A Curious Man

by Neal Thompson

  “It won’t be long before the Reds gobble up the rest of the country—gobble it up and close it up,” he said. “This will probably be our last chance to go back.”

  Storer reminded Ripley of his contractual obligations—the NBC program and the cartoon, to name two—and that he couldn’t just sail off to the Orient. But Ripley seemed insistent, almost desperate, and suggested that they broadcast radio shows by remote along the way, as they had during the See America series. Storer said he’d look into it, doubtful that he could pull it off but worried that Ripley wouldn’t let it go.

  A solution practically fell into Storer’s lap. He spotted a New York Times ad for the upcoming maiden voyage of the SS President Cleveland, which would be making a speedy tour through the South Seas, China, and Japan. Storer immediately called the head of American President Lines and pitched an idea: Robert Ripley would air his weekday radio show from aboard the President Cleveland. Fully warming to Ripley’s harebrained adventure, Storer suggested bringing a technician along so they could create audio travelogues from each country. The fifteen-minute shows could be performed in foreign ports or at sea from the ship’s deck, recorded, and transmitted back to New York.

  Storer convinced the president of the cruise line that the gimmick, and Ripley’s presence aboard ship, might be good publicity. The president finally agreed to host Ripley and his party free of charge. The ship would leave San Francisco in April, giving Storer less than a month to prepare the Believe It or Not machine for the road.

  RIPLEY KNEW THE drill. As with his regular trips before the war, he promised King Features he’d mail cartoons and promised NBC he’d send radio shows, even if such commitments would make for an exhausting vacation with little time for unplanned diversions. As usual, there were girlfriend issues to manage. Liese Wisse, Ripley’s longtime secretary (and part-time lover), insisted on coming along. Ripley initially didn’t want her aboard, having already invited Li Ling-Ai, who was out west and would meet him in San Francisco. Ripley recklessly instructed Storer to tell Wisse the trip had been canceled, but of course she discovered the truth, and Ripley relented. She packed a huge trunk full of dresses and joined him on a westbound train.

  Storer, meanwhile, arranged to have his wife, Hazel, come along to help with radio scripts, and an NBC production manager named Ed Dunham to set up the radio equipment. Liese would help photograph everything—Storer wanted to make sure he captured it all on film, knowing that Ripley’s return to Asia might be his last.

  But first, the entourage had to stop in Los Angeles, to offset the cost of Ripley’s troupe’s ride to China. As part of a complex scheme Storer had worked out with NBC, Ripley had to appear on the Truth or Consequences radio show before earning his free passage on the President Cleveland.

  GEORGE MCMILLIN was a young stockbroker from Chicago whose father had recently died. When George’s girlfriend dumped him, George moved to Los Angeles to live with his widowed mother and twin brother, and to pursue his dream of breaking into radio. When a friend gave him a ticket to the Truth or Consequences radio show, George was plucked from the audience as one of the show’s contestants.

  The host, Ralph Edwards, instructed McMillin that his challenge was to exit the studio and convince the first person he met that he was the cartoonist Robert Ripley. In the studio hallway he met a man named Roberts, from Des Moines (actually Ripley in disguise), and tried selling himself as Ripley, but quickly gave up and confessed that he was “just George McMillin.” Edwards then asked McMillin if he’d like to meet the real Ripley, and McMillin said, “Sure!”

  “Well, shake hands with him,” said Edwards. “He’s right in front of you!”

  When McMillin recovered from the shock, he was told that he’d been chosen to spend an expenses-paid trip with Ripley, leaving from San Francisco in less than a week. McMillin would receive a spending allowance of $600 a week, and in a note to his mother he gushed that he’d won a trip to the Orient “with the most traveled man in the United States—and they are going to pay me to go.”

  The ship left port on April 9, and as McMillin settled into his bunk he couldn’t sleep a wink, thinking how lucky he was. “How can this all happen to me?” he wrote in his diary. “I’m not that good a boy. I will be from now on, tho.” McMillin learned the next day that his trunk had been left on the San Francisco pier, and that he was headed to China with just the clothes on his back. He had to borrow $50 from Ripley to buy clothes from the ship’s store.

  Also aboard the ship was Ripley’s composer/conductor friend Rudolf Friml. The two men reminisced about their travels to the South Seas together in 1932. Friml was accompanied by two beautiful Chinese “secretaries,” and McMillin told his diary that Friml’s companions were the prettiest women aboard.

  McMillin’s first days on the Cleveland were spent half-drunk beside the pool, ogling Friml’s friends; earning a blistery sunburn; dancing (badly) on the wooden dance floor; sharing late-night cocktails with Li Ling-Ai, who could hold her liquor better than most men; and sweating off hangovers in the ship’s gymnasium with Doug Storer.

  Ripley, meanwhile, made himself scarce, holing up in his stateroom, scratching out cartoons while sipping gin and grapefruit juice. Sometimes he emerged full of mirth at cocktail hour and joined the others for dinner, after which they’d roll games of dice. One night they all crowded around a radio to listen to a rebroadcast of the Truth or Consequences show.

  McMillin found Ripley to be generous and entertaining, always willing to offer a bottle of beer or a sandwich. He also glimpsed the melodrama of Ripley’s VIP lifestyle. Ripley once blew up when he learned that his favorite masseur had missed the ship at San Francisco. Storer had to hunt down someone to attend to Ripley’s sore back, and to the rescue came a bass player in Friml’s orchestra who was studying to become a chiropractor.

  Still, Ripley spent most of his days inside his darkened cabin, possibly to avoid Liese Wisse, who hadn’t learned until San Francisco that she’d have to share a cabin with her perceived rival, Li Ling-Ai. During the first days of the journey, Liese made frequent visits to Ripley’s cabin, where she and Ripley launched into terrible arguments like an embittered married couple. No one was quite sure what they were fighting about, but their shouts spilled into the hallways.

  IN HAWAII, the “land of romance and happiness” where Ripley once imagined himself retiring, he finally emerged from his stateroom for an eighteen-hour layover packed with the duties and obligations of fame.

  He reunited with former Olympic swimming champ and famed surfer Duke Kahanamoku, who was now fifteen years into his term as Honolulu’s sheriff. Duke escorted Ripley’s group to the Outrigger Canoe Club at Waikiki Beach, where Ripley recorded one of three radio shows scheduled for his short Hawaiian visit. He then climbed into an outrigger canoe with McMillin, Wisse, and two beefy guides. The fivesome paddled offshore, surrounded by Duke and other local surfers. When a big swell approached, the guides yelled, “Paddle! Paddle! Paddle!” Ripley’s boat caught the wave, as did the nearby surfers, and they all surfed the curl toward shore.

  Ripley had surfed in an outrigger canoe during his memorable South Seas trip with Oakie sixteen years earlier. Now he threw his head back, lifted his oar in the air with both hands, and laughed giddily as water sprayed over the sides. It would be one of the purest, happiest moments of the trip.

  During that night’s radio show, Ripley interviewed a local boy with the shortest Hawaiian name (Mi) and a girl with the longest (eighty-one letters). In another show, Ripley gave an impassioned plug for Hawaiian statehood and interviewed Li Ling-Ai’s parents, both doctors for fifty years. Li’s parents threw a dinner party, after which Ripley made an emotional toast to his Hawaiian hosts, who escorted Ripley’s entourage back to the Cleveland for its midnight departure.

  For the next twelve days, Ripley mostly retreated to the sullen cave of his stateroom while the rest of his entourage fell into a lazy schedule, the leisurely life-at-sea pace Ripley once loved. McMillin,
the Storers, Wisse, Li, and the others sunned themselves by the pool, played tennis and shuffleboard, ate buffet lunches, and on the rare cool days sipped hot bouillon. Tea was served at four each afternoon, followed by highballs at five, then dinner and a carefree night of card games, slot machines, or bingo. One night the ship’s staff threw a costume ball and the men in Ripley’s group borrowed clothes from Wisse and showed up in drag. (Liese brought along so much clothing her trunk blocked the bathroom entrance. During a cabin inspection, the ship’s captain asked Li how she got in and out past Wisse’s trunk. She winked at him and said, “Easy. I go Chinese fashion—sideways.” Li’s quip later got back to Ripley, who bugged out his eyes and roared with laughter.)

  As the days wore on, Ripley’s absence from most activities began to feel awkward. McMillin noted Ripley’s truancy in his journal: “Very seldom see Mr. Ripley during the day. He is usually working in his stateroom … Once in a while he gets up on deck for a couple of hours of sun.” Ripley seemed to spring to life just before his broadcasts, and performed dutifully. Then he’d disappear back to his room. With windows shut and shades drawn, it became rank with leftover food, fruit peelings, unwashed clothes, and empty cocktail glasses. In a rare display of hospitality, Ripley hosted a cocktail party one night for thirty guests, all of them getting bombed and silly. Li sang “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and Storer and McMillin performed a mock Believe It or Not radio show that had Ripley howling.

  “Gosh, life is wonderful,” McMillin declared in that night’s journal entry. But as the Cleveland steamed toward the Philippines, Ripley’s laughter was again replaced by quiet solemnity.

  Ripley one day asked the ship’s florist to prepare a wreath of flowers. He’d arranged with the captain to visit the spot where a Japanese ship carrying American POWs had been accidentally bombed by US planes. One of those killed was the son of Ripley’s friend in New York, and Ripley had offered to toss a wreath atop the spot where the so-called hell ship went down. Coincidentally, another passenger aboard the Cleveland had prepared a similar ceremony for his twin brother, who was lost on the same ship. Ripley and the other man stood beside the railing as the Cleveland slowed to a crawl. A small crowd gathered as a priest said a quiet prayer and they each tossed their wreaths overboard.

  Ahead in Manila waited more celebrity duties and more reminders of war: a city in ruins, buildings and churches gutted and crumbling, pocked with battle scars. In port, children swarmed around Ripley’s group, begging for coins and Cokes and shrieking, “Hello, Joe!” Ripley, drenched in sweat, swatted them away, looking stricken as he scanned the gaping wounds and lopsided buildings of the downtown skyline.

  With special permission, Ripley’s crew received a tour of Corregidor Island, at the entrance to Manila Bay. Douglas MacArthur had used the island’s tunnel network, Malinta Tunnel, as his headquarters at the start of America’s entry into World War II, but the island fell to Japanese invaders in 1942. When it was retaken by US forces in 1945, many Japanese soldiers committed suicide to avoid capture, detonating explosives that brought sections of the tunnel down on top of them. Across nearly five years of battle, Corregidor had been shelled to rubble. Only Filipino demolition squads and some American soldiers lived there now, and the island remained a dangerous place, rigged with land mines and booby traps. Just weeks earlier, twenty men were killed by an explosion in Malinta Tunnel, their bodies still trapped inside. Some of the soldiers stationed on the island believed Japanese fighters were still hiding deep inside the tunnels, unaware the war had ended.

  Ripley’s tour guide was a young Filipino lieutenant who oversaw the demolition crews. As he drove Ripley inland, the lieutenant said a land mine was found on the road that very morning—Ripley could have been killed. Ripley had brought along a case of cold Dutch beer, but he and his companions hardly felt festive, and the beer quickly turned warm. At the top of the island, they all began climbing a tower, its metal staircase rickety and damaged. Ripley, now a much portlier specimen than the athlete he’d once been, was exhausted and refused to climb the last steps to the top. The others continued up, then looked out over the complete devastation of a once flowery and magical island, silent except for a few birds.

  “Once, many people lived over there,” the lieutenant said, pointing. “They laughed and danced and the island was very alive. Now, there is nothing here but death.”

  On the boat ride back to Manila, one of the engines died and the two-hour trip stretched to four. Ripley arrived shamefully late for a banquet with Army officers and orphans who had been held during the war at nearby Santo Tomas Internment Camp.

  In the next day’s radio show, Ripley solemnly described the “extent of the damage done by the Japs.”

  AFTER A ONE-DAY VISIT to Hong Kong, during which Ripley visited the Wo Hop shipyard where the Mon Lei had been built a decade earlier, the SS President Cleveland steamed into Shanghai, finally delivering Ripley back to Chinese soil. The arrival wasn’t nearly as cathartic as he’d hoped.

  Ripley had first visited Shanghai twenty-five years earlier and it had always ranked atop his list of most fascinating cities—“the Paris of the Orient,” he’d called it. Now he found chaos, poverty, and anti-American angst. The city had taken a steady beating since the Japanese bombing in 1932, shortly before Ripley’s visit that same year. After so many years of battle, the recent postwar economic collapse, and the rising influence of the Communist Party, Ripley hardly recognized Shanghai. As one employee later put it, for Ripley it was like meeting “an old flame who had become soiled and shabby with age, illness, and misfortune.”

  “Shabby” didn’t come close to describing what had occurred in Shanghai after Japan’s more aggressive second invasion in 1937. More than 200,000 Chinese soldiers were killed and thousands of civilians raped or beheaded. Eleven years later, Ripley found himself dumbstruck by Shanghai in her wrecked and soiled postwar state.

  In a radio broadcast he announced that every time he turned a corner his eyes popped from his head, that he was in a “continual mental tailspin.” He was sorry that the man-powered rickshaws had been replaced by pedicabs, and it almost hurt to see the ruined swimming pool at the French Club, which had been used to store Japanese bombs. The city’s economy was in turmoil, the exchange rates fluctuating hourly. At one point an American dollar was worth a million Chinese dollars. Ripley described for Radioland how near-worthless $1,000 Chinese bills blew down the streets, how a newspaper cost $50,000 and a single cigarette cost $6,000. In order to buy a new suit from his favorite tailor, Ripley had to hire two men to lug wheelbarrows of Chinese currency from Chase Bank.

  Despite the eye-popping distractions, Ripley stuck to the work schedule, drew his cartoons, and spoke into his microphone to NBC listeners. But he seemed disturbed by China’s sad state of affairs. During a dinner party at the ambassador’s residence he learned that the Communist Army was literally at Shanghai’s city gates. He gruffly excused himself and went back to his hotel. Hazel Storer, who had once lived in Shanghai, could tell that Ripley was a wreck. “Shanghai was all but unrecognizable … a ravaged caricature,” she would write years later. “The whole city seemed to be covered in a thin, gray scum. The people were silent, indifferent … He knew that he would never see China again.” Ripley would later describe how it was “beyond all belief” for him to watch the citizens of Shanghai “sit idly in the streets waiting for the Communist armies to roll in and take over.”

  The next day, Ripley told Doug Storer he wanted to leave Shanghai immediately and fly ahead to Tokyo, to prepare for their planned broadcast from Hiroshima. He argued that he and Storer could use the extra days ahead of the Cleveland’s arrival to ensure that their stay in Japan was fruitful. Storer agreed, and he and Ripley caught a hastily arranged flight.

  In Tokyo, Douglas MacArthur’s staff arranged for Ripley to broadcast from Radio Tokyo, the infamous station where Tokyo Rose had aired her taunting wartime propaganda. MacArthur’s PR officer then helped Ripley visit Hiros
hima. Security was tight, so Ripley traveled alone, carrying his own camera to film the spot above which the atomic bomb “Little Boy” had detonated nearly three years earlier. He taped his radio show from that site, interviewing survivors of the US attack. Surrounded by mounds of rubble and a crowd filled with injured and sick victims, Ripley told radio listeners that vegetation had begun to grow again and that residents “look very well and they’re beginning to wear their bright clothes again.” But his voice seemed shaky and unsure.

  Meanwhile, back on the Cleveland, the others were having “a gay old time,” as McMillin put it. He and Li one night competed in a “chug a lug” contest of martinis. When the ship reached the port at Yokohama and they all reunited, Hazel Storer became worried at how “sobered and saddened” Ripley seemed after Hiroshima.

  He was becoming more somber as the trip progressed.

  ONE NIGHT, the ship’s captain hosted a dinner and invited Ripley to sit beside him at the head of the table. Ripley began drinking heavily, and was soon grousing about Franklin Roosevelt, a tirade that escalated into shouts about “that son of a bitch.”

  The others at the table—including congressman Emmet O’Neal, a Democrat from Kentucky, who’d been appointed ambassador to the Philippines—later said Ripley acted like “a wild man,” cursing and waving his arms, his face turning purple. Friends were never entirely sure of the source of such venom. Ripley had for decades lived among wealthy men who had resisted Roosevelt’s New Deal. He then became one of those millionaires who hated the idea of sharing his income with the government. He could be generous with charities, he was patriotic to a fault, but he didn’t trust the US government with his tax dollars.