed through Armenia.