Ripley, The Modern Marco Polo

Life and Times of the Creator of "Believe It Or Not"

Bob Considine

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839743221
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Bugs Baer said of Robert Ripley, "He looks like a paint factory that got hit by lightning." And this is an apt description of the curious genius whose life was as unusual and entertaining as anything he ever portrayed in his famous "Believe It Or Not" cartoon. Here, for the first time is the story of Ripley, The Modern Marco Polo and his world travels in search of the exotic.-Print ed.

 

CHAPTER I—Ripley’s Greatest Oddity

IT was late spring 1929, and into the lobby of the New York Athletic Club strode a tall, trim, determined-looking man in his mid-thirties. As he approached the reception desk, he called out, “Where can I find Bob Ripley?” If his voice had not carried so well, and carried with it such a ring of authority, Joseph V. Connolly might have found Ripley not fifty feet away, emerging from an elevator. But Ripley, at the time threatened with a breach-of-promise suit, mistook the stern-looking Connolly for a process server and ducked out a side door and into the vastness of Central Park. There he spent the rest of the day, procrastinating, until Connolly was able to get into Ripley’s room and trap him a few days later, a meeting that would alter Ripley’s life in a manner beyond his wildest dreams and set in motion a personal drama more bizarre than anything he ever portrayed in his “Believe It or Not” cartoon.

Connolly, one of the great editors of all time, was head of King Features Syndicate, by far the world’s largest purveyor of comic strips, columns, and assorted newspaper features. He had a prolific imagination and relentless drive. He had the vast wealth and other resources of the Hearst newspaper empire behind him. And before him he had a two-word telegram from William Randolph Hearst, Sr., then at the very peak of his power and majesty. It said simply: SIGN RIPLEY.

One of the special skills for which Hearst editors were unusually well paid was the knack of deciphering and executing terse and peremptory telegrams and cables from “The Chief.” Some of the decoding operations set off were agonizing—once King Features executives received from Bad Nauheim, Germany, where Hearst was vacationing, a two-worder reading: GET ANDERSON; only after the most painstaking examination of periodicals, feature directories, and their memories did the KFS men decide—correctly, as it turned out—that WRH wanted Carl Henry Anderson, a cartoonist then employed on the Saturday Evening Post. There were, of course, bound to be breakdowns in communication of this nature: a two-word cable from Paris prompted the dramatic promotion to head of one Hearst subsidiary for a young underling whose chief asset was a last name shared with the man Hearst really wanted. There was no doubt in Connolly’s mind whom Hearst was referring to, however, when he directed him to SIGN RIPLEY.

King was then only one of a number of syndicates trying to hire Ripley. For his career and fortunes had just had a notable boost through the efforts of another persuasive and persistent editor, Max Schuster, of Simon and Schuster. Intrigued by the Ripley “Believe It or Not” cartoons appearing at the time in the New York Post, Schuster spent nearly four years encouraging Ripley to compile some of his cartoons into a book. For a long time Ripley demurred, saying, “I’m just a two-cent man”—that was the price of newspapers in those days. Schuster cajoled, promised, even dug up curiosa for Ripley, and the reluctant author finally got some two hundred of his cartoons between hard covers.

Schuster didn’t stop there. He sent one of the first copies out of the bindery to Hearst, because he was certain that the great publisher’s widely heralded appreciation of the unusual would lead him to approve Ripley’s approach to the odd and arresting detail—and that in turn would result in promotion of the book through the Hearst newspapers. Hearst went further than that. After a quick look through the book, he sent his two-word order to Connolly.

Connolly’s own editorial and publishing genius was one big reason why Ripley went with King Features rather than with one of the other syndicates pursuing him. It was Connolly who came across a novel printed in Germany and, over the objections of his colleagues, arranged for its serialization in the United States. And the book, All Quiet on the Western Front, later hailed as a major novel, became one of the most successful serializations of all time. It was Connolly who spotted the one-day appearance of an illiterate but honest sailor in Elzie Segar’s fading comic strip, “Thimble Theater.” “Feature the sailor,” Connolly told Segar, and “Popeye” went on to comic-strip glory. It was Connolly who inspired Chic Young to develop “Blondie,” and then, in order to expand syndication, sent silk panties with copies of the strip to thousands of newspaper editors around the world. Ripley knew about Connolly—and what he and the Hearst organization could do for an artist.

This was the turning point in Robert L. Ripley’s life. With the limited syndication he enjoyed before signing with KFS, Ripley earned about $10,000 in 1928. He could and did live well by most standards, but in niggardly fashion compared with what was to come. In 1930 his earnings were upward of $100,000, and at the very bottom of the depression, a few years later, his income reached $500,000 annually—an exalted level at which it was maintained by revenues from radio shows, lectures, freak shows, movies, and countless other ventures. Suddenly Ripley could indulge his every whim, and there were some dandies.

Connolly always insisted that Ripley himself was his own greatest oddity. Ripley acquired a baronial twenty-nine-room home on his own island, and kept a twenty-eight-foot boa constrictor there as a pet. He had a huge apartment in Manhattan and a palatial home in Palm Beach. He stocked and maintained a full-blown harem, and at various times there were as many as a dozen women residing in one or another of his castles—ethnic products of China, Japan, the Soviet Union, France, Greece, and Germany. He cruised the world—earning the title of “Modern Marco Polo”—with a retinue as exotic as that of any Oriental potentate.

For journeys in United States territorial waters Rip purchased an authentic Chinese junk so overly powered with twin diesels that at full speed—which was the only speed Rip recognized—the patched old sail of the magnificent vessel billowed backward; and many a tipsy Long Island Sound seafarer was jolted into sobriety as Ripley’s junk roared by, sail working at cross-purposes, deck covered with the Caliph’s sun-bathing babes.

He lived it up, this strange, mixed-up man. He would own the most expensive foreign cars obtainable, but never summon up enough courage to drive. He would pioneer in transatlantic radio broadcasting, but he would never dial a telephone, because in his curious mind there lurked the suspicion that he might be electrocuted in the process. He consumed enormous quantities of liquor and may have set a record for amorous dalliance, but he considered smoking and card playing evil and would have nothing to do with them. He was, to those who knew him best, the very personification of shyness, but no contemporary matched him in flamboyance or in seeking notoriety.

Ripley and “Believe It or Not” became household words in fourteen languages and thirty countries where the cartoon was syndicated—and a readership survey in the United States once showed that it topped every feature in reader interest with the single exception of first page news. “That’s one for Ripley,” and, “Tell It to Ripley” passed into the language just as “Annie Oakley” and “the real McCoy.” His newspaper audience was estimated in excess of seventy-five million readers. And it seemed as though at one time or another all of them wrote to him; his mail reached the staggering average of a million letters a year, and, in one week, while he was conducting a contest to find “Believe It or Nots,” hit 465,000. His fame was such that letters merely ripped, to indicate that they should go to “Rip,” would reach him. And his appeal as a collector of the odd, weird, grotesque, amazing, and peculiar was so powerful that his radio and TV shows were successful for nearly two decades, despite a mumbling, fumbling, stumbling start, compounded of simple mike fright and gross ineptitude.

The golden public triumphs were interwoven in Rip’s life with personal failures of an increasingly somber hue. The gap between public success and private tragedy, in fact, seemed to widen steadily from 1929, when he was propelled toward his greatest heights as a cartoonist, collector, performer, and entrepreneur. He would travel a long, long way from a boyhood of poverty in Santa Rosa, California. He would travel a million miles or more and return to Santa Rosa in death, without finding whatever it was he had been seeking, or realizing fully where he had been.

CHAPTER II—Horatio and the Harem

THE early years of LeRoy Ripley, who was destined to live like a twentieth-century sultan, were strictly Horatio Alger. All the required ingredients were present: the small-town locale, a boy with great ambition and enormous drive, the widowed mother, the kind benefactor, and the big break. Ripley later tried to embellish the facts—for example, he changed his birth date from December 26, 1893, to December 25—but the facts themselves should have been more than enough.

Santa Rosa was a town of about 5000 population in Ripley’s time. It was the market place for a lush valley producing wine and wool. Sheep grazed on the beautiful green hills that protected the valley from the cold wet winds of the Pacific. Santa Rosa had a woolen mill, a gasworks, banks, two newspapers, a new city hall, and Luther Burbank, the “Wizard” of plant breeding.

LeRoy’s mother was born Lilly Belle Yucca in a covered wagon on the old Santa Fe trail. Her husband, Isaac Davis Ripley, born of old American stock in West Virginia, had run away from home at the age of fourteen to seek fame and fortune in California. Along the way he swam the Ohio River, because he didn’t have the price of a ferryboat ride. He died in 1905—having found neither fame nor fortune and leaving the house he had built with his own hands and three young children: LeRoy, twelve, Ethel, and Douglas, a toddler.

Mrs. Ripley, a small, wiry, and strong-willed woman, partly of Portuguese descent, met the problem of rearing and educating the family by taking up practical nursing, renting rooms in her home, and turning to needlework and other occasional chores. LeRoy, a tall, skinny boy with buck teeth, pitched in to augment the family income. His first job, working after school hours and on Saturday, was polishing headstones for the Fisher & Kinslow marble works—he left because it was “too gloomy.” He also helped load fruit and vegetable wagons and did an occasional paint job on a neighbor’s porch.

Ripley had plenty of energy left over, and found two primary outlets for it: the drawing board and the athletic field. Completely self-taught, he had been drawing as early as anyone in the house could remember, starting with crayons. At Santa Rosa High, the shy and quiet boy did cartoons for the school paper, the Porcupine, and even went so far as to turn in some of his assigned homework themes in the form of illustrated stories. He had trouble then and for many years later expressing himself as forcefully as he wished in the more conventional ways.

Whenever he could find a ball game, whether at school or in the neighborhood, Ripley managed to get into it. As is the case with most teen-agers of exceptional baseball ability, he was a pitcher. In the professional ranks, few pitchers even qualify as athletes, being more or less physical freaks with specialized skills, but among kids the best all-around athlete in the group usually is the pitcher. That was Ripley, a splendid athlete through much of his life.

Needing money to help support his family, Ripley managed to combine his two chief interests and make them pay. He pitched semipro ball when he was thirteen and drew posters advertising the games for use in shop windows. He earned as much as $15.00 a week this way, a great deal of money for a teenager.

In 1907, at the age of fourteen, the die was cast for his future. He sold a cartoon to the old Life magazine and got a check for $8.00. It was the first cartoon he had ever submitted to a major periodical, and his instant success convinced him that he would be an artist. This drawing showed some young women washing clothes and was entitled “The Village Belles Were Slowly Wringing.”

In the summer of 1908 Carol Ennis came to Santa Rosa to visit her mother, who had taken a room at the Ripley home for a vacation. Carol had been doing Sunday-supplement features for the old San Francisco Call and had married Earle Ennis in 1900. Ennis for thirty-five years was a columnist for the Bulletin and Chronicle, and, later, for the Oakland Tribune; and Carol then, and for years after, enjoyed a close association with the fourth estate.

With her San Francisco background of newspapers, Carol also had a side attachment for art. She had been a student in an organization which, if its title is any criterion, must have been highly informal, even for artists. It was known as the One-Dinner-a-Week-Montgomery-Street Art Group.

The association of Mrs. Ennis with artists, nebulous as it was, attracted the skinny Ripley boy. He was emboldened to show Carol, some ten years his senior, sketches he had made for the school newspaper and semipro posters. In his bold strokes and violent, vibrant action, Mrs. Ennis detected what she was sure was budding genius. Ripley’s energy was being worked off in his drawings.

Carol thought the fifteen-year-old Ripley’s talent deserved a wider field than the pages of the school paper and posters in cigar-store windows. He should be on one of the San Francisco papers. This was a presidential year, with William Howard Taft and William Jennings Bryan opposing each other. Carol decided that a political cartoon would be the quickest way to open the door for this embryo Rembrandt, and approached him on the subject.

“Do you know anything about politics, Roy?” she asked.

“Not a thing,” answered Ripley cheerfully.

In what must have been one of the most intensive political seminars of all time, Mrs. Ennis sat down with Roy to work out a theme for a cartoon on the presidential race. Ripley executed it, and Carol set out for San Francisco with this and several of Roy’s sports cartoons.

The enthusiasm Mrs. Ennis held for young Ripley’s ability was not shared noticeably by any of the San Francisco editors to whom she showed his work. Far from being discouraged, Carol decided on a flanking attack. With the aid of her husband, she began working on newspaper friends of theirs to intercede on Ripley’s behalf.

In the beginning this plan made no marked headway. Managing editors have been impervious to suggestions since the days of the runic alphabet. Discovering that broadsides were getting them nowhere, the Ennises decided to concentrate their fire on a single target.

Frank Muligrew, a friend of the Ennises, was the man who stepped into the breach. He agreed to an all-out, nonstop assault on Jim Bagerley of the Bulletin. It finally worked, and Roy got his chance at something like $18 a week.

Although the Taft-Bryan cartoon had been drawn expressly for the purpose of opening the journalistic doors for Ripley, Bagerley decided that politics was not the young man’s forte, an opinion wholeheartedly shared by Ripley’s friends for the rest of his life. The sports cartoons, however, did impress Bagerley, as did Rip’s unchallenged knowledge of baseball. It was decided that the youngster should do a series on semipro baseball.

San Francisco, even five decades before Candlestick Park, was a hotbed of baseball enthusiasm. The Bay Area frequently supported as many as three clubs in the Pacific Coast League—two in San Francisco and one in Oakland—but even this heavy representation in the highest minor league in the country did...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Table of Contents
• DEDICATION
• An Author’s Note:
• CHAPTER I-Ripley’s Greatest Oddity
• CHAPTER II-Horatio and the Harem
• CHAPTER III-Determined Bachelor
• CHAPTER IV-On the Job
• CHAPTER V-Ripley and the Men in Gray
• CHAPTER VI-Perfect Blend-Business and Pleasure
• CHAPTER VII-Ripley, on Land
• CHAPTER VIII-Ripley, the Broadcaster
• CHAPTER IX-Ripley’s Golden Age
• CHAPTER X-East Is East
• CHAPTER XI-Ripley at Sea
• CHAPTER XII-Few Happy Days
• CHAPTER XIII-Last Voyage