Books: Vaulting Ambition

THE BIG LITTLE MAN FROM BROOKLYN by St. Clair McKelway. 193 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.

He was born in a little red brick two-story house in Brooklyn on November 25, 1890, the eldest son of a moderately successful real estate broker. It was thought that he might become a diplomat, or a doctor or lawyer. But the boy had the ravenous ambition of a restless Renaissance man: he decided to become all three.

Impossible dream? Perhaps. But during his lifetime the man known as Stanley Clifford Weyman was feted as the U.S. Consul General to Algiers, highly praised as Silent Star Pola Negri’s private physician and duly appointed Special Deputy Attorney General of New York. In addition—among countless other achievements—he helped handle the arrangements for Rudolph Valentino’s celebrated funeral, once addressed a medical convention on “psychiatric treatment in prison institutions” and managed to be received at the White House as an interpreter assigned to a visiting princess from Afghanistan.

Rudy Sent Me. How did Stanley do it? By dint of good old-fashioned cheating. Often an item in a newspaper served as his source of inspiration. He never altered his face; he merely changed his history and his costume. Then he proceeded to act, always seeming so trustworthy, so professionally knowledgeable that few would have dreamed of challenging him.

During the preparations for the Valentino funeral in 1926, Stanley blew into the Hotel Ambassador carrying a little bag. He knocked at the suite of Valentino’s bereaved lover, Pola Negri, told the maid he was a physician and introduced himself to Miss Negri as a close friend of Valentino’s. “Rudy would have wanted me to take care of you, my dear,” Miss Negri later reported his saying. “You are very thoughtful,” she replied.

Indeed, so well did Stanley perform

Hippocratically—dispensing a few comforting words here, a couple of aspirins there—that Miss Negri insisted upon keeping him on even after his sham was exposed. He was, she said, the best doctor she had ever had.

But Weyman was not inclined toward long-playing roles. He found that a succession of new impersonations made the most stimulating demands on his talent. If he had never piloted a plane, for example, how much sweeter the triumph of posing before fawning New York crowds as a returning aeronautical hero. He could not read a word in Le Figaro, but he came on convincingly as a French navy lieutenant named Royal St. Cyr.

Unforgiving Foe. Stanley rarely pursued his imposture for personal gain or money. His was a relatively pure art. But his escapades brought him face to face with an unforgiving foe: society. He spent a good deal of time in prisons and mental hospitals as a parole violator and certified manic-depressive. But wardens and doctors, like everyone else who came in contact with him, were completely captivated.

Ironically, his life ended on a muted but genuinely heroic note. In his late 60s, Weyman finally abandoned—or conquered—his artistic impulses and went to work as a night manager in a Yonkers motel. There, on the night of August 27, 1960, after a year on the job, he was shot to death bravely trying to foil a hold-up attempt.

Weyman’s chronicle and the handful of other tales included in the book are all what journalism schools used to call human interest stories. In telling about people, however, St. Clair McKelway scrupulously avoids confusing the knack of self-expression with the act of self-intrusion. He might be called an old-fashioned journalist—if he did not so often manage to sound so refreshingly new.