A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  At one point, with Ripley a month behind schedule, one of Connolly’s associates, Brad Kelly, pleaded: “Something has got to be done quickly … Won’t you remedy this situation immediately and supply two weeks [of cartoons] every five days until you are on the war-time schedule?” The situation grew worse when mail restrictions forced Ripley to send cartoons an extra week ahead of schedule. “The situation is serious,” another King Features executive wrote.

  Ripley’s secretary, Cygna Conly, tried to help him avoid the $5,000 fines King Features began threatening for missed deadlines, but her boss seemed almost intent on sabotage. In late 1944, desperately itchy to travel, deadlines or no deadlines, Ripley escaped to Cuba for the Christmas holidays. When he returned to New York, King Features colleagues must have all slapped their foreheads as they read headlines about Ripley’s latest effort—trying to buy a Mexican volcano.

  At a New Year’s Eve party in Cuba he’d learned about a volcano that had mushroomed up from a cornfield in Mexico. A fissure in the cornfield began vomiting up lava and ash in 1943 and within weeks it had bulged to a five-story mound. By 1944 it was a 1,100-foot cone of steaming cinders called Paricutin, which continued to belch smoke and lava. Ever since the 1906 California earthquake, Ripley had been fascinated by natural disasters and the violent tics of the earth. Earlier in 1944, Italy’s Mount Vesuvius had also erupted, the first such eruption since 1906, inciting Ripley’s obsession with owning his own volcano.

  When he learned about Paricutin, he began telling dumbfounded friends that owning it might fill a spiritual void, or that the volcano might contain minerals that would be a good financial investment. After returning from Havana, Ripley began negotiating by phone and mail with the farmer, whose claim to the land turned out to be somewhat vague. Mexican authorities finally told Ripley they weren’t keen on having an American own Mexican land, and the legislature hastily passed a bill making the volcano state property.

  “I could have charged admissions and made money off it,” Ripley complained, vowing to search for another volcano elsewhere and proposing a Believe It or Not volcano contest.

  Soon after the failed volcano purchase, Ripley learned that Joe Connolly, his mentor for more than fifteen years, had died. Connolly and his wife were coming home from a movie when Connolly suffered a heart attack. He died later at the hospital, in April of 1945, a week after President Roosevelt’s death.

  Connolly had been in poor health for years, but never slowed down. Six hundred people attended the funeral, at which Ripley served as pallbearer. Connolly’s replacement at King Features, Brad Kelly, told Ripley, “You were his pride and joy.”

  Ripley’s own health had been in continual decline. The man once called America’s most eligible bachelor, who in 1942 had ranked sixth in a columnist’s “Catch of the Season” list, was now described in print as “stocky” and “a heavyset middle aged man with dark laughing eyes.”

  He had recently learned that one culprit behind the years of suffering from sore and swollen feet was a heart condition that caused poor circulation and dropsy. When he told Li Ling-Ai about the diagnosis, she could tell he was shaken, knowing that his father had died young of a heart attack. And while there is no record of it, Hazel Storer would say years later that Ripley also suffered a small stroke in the mid-1940s—“in a hotel out in the Midwest on a lecture date.”

  After attending so many funerals in recent years, Ripley had to be contemplating mortality during this period, especially as America tallied its dead at the conclusion of four years at war. As World War II finally ended, Ripley tallied his own losses—friends, bosses, dogs, and even the luxury ships he had once sailed upon. War’s end seemed to bring Ripley little peace, and friends worried that the years of global conflict had strained his ties to the exotic lands he’d so obsessively pursued.

  “We want to be a part of somebody and something,” Li Ling-Ai later observed. “We might fall in love to say we’re a part of somebody’s life. But to be a part of humanity, the world …”

  Li knew Ripley well enough to sense that a man so attuned to the weird, wide world around him needed, now more than ever, to be part of something.

  Until 1941, Ripley had stubbornly pretended that World War II wasn’t spreading like a cancer, that Earth wasn’t becoming a battlefield. He kept lobbying for neutrality while poring over maps and atlases, making lists and notes and lofty travel plans. Even as it became obvious that America would join the fight, he had obsessively compiled possible itineraries, optimistic but unlikely tours of Greece, Romania, Turkey, Egypt, Italy, France, West Africa, and the South Pacific.

  In fact, just a year before the attack on Hawaii, he had communicated by mail with the Japanese Tourist Industry, which offered to cover the expenses for a railway tour of Japan. His travel secretary at the time, George Wieda, advised Ripley that some of his ideas were “impractical.”

  Now that the war was over, he couldn’t wait to get back overseas after five years of wartime restrictions. Unfortunately, the travel industry was hardly ready to accommodate him. Indeed, many of the beautiful vessels that had once delivered him to exotic ports had been lost during the war and now lay in pieces on the ocean floor.

  The SS Santa Luisa, aboard which Ripley had sailed to South America in 1925, had been sunk in the Aleutian Islands. The Conte di Savoia, which carried him home from Europe in 1932, had been set afire and bombed by the Germans, sinking in the English Channel. The Savoia’s sister ship, the SS Rex, which ferried Ripley back and forth across the Atlantic a few times, had also been sunk, by the British.

  He had tried to explore close-to-home waterways during his decade at BION Island, paddling his pond in his international collection of boats from Iraq, Alaska, and Peru, or occasionally commuting into Manhattan on his brother’s yacht. Though Ripley had championed the power of aviation, he preferred being on the water. And when he learned that no luxury liners would be available for passenger travel anytime soon, in early 1946 he decided that he was ready for a boat of his own.

  As usual, no ordinary purchase would suffice. For $7,500, he bought the strangest and least practical vessel on the eastern seaboard.

  THE MON LEI had been built in 1939 for a wealthy Hong Kong businessman. (Ripley always referred to him as a “war lord.”) According to one version of the story, when the Japanese invaded China, they captured the boat and sold it on the black market to British employees of Dollar Steamship, who were stranded in Hong Kong. The new owners sailed with a Chinese crew across the Pacific, through the Panama Canal, and up to Baltimore, where Ripley found the boat. In another version, the boat was sailed across to California, to keep it out of Japanese hands, and was later found sunk in the mud in Florida.

  Ripley invested $40,000 to restore and repaint the worn-out vessel. He installed a powerful new diesel engine and, in recognition of a Chinese belief that boats are propelled by the spirits of dragons, had eyes, teeth, and whiskers painted on the engine. In the wheelhouse he painted a Chinese saying that translated as “May she sail like a flying dragon and move like a leaping elephant.” For the boat’s flag, he chose the entwined yin and yang symbols. He installed a gong to ward off evil spirits and, because Chinese sailors believed that only a golden anchor could hold fast, he gold-plated his anchor accordingly. Belowdecks, there were sleeping cabins with six bunks and a tiled bathroom with a shower stall. He refinished the elaborately hand-carved teak wood, and the paint scheme throughout was heavy on gold and red lacquer.

  Ripley loved to explain how the name Mon Lei (in a Cantonese dialect) meant “ten thousand miles” or “infinity,” that it was sometimes used to imply “bon voyage.” She was a fishing boat known as a “junk,” fifty feet long, seventeen feet wide, and her draft—the depth of the hull below the waterline—was just shy of five feet. The flat-bottomed boat was designed for the shallow waters of the lower Yangtze in Shanghai. Rather than carve through water, “she slides over it,” Ripley liked to explain. Of course, that made the Mon Lei ill suit
ed for the chop around New York and along the East Coast. But it wasn’t so much navigational proficiency he valued as the exotic worldliness his boat represented, and the freedom from US shores she offered.

  Though it had been built for sailing, the three scalloped sails were now decorative, made obsolete by the new engine. But Ripley insisted on keeping the sails up, and local boaters snickered at the diesel smoke coughing from the alleged sailboat’s rear. On weekends, Ripley would invite friends aboard for floating parties around Long Island Sound, serving cocktails and Chinese food in his captain’s outfit—a double-breasted jacket, white pants, and sailor’s cap. Ripley hired a real captain and crew to navigate, but he loved to dress the part. He’d invite guests belowdecks to rub the belly of Ho-Tei, his statue of a Chinese good-luck god. He kept a prayer wheel aboard with 1,000 prayers inside a cylinder that, when spun, was said to release the prayers toward heaven. One writer said that descending belowdecks “is like entering a different world, one in which grinning Buddhas, flaming-mouthed dragons, and prayer wheels are necessary accoutrements.”

  Ripley soon grew bored with the waters of greater New York and began planning more distant Mon Lei adventures. Though global hostilities had mostly ended, it was still risky for civilian vessels to sail beyond American waters, so Ripley came up with routes that would allow him to safely play captain for weeks at a time. He rationalized that these trips would perform double duty as colorful Believe It or Not publicity campaigns. In April of 1946, he and his crew sailed to Florida, stopping in a dozen ports along the way. Liese Wisse and Ming Jung joined him on the sluggish journey south—the boat was only capable of 11 knots. When the Mon Lei finally arrived in Miami, a newsman said she “looks like something between an Orange Bowl float and an opium dream.”

  On one trip to Connecticut, Ripley was scheduled to be feted by the Hartford Times. The publisher and editor waited dock-side with a King Features publicist named Joe Willicombe, all of them looking down the Connecticut River for the Mon Lei. Willicombe finally excused himself and drove south until he found the Mon Lei docked in Middletown, fifteen miles away. When Willicombe asked why they weren’t in Hartford, the captain insisted, “This is Hartford!” Willicombe found Ripley relaxing below and convinced him that they were still an hour’s sail from Hartford, then drove him north to the day’s festivities.

  The next day, the rival Hartford Courant teased, RIPLEY ERRS, MISTAKES MIDDLETOWN FOR HARTFORD.

  In a similar display of Ripley’s nautical naiveté, he agreed to sail up the Hudson River for a day of festivities in Albany. The Mon Lei was expected by ten a.m., to join a flotilla of yachts and Navy ships. Hundreds lined the shore, awaiting the flamboyant boat and her owner, but by noon there was no sign of them. Joe Willicombe again found himself nervously driving downriver, where he found the Mon Lei bobbing lifelessly. Her engines had died and the captain had no luck attempting to sail the final miles. Willicombe wired a message to Albany and a Navy boat sped to the rescue, hooked a rope to the Mon Lei’s bow, and towed her into port.

  For a day trip into Manhattan to view a flotilla of Navy ships, Ripley, Baer, Li Ling-Ai, and others dressed in Chinese costumes and swilled cocktails as the Mon Lei chugged south, passing beneath drawbridges. When a bridge tender asked Ripley’s captain to identify himself, Baer taunted, “We can’t tell you. We’re smuggling in dope from the Orient.” At another bridge, Ripley pointed to Li Ling-Ai and yelled, “You better let us pass, we have Madame Chiang Kai-shek aboard.”

  When the Mon Lei sailed too close to the USS Missouri, which President Truman was scheduled to visit by helicopter, a Coast Guard patrol boat motored up and began nudging the Mon Lei away. An officer ordered Ripley’s crew by megaphone to “pull to the Jersey shore,” and the party came to an end with Ripley, unable to talk himself out of trouble, being interrogated and paying a fine.

  THE MON LEI quickly became Ripley’s refuge, and his favorite toy. After hiring a full-time captain, a first mate, and a cook, he spent as much free time as possible exploring East Coast ports. Ripley found the deadlines, the phone calls, and the demands of his fame all melted away while sailing.

  Over the years he had often told reporters that he sometimes imagined himself as the reincarnation of a Chinese warlord, or that he wished he could come back in his next life as “a Chinaman.” On the Mon Lei, he could live out such fantasies. When he brought girlfriends along, he expected them to dress their part. In newspaper and magazine photographs, Ming Jung, Liese Wisse, and other female friends and secretaries are usually wearing embroidered Chinese dresses. He’d invite well-known Chinese entertainers aboard, including actresses Anna May Wong and Jessie Tai Sing. For one magazine photo shoot he hosted beautiful dancers from the China Doll nightclub, and his itinerary for press tours always included a request for “Chinese girls for pictures.” (Joe Willicombe actually received a letter from King Features with the exact instructions: make sure good-looking Chinese women are always aboard, and reserve hotel suites for Ripley and his “secretaries.”)

  Li was a frequent passenger, always dressed in elegant Chinese garb. She even put together a stump lecture about the Mon Lei’s features and oddities, which she would deliver to visiting journalists. During a trip to Greenwich, Connecticut, Ripley left the Mon Lei at the pier to play golf with Samuel F. Pryor, a vice president with Pan American Airways. Pryor delivered his mother and her friend to the pier and Li gave the older women a tour. One of them asked about the large symbol over Ripley’s bed and Li explained, “It means ‘I wish you one thousand lays.’ ” The older women nodded their heads, thinking of leis, the flowery Hawaiian wreaths.

  That fall, he docked the boat in Long Island and put Ming Jung in charge of an overhaul, which included adding a barroom and converting one of the cabins into a bedroom/art studio. Ripley then spent most of the winter of 1946–47 living and working aboard the Mon Lei (with Liese Wisse along as his companion) traveling south to Charleston, Savannah, Miami, and Key West, where newsmen gawked at Ripley’s “pretty secretary,” who felt woozy after weeks at sea. Ripley never got seasick, Wisse said with a pout to the reporters: “It makes me mad.”

  The Mon Lei sailed up Florida’s west coast to St. Petersburg, where he signed autographs at the pier for hours.

  His staff would later learn that he had signed something else on aboard the Mon Lei that spring in St. Petersburg. The “Last Will and Testament of Robert L. Ripley” was witnessed and signed by Liese Wisse and the Mon Lei’s skipper, William L. Platt, on April 4, 1947.

  After Ripley signed the document, he hid it aboard the Mon Lei, hoping its services wouldn’t be required for years to come.

  LATE THAT YEAR, he concluded another season of radio and sailed once more to Florida for the winter. When the Mon Lei arrived in Miami in the final days of 1947, she was surrounded by so many curious onlookers that Ripley (and Liese) had to check into a hotel to get some rest. A reporter cornered Ripley and asked him to describe “the greatest oddity,” but Ripley said he was still looking.

  “When I find it, I’ll retire,” he said.

  Having been diagnosed with high blood pressure and warned by doctors to take better care of himself, he must have sensed that retirement was near. During the Christmas holidays, he decided he liked the idea of sunshine in winter, and bought himself yet another house—a Spanish-style mansion called Hi-Mount—in Palm Beach. He immediately had a special dock and boathouse built for the Mon Lei, right on the shore of Lake Worth, a lagoon that connected to the Intracoastal Waterway.

  His first night at Hi-Mount, in early February 1948, was spent eating take-out food on the floor with a girlfriend and Doug and Hazel Storer. Two employees were still driving south from New York with furniture. The only items in the house were a couple of chairs and cabinets, a Chinese rug, and a beat-up wooden drawing table from the Mon Lei, which Ripley had been using for thirty years. He set up a small buffet on the table and they all sat on the rug eating cold cuts and drinking Michelob beer.

&n
bsp; The Storers thought Ripley seemed more at ease than he’d been in years. Far from the demanding New York lifestyle, Florida seemed to relax him.

  He certainly wasn’t thinking about his recently signed will that first night at Hi-Mount. The will that named those who’d befriended him or hired him or worked for him or slept with him over the years. The will that listed in detail the amount of money each of the most important people in his life should receive when he was gone. The will that named his brother and sister, as well as an inventory of current and former secretaries, housekeepers, and lovers.

  “He was utterly happy that night,” Hazel Storer later said. “He was happy and relaxed and felt free to be completely natural.”

  When the Storers left for their hotel, Ripley and his companion curled up in a pile of jackets on the Chinese rug and fell asleep.

  Within weeks of that happy first night in his new Florida home, Ripley was back in New York, back to the lifestyle he’d been denied during the war. He reopened BION Island, started hosting parties again at his New York apartment, and was back on the air. Ripley’s Believe It or Not Radio Odditorium had broadcast three times a week in 1947, but NBC decided to bump the show to five days a week for the 1948 season.

  Just as quickly, he was back to planning his long-delayed escape from American soil. By now—two and a half years after the war—the full onset of peace meant Ripley could travel once more. The Mon Lei and the new Florida house had been exciting distractions, but apparently not enough.

  He suddenly, urgently, wanted to return to Asia, especially China. Ripley had first mentioned this surging desire to Doug Storer at a Christmas party. “How about you and Hazel going to China with me?” he had asked. Weeks later, he invited Storer to his apartment, ostensibly to discuss details of the radio show. Instead, Ripley again raised the topic of China. He’d been reading news reports about his favorite country’s tilt toward communism after World War II and felt the need to act fast if he wanted to see China again.