The Big Little Man from Brooklyn—I

Seventy-eight years ago, on November 25, 1890, in one of a long row of red brick two-story houses in Brooklyn that had five gray stone steps leading up to the front doors, coal stoves for heat, and toilets in the back yards—each house exactly like the other houses in the row, and also exactly like the ones on the opposite side of the street—a boy was born who was named by his parents Stephen Jacob Weinberg. He wasn’t entirely satisfied with his name or with himself. Soon after he reached the age of twenty-one, he started tinkering with his name and being people other than himself. Except for swift, recurrent periods during which he was Royal St. Cyr, he stayed fairly close to the essentials of the name he had started out with. He was Royal St. Cyr only when he wished to drum home to himself and other people the notion that he was a lieutenant in the French Navy, which he wasn’t. Otherwise, he was, more or less successively, S. Clifford Weinberg, Ethan Allen Weinberg, Rodney S. Wyman, Sterling C. Wyman, Stanley Clifford Weyman, Allen Stanley Weyman, and C. Sterling Weinberg, and he went back to S. Clifford Weinberg and Ethan Allen Weinberg for second and third tries. In middle age, he settled firmly on Stanley Clifford Weyman. From then on, he used only that name, but under it he continued to carry out impostures of great artistic merit. For the sake of simplicity in a chronicle that cannot be other than compound, and in deference to the man himself, he will generally be called here by the name he seemed to like best—Stanley Clifford Weyman.

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