The law-enforcement officers were further rattled by Weyman’s trait of being open and aboveboard. His neighbors in Brooklyn grew accustomed to seeing him go in and out of his house in broad daylight, one time as one man, another time as another man, and soon ceased to give the matter a second thought. But the police seem at first to have been incapable of grasping the fact that Weyman’s life was an open book. They persisted in the belief that the fellow they were after was a shamefaced scapegrace whose tactics would be studiedly underhanded, and that he was bent on pulling the wool over their eyes. Because they were sure he would be too sly to go home when the heat was on, they almost never made an effort to find him there. He was practically always there except when he was out on some imposturous jaunt or other, yet he was usually recognized and picked up by the police while he was jaunting around, rather than tracked down by them to his home in Brooklyn.

All of Weyman’s getups, like Weyman himself, had a Chaplinesque quality. With striped trousers and morning coat, for example, it was not unusual for him to wear a pair of tan shoes. He occasionally put on a white tie with dinner clothes or a black tie with tails. And his military and naval uniforms were never exactly right—a brass button might be missing, an epaulet might be askew, there might be too many gold stripes on one sleeve and too few on the other. Yet nobody ever seemed to notice these imperfections when face to face with Weyman and listening to Weyman talk. When Weyman was well perked up, full of self-confidence over not being himself, and his ego was fattened with success, he spoke to, and frequently barked at, people, and seemed to have a hypnotic effect on them. In any case, they almost always did exactly what he told them to do, and they usually believed everything he said to them. It was only after he had left them and their heads had begun to clear that they were able to remember that he looked quite a lot like Charlie Chaplin—or, to be more precise, like Charlie Chaplin posing as a millionaire, an admiral, an Army officer, a physician, the State Department Naval Liaison Officer, or whatever. It was sometimes not until years afterward, though, that these people found themselves able to laugh, for it was Weyman’s contribution to the gaiety of nations that in one way or another he made people look funny to everybody but themselves and himself.

As things turned out, picking up Weyman without going to his Brooklyn home became comparatively easy for the New York police to accomplish. After a few years of being perplexed into a state bordering on numbness by Weyman’s undeceitful ways, they appear to have put their heads together and figured out that what Weyman would probably do was try to outwit them by making himself conspicuous. Once they had evolved this theory, police detectives would nonchalantly haunt the most noteworthy event that was enlivening metropolitan life on a particular day, and, sure enough, they would usually find Weyman mixed up in it somewhere, and possibly in charge of it. They would recognize him by his face and pick him up.

An example of what came to be the standard police method of capturing Weyman occurred on April 23, 1917, when he was twenty-six years old. On that day, nothing much was going on in Manhattan, but there was a military shindig in progress at an armory in Brooklyn. Police Detective Francis X. Sullivan, of the Delancey Street station, in Manhattan, wanted Weyman, because a while earlier Weyman had forged the name of United States Senator William M. Calder to a letter of recommendation that had landed Weyman a job as a cashier at a downtown branch of the Bank of United States. Weyman hadn’t run off with any of the bank’s funds, and wasn’t trying to, but Senator Calder, the bank, and the District Attorney’s Office felt that Weyman’s procedure in getting the job had been felonious. Detective Sullivan went over to the armory in Brooklyn and hung around. Weyman showed up after a short time, and Sullivan recognized his face, if not the rest of him. On the one occasion that Sullivan had seen him before, Weyman had been wearing the top hat, morning coat, and striped trousers of his identity as the Consul General of Rumania. Now he was in the dress uniform of a rear admiral of the United States Navy—a striking outfit, with a high-crowned cap, epaulets, flotillas of brass buttons, and garlands of gold braid. It was the sort of naval uniform that is never seen anymore except in movies or on the covers of historical novels. After returning the salute that the Army sentries at the entrance to the armory gave him, Weyman sailed inside, received and returned a salute from the major general in charge, and told the general that, as a gesture of interservice courtesy, he had come to inspect the troops. Sullivan, like most human beings, took pleasure in delaying a foreseeable climax, and he drifted along unobtrusively in the admiral’s wake. The general was about to start inspecting the troops with the admiral when Sullivan lunged, put the handcuffs on the admiral, and took him to the Delancey Street station house.

Sullivan could have had Weyman earlier that day if he had simply gone to Weyman’s home in Brooklyn and waited for him to come out, or had walked into the house and pounced on him while he was taking off the uniform of the French Navy in order to put on the uniform of the United States Navy. Weyman had been St. Cyr that morning. Newspaper clippings and a railway stub that were taken from his wallet when he was booked at the Delancey Street station house showed that he had just come back in a lower berth of a Pullman car from a visit to Washington, D.C., where, as Lieutenant St. Cyr of the French Navy, he had been, as the society editor of the Washington Evening Star put it, “among the more colorful guests” at a succession of dinner parties. One of these dinners was a stag affair given for a group of men of consequence by Vice-President Thomas R. Marshall, who was celebrated in those days as a conscious humorist rather than an unconscious one, and was the man who said, among other witty things, that what this country needed was a good five-cent cigar.

Weyman didn’t get to the White House on that 1917 trip to Washington. The Chief Executive at that time was, of course, Woodrow Wilson. When Weyman was searched at the Delancey Street station house, there was a letter in his pocket from Mrs. Wilson’s social secretary, which was addressed to “My dear Lieutenant St. Cyr,” and which said, “In reply to your letter of recent date, permit me to say that the President and Mrs. Wilson have so many engagements in the near future that it would be impossible to arrange a time when they could conveniently receive Mme. St. Cyr and yourself.” At that time, Weyman wasn’t any more married than he was an officer in the French Navy or in the United States Navy. In spite of a contrary impression he gave many people who were casually acquainted with him, or who cursorily studied his career, Weyman was married only once, and he stayed married to the woman of his choice. Both his courtship and his marriage were as tempestuous—and perhaps as happy—as those of the hero of “The Taming of the Shrew.” However, one of his foibles, both before and after his marriage, was to offer rare treats, such as prearranged visits to the White House, to ladies of his acquaintance. He nearly always came through with what he offered, too. Four years after the 1917 visit to Washington, he promised to take a different lady to call on President and Mrs. Warren G. Harding, and he came through with that in grand style. That he was not received at the White House until the summer of 1921 should not be taken as an indication that he wouldn’t have got in there sooner if he had been able to try again after his initial failure with the Wilsons. He didn’t have a good chance to try the Wilsons a second time because he was in prison almost continuously from the day Detective Sullivan picked him up in April, 1917, until March, 1920, and by that time the Wilsons were in their last year in the White House and the President was recovering from his illness. And Weyman probably could and would have called on the Hardings on one pretext or another soon after Harding’s inauguration, in March, 1921, if he had not been away on a foreign mission. In late 1920 and for a part of 1921, Weyman was working as a physician and sanitation expert for an American engineering company in Lima, Peru.