A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  In truth, he had already found the ideal partner, beautiful and loving, adventurous and tolerant … yet married.

  RUTH “OAKIE” ROSS had for years been the mystery woman of Ripley’s life, the one who appeared and disappeared and reappeared again without anyone ever catching her full story, even as she became his constant traveling companion and a paid employee of Believe It or Not, Inc.

  Through the mid-1930s she had frequently joined in his travels, including the 1932 South Seas and China adventure. In 1934 they had toured throughout Northern Africa—Morocco, Tripoli, Libya (then known as Cyrenaica), Algeria—and on to Northern Europe. Though she was listed on his payroll as “secretary,” Ripley once introduced her to reporters as “Mrs. Ripley” during a visit to the Shetland Islands. At the end of that trip, he and Oakie sailed home with Will Rogers and his wife.

  When Ripley bought BION Island in 1934, Oakie helped organize the messy contents of his new mansion. She lived in Manhattan but spent many days and nights at the Mamaroneck house. Their lives were woven tightly together and at times they lived practically as man and wife. One contemporary called her “a combination social secretary and companion [who] earned the right to move in and out of Ripley’s life as she pleased.”

  But sealing the deal by proposing was apparently never a consideration, largely due to dark memories of his failed marriage to Beatrice. In one of the why-aren’t-you-married stories, a reporter asked if he ever had been married. “Oh, nooooooo,” he said, then quickly admitted, “I guess I was once. But she’s married and got children.”

  Ripley had occasionally run into Beatrice over the years, once while searching for Mayan ruins in Mexico. The captain of Ripley’s ship had introduced him to the owner of a hemp plantation, who invited Ripley to stay the night. At dinner he introduced his wife—it was Beatrice. Ripley later told Bugs it felt “a little creepy.” In another version of that story, Beatrice sent him a note later that night: “Roy, you’ll always be the only one I love.” An employee would later claim that the run-in was no accident, that Ripley knew Beatrice was living there and staged the encounter with her husband in order to see her.

  Ripley so rarely talked about Beatrice that her true identity would become mixed and muddled. For decades, Believe It or Not fans thought she was the same Beatrice Roberts who became a Miss America contestant, a small-time actress, and Louis B. Mayer’s lover. Based on census records, Ripley’s marriage license, Miss America documents, and newspaper articles, it turned out they all had the wrong Beatrice. After divorcing Ripley, Beatrice returned to Massachusetts to live with her family. She eventually married a Cuban man and lived with him in Cuba, but her husband died of tuberculosis, leaving her with two children. She moved back to Massachusetts, and Ripley helped by continuing to send occasional checks to his widowed ex.

  Beatrice wasn’t the only ex-lover who’d remained part of his life. After Haru Onuki (aka Marion Ohnick) sued him in 1932, Ripley settled out of court, paying an undisclosed sum. She eventually moved back to California, and Ripley would visit during trips to Los Angeles. He once received a cable from Onuki, who had lost her purse while traveling and wondered if her “Bobbie” could wire some money. Though his attorney smelled “a frame,” Ripley complied.

  A collector and sentimentalist, Ripley seemed unable to sever ties to the women he once loved, and had even continued to contact his high school love, Nell. But he had at least learned not to remarry, that he could “never make a wife happy,” as he once put it. Besides, there were too many beautiful women in the world. Ripley was no braggart, but he once told Doug Storer that he intended to have sex in every country he visited and wasn’t far off that goal. One of his proudest conquests was still his tryst in Hell, Norway—“Just for the hell of it,” he told Storer with a wink. A self-professed connoisseur of the female form, he wrote in his third Believe It or Not book that he adored Nordic women (“pure unadulterated beauty”), Eurasian women (“always beautiful”), and Turkish women (“lovely”), adding, “I doubt if anyone ever saw anything cuter than a Javanese.”

  In Oakie, he found someone possessing the best features of all the world’s women. Though he appreciated slim, dark-skinned women—especially Asian women—Ripley also liked intelligent, independent, and worldly women. Oakie was all of that.

  At thirty-eight she was older than most girlfriends, but carried herself with poise and assurance, always well-dressed, a confident strut, often grinning. While in the tropics, she wasn’t shy about removing her top and sunning herself. In one of Ripley’s home movies, he and Oakie are lounging on a boat someplace steamy, Ripley sweating in just white skivvies and Oakie with her bathing suit pulled down to her waist, her head thrown back to soak up the sun.

  Elsewhere in Ripley’s home movies the two seem perfectly at ease walking along cobblestone streets or beaches, sharing a pedicab or a meal or a dance. With her, Ripley seemed carefree and happy, and friends could tell there was something special about their relationship. Other serious partnerships had ended in divorce, lawsuits, headlines, allegations of abuse—indications that Ripley preferred drama and conflict in his liaisons. With Oakie, he sought simplicity and domesticity. Though he would remain secretive about the details of their affair, it became obvious to those close to him that he truly loved her.

  But there was that one complication in their otherwise romantic love story, which compelled Ripley to be furtive. His lover was a married woman.

  FRIENDS WOULD LATER say that Ripley declined to marry Oakie, so she eventually wed someone else, sometime in the mid-1930s. Others assumed she had been married all along, and that Oakie gave Ripley the ideal duty-free relationship. The particulars would remain murky, as would the identity of Oakie’s husband. However it came to be, the strange arrangement might have been for the best.

  Until meeting Oakie, Ripley had seemed incapable of fully sharing his life with just one woman. He admired the male-dominated cultures of certain countries, even those practicing polygamy, and he complained often about American-style marriages. In one interview he declared his admiration for Muslimstyle marriages. “Men are left to enjoy themselves,” he said. “Women aren’t making noise all the time with court litigation like they do here.” Oakie apparently decided there was no sense in forcing Ripley to commit. She simply married another and became Ripley’s favored mistress. They seemed to have made a pact, each agreeing to the ruse in which their separate lives sometimes overlapped.

  At BION Island, Oakie left her imprint everywhere. She had initially helped him find and hire domestic help—cooks, chauffeurs, gardeners, and maids—and then began arranging his antique furniture and artwork. By 1936, Ripley was living and working there nearly full-time, roughly two years after buying the place.

  WITH HIS VARIOUS collections now on display across BION Island, he loved to show off his extraordinary and eccentric estate to guests. With Hitler stirring up conflict in Europe, it wasn’t an ideal time for overseas passenger travel anyway, which meant Ripley couldn’t venture too far abroad. He tried to take at least one long vacation each summer (usually with Oakie), but scaled back from his two or three global trips a year, and was forced to stay away from Europe and parts of Asia. He compensated by displaying some of the world’s weird artifacts on his private island, reminders of previous adventures that helped him relive life on the road.

  In 1937, he visited Alaska, then stopped at Ye Olde Curiosity Shop in Seattle, where he spent $1,000 on more BION decorations, including totem poles and a “man-eating” clamshell. He decorated his island with Buddha sculptures, Japanese bells, African idols, and covered nearly every inch of floor space in thick rugs from India, China, Turkey, and Persia. (Ripley’s feet frequently ached and swelled, and he preferred to walk barefoot across rug-draped floors). Oakie helped fill rooms with velvet-covered chairs and a hodgepodge of dark-wood, hand-carved furniture. Walls bristled with weapons—spears, masks, torture devices, and pieces of armor—giving the house a medieval warlord motif. Here and there, R
ipley added sentimental touches. In addition to the ridgepole hanging above the bar, he had purchased the front door from his childhood home, handmade by his father and with the metal numbers of his old street address still attached. He installed it as the entrance to his bedroom.

  On weekends, he’d invite friends, employees, newsmen, sports stars, and celebrities to his island. He hosted swimming, boating, and seafood feasts in summer, ice-skating and bonfires in winter. His brother and a carpenter built a new bar in the boathouse, and Ripley purchased (or relieved from storage) boats to use on his pond, including a sealskin kayak from his Alaska trip, a boat of woven reeds from India, a dugout canoe from Peru, and a circular guffa boat from Iraq. Columnist O. O. McIntyre, after a weekend ride in a guffa, raved about Ripley’s “moated castle.”

  Guests lingered in the low-ceilinged basement bar, cool and dark as an Irish pub, where Ripley happily played barkeep. He stocked the bar with fine wines from California, many of them sent by the mayor of Santa Rosa. He’d serve drinks beneath the flags of countries he’d visited, scores of them dangling from the walls. Shelves were cluttered with unusual souvenirs, sheep’s bells and bullwhips, a collection of rare goblets, steins and tankards, a narwhal tusk, and the dried penis of a whale. When guests asked what that was, Ripley would explain, “Let’s just say it was very dear to the whale.” When the mayor of Hell, Norway, passed through New York, Ripley threw him a party and hired waiters dressed as monks to serve hell-themed dishes like deviled eggs and sizzling meats.

  In one rock-walled, grotto-like basement room, which was off-limits to most visitors, he displayed his erotica: pictures, statues, books, and carvings from around the world. One visitor described the collection as “ranging from the revolting to the exquisitely executed.” In this dimly lit room he also stowed a few of the gruesome photographs he’d acquired over the years—men being tortured in China, elephantiasis victims in Africa.

  He began collecting pets, too. His first dog, a cocker spaniel named Dokie (as in okie-dokie), had been joined by Suzy the Dalmatian; Flash the collie; Sin and Virtue, both spaniels; and others. Some visitors observed that Ripley seemed more at ease with his animals than his guests.

  HIS KOOKY HOME became his primary workplace, where six to ten employees tended to the Believe It or Not realm. For nearly thirty years he had worked in either a newspaper office, his NYAC apartment, or hotel rooms and cruise-ship cabins. By 1937, he had developed a new set of work routines.

  Before eating or even dressing, he’d begin drawing cartoons at dawn in the spacious studio he created on the top floor. Barefoot and clad in a kimono, he worked feverishly to catch up on his quota of cartoons. By late morning, with a few sketches completed, he’d eat a light breakfast in the massive kitchen, where he employed two full-time chefs from China. (He favored oxtail soup.) Then he’d return to the studio with snacks and work until dusk, while staffers scurried around on the floors below. In warm weather, he kept the studio windows open and scattered nuts and cracked corn on the sill to attract squirrels, chipmunks, and birds. On midday walks around the island, he always kept a stash of nuts in his pockets, to feed the rodents.

  Norbert Pearlroth still worked at the New York Public Library and would send Believe It or Not ideas to the island. Robert Hyland continued to work as Ripley’s financial manager, Dick Hyman as publicist, and Joe Simpson as traveling secretary, while C. C. Pyle oversaw the Odditoriums, and Doug Storer managed his radio shows. Ripley’s domestic staff included a personal assistant named Mac, Joe the chauffeur, Barry the gardener, Elinor the housekeeper, and his chief secretary, Cygna Conly, the speed-talker featured in cartoons and on the air. Another ten employees worked at the King Features offices in New York, managing the daily deluge of mail.

  Ripley’s brother, Doug, was now a full-time fixture in Believe It or Not, Inc. He’d spent a few years living in New York after Ripley first lured him away from his cabin in the Appalachian hills of Ohio. Now living at BION Island, he preferred working with his hands, fixing things or assisting the carpenter or gardener, but Ripley kept giving him business duties, such as delivering cartoons into New York. Doug was a quiet, moody presence among the others, seemingly immune to his hardworking brother’s work habits and more at ease with the household staff than the newsmen. He drank a lot—sometimes even more than Ripley—and occasionally scuffled with King Features staffers. He developed an especially scrappy relationship with Ripley’s boss, Joe Connolly, a regular visitor to BION Island. Doug once called Connolly a “freeloader” and kicked him off the island. Connolly retaliated by barring him from Hearst’s offices in New York.

  Ripley usually defended Doug, trying to make good on his long-ago promise to their mother. He must have sensed Doug’s unease amid the hubbub of his celebrity lifestyle. When Ripley got permission to build a pier off the island, he bought Doug a yacht, and Doug would disappear for days at a time, motoring all over Long Island Sound. In time Doug learned to navigate the tricky waters around Manhattan and would shuttle his brother into New York. Some nights Doug would wait at an East Side pier to take Ripley back home, but he’d end up waiting past midnight before realizing his brother wasn’t coming. Doug would head back to Mamaroneck alone. He eventually sold the yacht and bought a speedboat.

  AS A DISORGANIZED MANAGER of his own affairs, notorious for running late, losing keys, and forgetting important phone numbers, including his own, Ripley relied on his brother and his staff more than ever. He communicated by intercom, sometimes testily calling downstairs for more paper or ink, food or drink. Employees became the buffer between Ripley and King Features. They stayed in touch with the downtown office by phone or mail, sending requests for more art supplies and arranging for the delivery of Ripley’s sketches, which were often behind schedule. Editors wrote back regularly asking Ripley to please send more cartoons.

  Unlike other big-name cartoonists, Ripley continued to draw his own sketches. “That’s fundamental,” he once said. But he had begun to allow other King Features artists to ink the captions. He would send drawings to New York with instructions on how the captions should be arranged. In the coming years, Ripley would turn more artistic duties over to subordinates, even though he would publicly insist that he drew every last cartoon with his own hand.

  Despite some tensions caused by Ripley’s move to Mamaroneck, Believe It or Not remained a profitable enterprise for King Features, which now sold Ripley’s cartoons to hundreds of papers. In late 1937, when Ripley agreed to extend his partnership with Hearst for three more years, Joe Connolly sent a personal note expressing his pride in a partnership that “has been so satisfactory and so personally pleasant to me.” As Ripley’s most vocal advocate, Connolly used all his resources to promote Believe It or Not, instructing reporters and photographers to give coverage to all of Ripley’s travels and radio shows.

  At a time when he had begun to feel threatened by rivals and competitors, Ripley needed to stay in the public eye.

  JOHN HIX, whose cartoons featured unusual historical facts and scientific phenomena, had been nipping at Ripley’s heels for a decade. Ripley initially viewed Hix’s Strange As It Seems as both a blatant knockoff and a sign of flattery.

  By the mid-1930s, however, Hix had become a true threat, his cartoon getting picked up by more and more papers. Hix had expanded into comic books and radio, his show closely resembling Ripley’s, with curious tales dramatized in reenactments. But Hix wasn’t the only competitor. A cartoon called Screen Oddities featured odd facts about actors, actresses, and other celebrities. Bernarr Macfadden’s True Story magazine now reached a circulation of two million, prompting Macfadden to create more stranger-than-fiction offspring: True Romances, True Ghost Stories, True Detective. Other knockoff magazines included Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, and Science Wonder Stories.

  Rivalry was advancing on all fronts. The Depression had become a heyday for cartoons, launching such soon-to-be favorites as Dick Tracy, Flash Gordon, L’il Abner, Prince Valiant, and The Gumps. Many
of those cartoons had also earned their own radio shows.

  With Hix and other competitors on the radio, in comic books, and in newspapers, Ripley realized he needed to protect his brand at all levels. When he heard about a Massachusetts theater show featuring performers who had appeared in his cartoons, he sued, accusing the show of copyright infringement. He also sued the “House of Mirth” carnival and its sideshow, titled “Robert (Believe It or Not) Ripley’s Freaks.” One act featured men and women of “abnormal sex nature,” which Ripley’s lawyers called “indecent, lewd, immoral, disgusting.” A judge agreed and sent sheriff’s deputies to halt the show’s railroad cars in Connecticut.

  Ripley complained to a Popular Mechanics writer that he felt “besieged by lawsuits, taxes, and imitators.” One columnist, in a mid-1930s Ripley profile, said, “He has more imitators—some of them extremely good—than any other artist of his type the world ever saw. But there is only one ‘Rip.’ He combines with the gift of his art that glowing spark of curiosity and the beautiful quality of wonder as no one else ever has.”

  Despite the competition, Believe It or Not continued to inspire boys and artists. When a young Minnesota cartoonist noticed his dog’s propensity to eat broken glass and sewing needles, his first thought was Ripley. The boy drew a picture of his dog Spike and mailed it to New York. In early 1937, Ripley published the sketch inside a Believe It or Not panel with a caption explaining that C. F. Schulz’s dog “eats pins, tacks, screws and razor blades.”