A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  The slow-moving train was filthy, the toilets backed up and black, and there was no food or water available during the daylong trip into Georgia. Ripley and Simpson were joined by two official escorts from InTourist, the Soviet travel agency created four years earlier by Joseph Stalin. The view outside their windows was a sprawling blur of concrete buildings that Ripley joked was the Soviets’ “last word in modern housing.” During layovers in small towns, the best Ripley could find to eat was cabbage soup and black bread. At each town he saw gaunt-looking families hovering around the station collecting scraps of food. With the help of some vodka, he managed to sleep and to avoid the rainy, homely landscape outside. He would soon publish his initial assessment of the Soviet Union, describing “the filthiest train I have ever seen in 158 countries” and impoverished citizens who never smiled.

  During an overnight stop in the Georgian capital of Tiflis (soon to be renamed Tbilisi), he had to maneuver his way across a treacherous train platform maligned by missing planks and rotted holes toward a smelly hotel room. In Tiflis, Ripley decided to abandon the train and drive into Russia, against the advice of his InTourist guides, who warned that the Caucasus Mountains had received eighteen inches of snow the previous night and the pass might be closed.

  When Ripley insisted, his escorts reluctantly found a car and a chauffeur, but the car broke down a few hours into the next morning’s drive. While waiting for a replacement, Ripley and Simpson ate lunch with a family of “peasants” (Ripley’s word) as dogs and pigs scurried beneath their legs. The driver returned with another car and they continued into the mountains, but at a crowded mountainside inn they were warned not to proceed, that they’d all freeze and die. Ripley agreed to wait until morning and drank vodka with his hosts until he grew sleepy, then curled up on a cot still wearing his clothes and overcoat.

  The next morning, his driver inched through deep snow toward the pass, the car sliding on and off the serpentine road. The driver had forgotten to bring tire chains, but it looked like they might have enough momentum to climb the final mile—until they were stopped short by a farmer’s horse-pulled wagon, stuck in the snow and blocking the pass. Ripley and Simpson helped the farmer push his horse cart aside, but then the car refused to budge and it looked as if the previous night’s warnings had been correct, that they’d perish up there at 7,800 feet. Incredibly, four hours later, two poor farmers came plodding through thigh-high snowdrifts with a team of oxen. The men hooked their oxen to the car and slowly pulled it over the top, with Ripley and the others pushing and shoveling. In film footage of the dangerous crossing (recorded by Simpson), Ripley appears giddy, almost euphoric, having the time of his life.

  Later that afternoon, they snaked down the north slope of the Caucasus range into a mining village and ate their first meal of the day—cabbage soup. Ripley wisely decided to ditch the car and catch a train. A mile from the station, though, the driver pulled over with a flat. Hearing a train whistle, Ripley and Simpson grabbed their bags and ran to the station, only to learn their train would be five hours late.

  It would take another month to reach New York, an extended anticlimax after the experiences of Iraq, Persia, and Georgia. Ripley briefly visited Moscow (“a hard, severe, unromantic, and inartistic city”) and Leningrad (“clean and dignified”), where he was given a tour of a hospital and watched Russian surgeons perform an abortion. He was surprised by Soviet health care, especially the free contraceptives. Two things he admired: Russia’s vodka and its liberal sexual mores. “Sexual intercourse in Russia is not looked down upon at all, as it is in our conventional country, but is regarded purely as a human necessity and treated as such,” he wrote, revealing his own view.

  Still, he was hugely relieved to reach Finland, which felt instantly cleaner, more civilized, and friendlier. It seemed as if everyone on the train sighed and smiled with relief “to be out of Sovietland.” During two weeks in Russia, he had seen few smiles.

  RIPLEY OFTEN JOKED that he traveled so much—two-thirds of the past five years spent on the road, by his estimate—to stay ahead of Prohibition agents and find a good drink. While roving the world he had swilled gin slings in Singapore, chota pegs in Bombay, cold Champagne in Panama, and even cold beer in Iraq. Days after his return from Russia, however, the Twenty-first Amendment was ratified, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment and finally putting an end to Prohibition.

  Burton Holmes was among those who cheered the end of “the dark fourteen years.” With Prohibition good and dead, Ripley no longer needed Manhattan’s speakeasy scene to accommodate his drinking bouts. That scene had been diminished anyway by the passing of Texas Guinan, who died in November at age forty-nine, a month shy of seeing the conclusion of America’s experiment in abstinence.

  During the same fourteen years of Prohibition, Ripley had been living at the NYAC, in what one interviewer described as a newspaper’s city room—“if a city room had hats and shirts and things strewn around it as well as crumpled newspapers and such.” Until recently, it had been all the home Ripley needed, since his real home had been foreign hotel rooms or ocean-liner cabins. But the NYAC—and even the city itself—had begun to feel a bit tight.

  By early 1934, Ripley had come to the conclusion that, at age forty-four, it was time to move out of the NYAC, and even out of Manhattan, leaving the handballer/bachelor/Prohibition-violator lifestyle behind to find a residence suitable for a middle-aged millionaire.

  Five years after the Wall Street crash, President Roosevelt ramped up his New Deal efforts to get hungry and unemployed Americans back to work. Violent dust storms scoured the Great Plains. Farmers lost their homesteads to foreclosure. Factory workers were striking.

  And Robert Ripley flourished, making money seemingly without trying. Unscathed by the lumbering events of the Depression, cash and new contracts and profitable new offers found him, practically chased him, and his income kept dancing skyward. Even Uncle Sam threw money at him, issuing a much-publicized $20,000 Treasury Department refund after Ripley complained he’d been overtaxed in 1931.

  Though exact numbers are elusive, his income from newspaper, radio, books, endorsements, film, and his Odditorium was believed to be at least half a million dollars a year (the equivalent of nearly $9 million in 2012 dollars). He was far outearning any cartoonist in the business. One columnist referred to him as “the six-figure gent.”

  “Last year was the worst year of the depression but it affected cartooning very little compared to other industries,” said a 1933 article in Modern Mechanix magazine titled “How Comic Cartoons Make Fortunes,” which featured Ripley atop the list of “big money makers in the funnies,” ahead of Rube Goldberg, George McManus, Bud Fisher, and even Walt Disney. “Why? Because editors wanted more and more ‘funnies’ to cheer people and help them forget their troubles.”

  For two decades he had lived and worked in the heart of a metropolis that featured more floodlit glitz than any similar patch of land. But with the means to live wherever and however he chose, he decided to leave the island of Manhattan and buy an island of his own, trading his cramped apartment for an over-the-top residence twenty-five times larger.

  Using his acronym for “Believe It or Not,” he called his grandiose new home BION Island.

  THE DECISION TO LEAVE New York surprised many friends, who assumed he would be content to live at the NYAC forever. Said one columnist, shortly before Ripley moved north, “Those close to him perceive no indication that he’ll ever move into more commodious quarters. Probably he feels that to keep two rooms littered is work enough.”

  Yet, as he would explain in a magazine article, Ripley had been feeling rootless—“like the proverbial sailor who is always a-sea but looks forward to the time when he may have a home of his own, to be embellished with mementoes of his sea travels.” Traveling so far and so often, he had accumulated too many artifacts and collectibles, stashing them in warehouses but frustrated by the inability to do something with them. He was finally ready to free that bo
oty from its storage crates, to put it on display, and enjoy it.

  Ripley had been visiting Mamaroneck and surrounding Westchester County for years. The NYAC had built its Winged Foot Golf Club there in 1922. Joseph Connolly, Ripley’s boss at King Features, and Max Schuster lived in Westchester County, as did other newspaper and radio friends.

  An old town, full of odd historical facts and characters, Mamaroneck was an ideal fit. An ethnically diverse home to shipbuilders, textile workers, and fishermen, it began attracting theatre people after D. W. Griffith, director of the 1915 film Birth of a Nation, bought an estate there and built a studio, turning Mamaroneck into a miniature Hollywood. Mary Pickford and Lillian and Dorothy Gish moved there, as did Ethel Barrymore, who wrote in a memoir that Mamaroneck was just twenty miles from New York but “might just as well be a million miles.”

  Trolleys ran up and down the main street, an old Indian trail now called the Boston Post Road, and Manhattan was less than an hour away by train. In a sense, it was like an East Coast version of the Santa Rosa–San Francisco link of his youth, with Ripley living in the country village an hour north of the big city.

  Ripley’s island was at the end of Taylors Lane, which branched off Boston Post Road. He bought it for $85,000 from John Eberson, an architect who had designed movie theaters but lost his fortune as the Depression took its toll on the film business. A stone causeway led out to three acres of lawns, gardens, tall pine trees, rocky outcroppings, and swampy marshes. The centerpiece was a twenty-eight-room English-style manor of stucco and stone, built in 1910 atop a rock mound at the center of the island. The homestead also contained a smaller house, a garage, and a boathouse, all of it surrounded by a tidal pool that had been severed from Long Island Sound by a dam.

  With oak floors and dark-wood paneling, the mansion’s shadowy interior resembled an elegant lodge or the NYAC’s dining hall and saloon. Scattered across three stories were bedrooms, sitting rooms, a solarium, a dark room, a steam room, and a gymnasium. Windows were scarce, but drafty. Ripley soon learned the old house was difficult to heat in the winter, musty in summer.

  A Gothic living room looked out onto the Sound, always busy with boats and gulls. Above the huge fireplace, Ripley hung the 1918 “Champs and Chumps” cartoon in a frame, with the original title crossed out and “Believe It or Not” written beside it. Later, he would encase the cartoon behind a mirror and surprise guests by flipping a hidden switch that turned on a light, revealing the cartoon that had started it all. He now had a place to display the beam he’d received from his childhood house. He hung it in his favorite room: the basement bar.

  He began unpacking crates that had been in storage, some of them for years. In time, the mansion would become his personal Odditorium, more a museum than a house and surely one of the more bizarre dwellings in all of New York. At first, it was an absolute mess, the rooms cluttered with javelins, mastodon and elephant tusks, boomerangs, skeletons, and war drums. Hand-carved cabinets of teak and mahogany set askew. Turkish and Oriental rugs piled up on the floors. In the garage were scores of crates, boxes, and trunks stuffed with wooden statues and carvings, musky-smelling python skins and stuffed animals, a huge bell from Japan that could ring for twenty minutes, all waiting to be unpacked.

  There wasn’t much time to get settled, though. He first had to loan some of his souvenirs to the Odditorium in Chicago, where C. C. Pyle’s exhibition was reopening for its encore season at the Chicago World’s Fair.

  RIPLEY PLAYED a more aggressive role in the 1934 Odditorium, promising in a King Features press release that the new Odditorium would be “bigger and in every way better … the greatest congress of oddities and curios in the world today.”

  After the surprising success of the 1933 Odditorium, Ripley followed Pyle’s lead and willingly crossed more fully into Barnum territory, advising Simpson by handwritten letter: “No sword swallowers. Too Coney Island.” Instead, he wanted an “Up-Arm man” from India, a “Sun-gazer,” and a “Hindu sitting on nails.” He wanted the seven-foot-nine-inch Buddhist monk from Korea and Kikuyu women wearing plate-sized earrings from Africa. He wanted men who ate glass, drank boiling water, stuck knives through their cheeks or spikes in their noses. He wanted a horned girl.

  Ripley considered himself and his sideshow more reputable than P. T. Barnum, who was known for fakery and deceit. Instead of Exit signs, Barnum sometimes posted signs that said Egress, luring rubes and illiterates outside and forcing them to pay to reenter. Barnum sometimes claimed that the public liked to be tricked, that it was all a game. Ripley disagreed, once telling an interviewer, “Barnum was wrong. The public doesn’t like to be fooled. And I’m happy to say I’ve never fooled my public. Not that the public always thinks so.”

  Among those returning for the 1934 Chicago show were Frieda Pushnik (“The Little Half Girl”), Leo Kongee (“The Human Pincushion”), Singlee (“The Fireproof Man”), and Betty Williams, who had learned to walk and could display the gruesome remains of her twin sister while standing on two of her four feet. New acts included a man who puffed cigarettes through a hole in his back and one who could break six-inch nails in half with his teeth. Ripley hired Swami See Ram Lai, a Hindu ascetic he’d met in Benares, who skewered his tongue with a long needle, then meditated. Ripley called him “The Great Tongue-Tied.”

  His proudest oddity was a recently purchased statue, a freakishly lifelike and anatomically correct self-portrait of a Japanese artist.

  Diagnosed with tuberculosis in the mid-1800s, Hananuma Masakichi had intended for the sculpture to be a dying gift to his lover. Working in the nude and surrounded by mirrors, he painstakingly re-created every muscle, wrinkle, and sinew of his body. Starting with his feet and moving upward, he glued together thousands of wood strips, then etched and sanded his likeness into the wood. He crafted startlingly realistic glass eyes and then—Ripley loved this part—drilled tiny holes to match each pore on his body and filled them with strands of his own hair. Upon completion, with hair on its arms, legs, head, face, and genitals, the statue looked like its creator in every way. Some newspaper stories later falsely claimed that the artist even pulled out his own fingernails, toenails, and teeth and inserted them in his statue.

  After finishing his masterpiece in 1885, Masakichi held exhibits, standing perfectly still next to his creation as viewers tried to figure out which wiry figure was statue and which was man. Masakichi died ten years later at age sixty-three.

  Ripley had known of the statue for years, having seen it at a curio shop when he’d first moved to San Francisco. When he learned it was still there, he arranged to have it shipped to Chicago—one worker shrieked when they unpacked the crate. (In one retelling, Ripley claimed to have bought the entire store from the reluctant proprietor in order to get the statue.) Ripley called it “the greatest piece of art in the world.”

  Missing from the May-through-October fair would be Lou Dufour’s “Darkest Africa,” the victim of an NAACP antidiscrimination campaign, and the girly joint run by Texas Guinan, now dead. But the fair’s second season would be as popular as the first, with more than forty million visitors during the two seasons combined. Ripley’s Odditorium would draw more than two million and Pyle’s final balance sheet showed a profit of $500,000.

  What Pyle didn’t reveal was the $10,000 he’d paid Lou Dufour for helping to restyle the show. Dufour felt he deserved more, complaining that Pyle had agreed in 1933 to pay him 3 percent of the gross ticket sales. Pyle refused. Since they only had a handshake deal, Dufour accepted the $10,000 but promised to get revenge someday.

  The half-million-dollar success of the partnership inspired Ripley and Pyle to create an ongoing series of Odditoriums, a self-perpetuating side business. Pyle started making plans for the next World’s Fair events: San Diego in 1935, Dallas in 1936, and Cleveland in 1937.

  AFTER CUTTING BACK on his radio schedule to travel during the previous two years, Ripley returned to the airwaves in 1934 with a global gimmick that made headlines
and earned him another new partner.

  He assembled a team of sixteen linguists and squeezed them onto a stage. Surrounded by rows of microphones, they translated Ripley’s show into their respective languages. The show was broadcast using a transmitter linked to radio networks and shortwave transmitters in other countries, allowing Ripley to claim he had performed the first radio show to be broadcast simultaneously around the world.

  RIPLEY TALKS TO WHOLE WORLD, said the next day’s headlines, noting that the show had been picked up in China, Japan, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Argentina, Persia, and beyond. The man behind the curtain on that record-setting broadcast was Doug Storer, a self-taught master of such gimmicks.

  Born near Harlem in 1899, Storer had graduated from Dartmouth with a medical degree but ditched his doctoring plans to run the radio department at a Chicago ad agency. He left advertising to manage a cousin’s radio stations in Toledo and Detroit, then became director of radio for the Blackman Company, producing shows for the United States Rubber Company, Procter & Gamble, and Hudson Motor Car.

  Ripley had first met Storer a couple years earlier during an appearance on NBC’s Saturday Night Dancing Party radio show, which Storer helped produce. An hour before airtime, Storer was running around the studio, handing out scripts and barking orders. He saw Ripley sneak quietly through a side door and would never forget Ripley’s outfit: a pale-blue shirt, an orange batwing tie, a plaid jacket, tan slacks, and black-and-white shoes.

  “You’re Bob Ripley?” Storer asked.

  Ripley bowed slightly, “grinning like an embarrassed schoolboy,” as Storer later put it. He suspected Ripley had been drinking.

  All Ripley had to do that night was read a brief introduction to a dramatic reenactment of one of his Believe It or Not cartoons, which would be performed by actors. At the microphone, he stammered through the introduction, his voice shaky, his hands shakier. He dropped the script and, when he bent to retrieve it, almost knocked over the microphone. After the show, he went straight to the control room.