A Curious Man Read online

  More Praise for A C U R I O U S M A N

  “Brilliant…What’s truly unbelievable is that it’s taken us so long to get a full-fledged biography of this great American character.… It was worth the wait.”

  —A. J. JACOBS, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE KNOW-IT-ALL AND THE YEAR OF LIVING BIBLICALLY

  “Neal Thompson has written the book many writers dream of—the great American rags-to-riches story—and has done it in an intoxicating way. The story of the man who created Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is a rip-roaring tale of head-shaking amazement.”

  —MARC J. SEIFER, AUTHOR OF WIZARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF NIKOLA TESLA

  “Robert Ripley was curious in both senses: first, his life was unbelievable to himself; and second, he couldn’t feel life as a real thing, so he endlessly collected unbelievable bits of ephemera to make clear to himself that the world was as strange as he was, and also that he was equal to the world. In a way that I’m not sure I was expecting, the book builds real sadness into the considerable momentum of its narrative. Neal Thompson constructs an elegant argument: the world Ripley created is the world in which we now live.”

  —DAVID SHIELDS, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE THING ABOUT LIFE IS THAT ONE DAY YOU’LL BE DEAD

  “A Curious Man is a work of real beauty and fun and emotion—and intense readability. It is a single-session book, one of those that takes your clock and renders it mute until the book has had its say. Thompson is the genuine article: smart and witty, empathetic and a pleasure to read.”

  —DARIN STRAUSS, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF HALF A LIFE AND CHANG AND ENG

  “Like Robert Ripley, Neal Thompson has a nose for the strange and wonderful. A Curious Man is a rich, compelling read for fans of the exotic and uncanny.”

  —STEWART O’NAN, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE ODDS

  “A biography of a man who was as unusual as the items he collected for his Believe It or Not! cartoons … An outstanding work … I couldn’t pull myself away.”

  —FRANK BRADY, BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF ENDGAME: BOBBY FISCHER’S REMARKABLE RISE AND FALL—FROM AMERICA’S BRIGHTEST PRODIGY TO THE EDGE OF MADNESS

  “Most of my childhood I wondered, ‘Who is this person Ripley, and why does he keep demanding to know if I believe his bizarre-seeming claims?’ Finally Neal Thompson has given us the man’s story, and Ripley’s life turns out to have been as weird as his facts. A fun but also compelling read that lingers in an unexpected way.”

  —JOHN JEREMIAH SULLIVAN, AUTHOR OF PULPHEAD

  “Believe it! Neal Thompson has written the definitive biography of the larger-than-life Robert L. Ripley, the father of our minutiae-mad modern society.”

  —KEN JENNINGS, ALL-TIME JEOPARDY! CHAMP AND BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF MAPHEAD AND BECAUSE I SAID SO!

  ALSO BY NEAL THOMPSON

  Light This Candle:

  The Life & Times of Alan Shepard,

  America’s First Spaceman

  Driving with the Devil:

  Southern Moonshine, Detroit Wheels,

  and the Birth of NASCAR

  Hurricane Season:

  A Coach, His Team, and Their Triumph

  in the Time of Katrina

  Copyright © 2013 by Neal Thompson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Ripley’s, Believe It or Not!, Ripley’s Believe It or Not! are registered trademarks of Ripley Entertainment Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  eISBN: 978-0-7704-3621-6

  Jacket layout by Joel Holland and Nupoor Gordon

  Jacket typography by Joel Holland

  Jacket illustrations: © Ripley Entertainment Inc.

  Jacket photograph: © Triff/Shutterstock

  Author photograph: Charis Brice

  All interior photographs copyright © Ripley Entertainment Inc.

  v3.1

  For Mary, always

  For Sean and Leo

  Dear Reader,

  Want to see archival footage of Ripley in China? At sea? On stage? Want to see a man stick a spoke through his tongue, or get shot in the gut with a cannonball and survive? Unlock exclusive content hidden in the photo section of this book—including rare videos and images, audio of Ripley’s radio shows, and dozens of original Ripley’s Believe It or Not! cartoons—by downloading the free Ripley’s Believe It or Not! app and activating the oddSCAN™ feature. Select “Ripley Bio” and look for the oddSCAN logos in the photo section of this book. Scan the full page with your smartphone to reveal the hidden content. For more information, visit www.nealthompson.com/books/curiousman.

  The freakish breaks all rules; it seems beyond belief because it fails to make any sense; it upsets comforting notions. The freakish is the ultimate avant-garde, a finger in the eye of the buttoned-up bourgeois vision of ordered life, like a tattoo parlor in the midst of a holistic spa.

  —“O, BELIEVERS, PREPARE TO BE AMAZED!”

  EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, New York Times

  Our daily life is so cut and dried that we get relief from fairy tales. Except Ripley’s fairy tales are true, and this excites people. They like to learn that nature makes exceptions. These are fairy tales for grown-ups.

  —NORBERT PEARLROTH

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  ODD SCAN Photo Insert

  Author’s Note on Sources

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  In the middle of the Syrian Desert, halfway between Damascus and Baghdad, the half-breed vehicle with twelve sand-surfing balloon tires came to a stop at an indistinct pile of rocks bordered by a scrawny stand of palm trees. It was time for lunch.

  Passengers stepped off the car-bus into the brutal heat, including two Americans, one of them more portly and distinctly American than the other.

  Robert L. Ripley was dressed in his preferred global traveler’s outfit—black-and-white wing tips, knee-high socks, white shorts, and a short-sleeved shirt. Atop his head sat a wide-brimmed pith helmet. As the tour bus staff handed out bagged sandwiches, Ripley withdrew his own lunch: a thermos of scotch and soda. He turned and offered a swig to his traveling partner, an earnest young Mormon from Utah named Joe Simpson, who worked for Ripley’s boss.

  Newspaperman William Randolph Hearst had hired Ripley in 1929, paying him more than $100,000 a year and making Ripley one of the best-paid journalists in all of newspapers. Simpson’s job was to protect and serve the famed and famously erratic cartoonist, a role that veered from traveling secretary to photographer to drinking partner. That night, Ripley’s caravan stopped at the sprawling fortress compound called Rutbah wells,
whose gates lifted as a small crowd gathered to greet the new arrivals. Ripley emerged from his vehicle to hear the distinct drawl of his friend, Will Rogers: “Hi, Bob. Where d’you think you’re goin’?”

  Rogers was headed the opposite way, toward Damascus, while Ripley was trying to add two new countries to his list, Iraq and Persia, part of his relentless search for material for his increasingly popular cartoon and its lucrative offshoots: books, films, radio shows and, currently on display at the Chicago World’s Fair, a kooky museum and performance hall called the Odditorium.

  After a three-hour stopover at the bustling Rutbah encampment, Ripley said good-bye to Rogers and reboarded his bus, which drove on through the sweltering night. At dawn, 250 miles later, Ripley spotted the sun-sparkled minarets of Baghdad’s mosques.

  RIPLEY HAD BEEN TRAVELING the world ever since moving to New York as a skittish rookie newspaper cartoonist in 1912. In recent years, thanks to his six-figure salary from Hearst and even more income from other ventures, he’d ramped up his travels, accumulating more than 130,000 miles in the past two years alone—more than half the distance to the moon—ranging from South America to North Africa, Fiji to Singapore, Indian holy cities to war-wracked China. His current journey had routed him through Naples, Alexandria, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and then Damascus. His real goal was the Garden of Eden, in Iraq, then on to Persia and, finally, forbidden Russia.

  At the Tigris Palace Hotel in Baghdad, Ripley washed away two days of Syrian Desert dust and walked among the ancient city’s coffeehouses, jotting his first impressions of Iraq in a journal: “never see women. men everywhere, talking and drinking–smoking … they talk constantly … they are talking about nothing at all.”

  Ripley had been warned that Iraqis didn’t always appreciate the arrival of “unbelievers” in their towns, that visitors were sometimes injured for failing to respect local customs and protocols. Despite such warnings, Ripley and Simpson pointed their cameras at everything, which usually drew curious and sometimes angry crowds, especially in poor and remote villages. At a school in Najaf, where cross-legged men studied the Koran, a group of locals surrounded them, gesturing urgently at Simpson’s camera and shouting at Ripley, who later called them “a strange mixture of humanity, paralytic, half-blind, dirty, ragged, and altogether unfriendly.”

  In the city of Ur, he and Simpson found a secret canteen that sold cold beer and, despite a sign warning NO DRINKING ON THE PREMISES, tossed back twenty-one bottles between them, then fell asleep on an overnight train ride to Basra, where they finally reached the purported site of the Garden of Eden. An unfaithful husband and Prohibition violator, Ripley was both familiar with and fascinated by sin, which he once called “the curse of the human race—although it is very popular.”

  He was disappointed not to find an intact version of the biblical garden where man’s first sin allegedly occurred. “NO APPLES. NO FIG LEAVES,” he complained. Instead of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, from which Eve had plucked the forbidden fruit, Ripley found only a dead stump.

  Still, before getting back on the road, he was sufficiently inspired to strip naked and have Simpson take pictures of him posing, Adam-esque, behind a palm tree.

  Back in Baghdad, Ripley drank German beers at a café near Maude Bridge, then dressed in the white robe and keffiyeh headdress he’d purchased, to the amusement of a nearby crowd. An overnight train ride delivered him to Persia, his 153rd country, where he drank beer for breakfast and began mapping a route home.

  DURING THE DEPRESSION, as Americans in a pre-television era sought affordable means of escape and entertainment, Ripley the traveling cartoonist provided both.

  A connoisseur of mosts and bests, of fastest and farthest, of the weirdest and freakiest that the world could offer, his cartoons and essays appeared in hundreds of newspapers around the globe, in dozens of languages, and were read by many millions. His life’s mission was to prove to readers that veracity and reality were elusive—King George I of England never spoke English; Aesop did not write Aesop’s Fables; Buffalo Bill never once shot a buffalo; Lindbergh wasn’t the first man to fly the Atlantic—and that sometimes you can’t recognize truth until someone shines a light.

  “I think mine is the only business in which the customer is never right,” Ripley once said. “Being called untruthful is, to me, a compliment. And as long as I continue to receive the lion’s share of this odd form of flattery, I don’t worry about a wolf being at my door.”

  Fans yearned to see their own strange accomplishments, their disfigurements, and their curious misfortunes reimagined inside a Believe It or Not rectangle. But Ripley, never content to rely on volunteers, roamed constantly, always searching for strange facts and exotic faces for his cartoons. He met beggars and bedouins, headhunters and heads of state, royal highnesses and holy men, most of these forays funded by Hearst, whose publicists dubbed Ripley the Modern Marco Polo.

  An insecure and effete kid named LeRoy, with terrible buckteeth and no shoes, Ripley had grown into an athletic and self-assured young man who always seemed to have luck and an influential patron in his corner. Once he stumbled onto his Believe It or Not concept (on the verge of age thirty), he was smart enough to parlay it into more than a newspaper cartoon, transforming and expanding himself from artist to radio and film star, to museum curator, to unlikely playboy-millionaire.

  His goofy everyman perception of the world, his limited education and simplistic worldview, his naiveté…turns out, it all meshed with that of his core readership.

  The shy, awkward misfit-loner had become champion of the freakishness of others. By celebrating weirdness, he made it mainstream, becoming one of the most widely read and influential syndicated cartoonists of his day—and among the best-traveled men in history.

  More than entertainment, his global dispatches gave readers hope.

  DURING THE SEVENTEEN-HOUR DRIVE from the Iraq border to Tehran, Ripley was stopped nearly every hour by police. He complained bitterly about the “deadly barrenness and dryness” of the police-controlled country.

  Ripley had hoped to escape Tehran by plane and fly into the Soviet Republic of Georgia, anxious to slip into the USSR and finally witness the collectivist, communist regime that Stalin had recently formed. Unable to secure a flight, he and Simpson decided to drive to the Persian-Soviet border, where they would walk across into Azerbaijan and then drive to Georgia—an ambitious and potentially hazardous route that would require passage through the snow-packed Caucasus Mountains.

  When Ripley and Simpson finally reached the Aras River Bridge, across which lay Soviet territory, they waited two hours for the Persian border patrol to arrive and awaken their sleeping chief. Sullen officials took their time searching each piece of Ripley’s luggage, which had multiplied to more than a dozen pieces in recent weeks with a surging accumulation of trinkets, carvings, and artwork.

  When the guards finished with each bag, they’d carry it to the middle of the bridge and drop it in a growing heap. Ripley and Simpson were finally allowed to cross to the middle of the bridge, where they were ordered to “Halt!” Persian soldiers told them to wait while they finished their tea.

  Across the bridge, young and twitchy Soviet soldiers stared coldly, aiming their bayonets as if primed for attack. Already Ripley had been at the border for more than four hours, the longest crossing in his two decades of travel. The sky grew dark as he and Simpson, hungry and cold, tired and angry, stood beside their rumpled pile of bags, hour after hour, in no-man’s-land. Just thirty yards away sat their unreachable transportation: a donkey-pulled wooden carriage and its bored-looking driver.

  Meanwhile, editors back in New York waited for their well-paid, peripatetic cartoonist to please send another batch of popular and profitable Believe It or Nots.

  Isaac Davis Ripley, whose son would one day explore all corners of the earth, fled his dead-end Appalachian home at age fourteen and headed west. He didn’t get far before the Ohio River blocked his path. Unable to
pay for a ferry crossing, Isaac swam solo across the turbulent river, eventually making his way to Northern California, seeking gold but instead finding work as a carpenter and cabinetmaker. By 1889, having settled in Santa Rosa, he fell in love with a woman fourteen years younger.

  Lillie Belle Yocka’s family made their own risky journey toward dreams of a sunnier California life. The Yocka clan left Westport Landing (later called Kansas City) in the late 1860s, joining a straggly crowd along the Santa Fe Trail. During the westward journey, Lillie Belle was born in the back of a covered wagon, and she spent her childhood in a Northern California encampment on the banks of the Russian River.

  On October 3, 1889, Lillie Belle—twenty-one and pregnant—married thirty-five-year-old Isaac Ripley, their union earning a brief mention in the Sonoma Democrat. Isaac built a cottage on a postage-stamp lot on Glenn Street, with intricate wood trim that looked like icicles.

  A son arrived five months later, although the exact year and date of birth would remain a lingering mystery. Possibly to prevent profilers from revealing his mother’s premarital pregnancy, LeRoy Robert Ripley would never admit to being born on February 22, 1890; on passport applications and other documents he’d declare 1891, 1892, 1893, or 1894 as his birth year. He’d also later claim to have been born on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve.

  Isaac and Lillie named him LeRoy but usually called him Roy. Only later in life would he adopt his middle name. A daughter, Ethel, arrived three years later and the family moved into a two-story bungalow Isaac built on Orchard Street, in a quiet grid of streets, home to saloon keepers and dentists, milliners and hops brokers.

  LEROY WAS LEAN and slight, socially timid but full of energy. He had a ball-shaped head and high forehead, a tousled mop of hair above comically jutted-out ears, a freckled and often-dirty face. His most notable feature was an unfortunate set of protruding and misaligned front teeth, a crooked jumble that practically tumbled from his mouth. When he smiled, it looked like he was wearing novelty teeth. He usually kept his mouth closed, lips stretched to hide his dental deformity.