Unlock the editor’s summary for free
Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, selects her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In my careless young people, I was not always as well carried in the great hotels in the world. I left a window and crossed a three -story drop to enter a party in a neighboring suite at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles; I also swam naked in his pool. I fainted at dawn on a friend’s couch at Ritz Paris. I organized a later party from my bathtub at the Alvear Palace in Buenos Aires. These hotel tran stories have aged, as well as the smaller characters that populate them. But even in my worst moment, I always had my best behavior in New York Carlyle Hotel.
This choir-boy approach is not simply because the hotel and I share a hometown. Although it has everything to do with the fact that the Art Deco icon has a court in the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and East 76th Street captures the increasingly weird rhythm of New York city in the old school. You want to bring your best, your best clothes and your polished manners. You need this place more than you need.
I write Thrillers about morally warm people found in a world of problems. I am a fan of a seductive backdrop, and the bars and halls of the great hotels put him in close contact with a surprising range of human desires and motivations, perhaps it is the freedom of not being at home. Carlyle is one of those fascinating characters. An Irish heiress who knew fled here when her bathtub overflowed and caused several demands for damage to her cooperative; She lived outside the hotel for years. A legend says that Marilyn Monroe used a secret tunnel in the basement to carry out her adventure with JFK. But the inhabitants are more intrigued by the inhabitants in the lobby whose stories I do not recognize completely. The middle -aged woman dressed with red silk with an envelope handle on the table in front of her, looking every time someone enters. The Italian tennis player with five rackets and a suit bag.
The first time I saw the interior of Carlyle was in Woody Allen’s 1986 comedy Hannah and their sistersWhere Allen’s character takes a Dianne Wiest, playing one of the sisters, to listen to a set of the legendary pianist Bobby Short. I moved to New York in 1996 as a university student without money who did not have a suit, and they spent several years before seeing the interior for me. That opportunity emerged almost a decade later, when a friend invited me to see his father, Steve Tyrell, acting at Café Carlyle, the Cabaret and the Hotel Jazz Club. By then, I owned a suit and felt at home in the puzzle of tables full of people, the expert contortists of the Esmoquin waiters to reach customers with oysters and drinks.
Not long after, another friend brought me to see Woody Allen play with his jazz band from Monday night. We collected a table so close to the stage that the horn of Allen’s clarinet could have sustained. I saw Elaine Stitch Wisecrack and runs to Sondheim in one of her last performances in Café. Later, I saw my friend Zadie Smith get on stage to sing the blues during a set of Jon Batiste.
There are 192 rooms in the Carlyle, and I have not slept in any of them. But that does not do less of mine. Most hotels belong to tourists. The Carlyle is, deep down, an institution of the city, the grazing land of a place, as well as the MoMA a few blocks to the north or the Chrysler building. Beyond the brass rotating doors at the entrance is Bemelmans Bar, The Moody Cocktail Lounge wrapped in Droll murals painted by their homonym artist and author of The MADELINE Books for children, Ludwig Bemelmans. Go further and you will find the Turkish-Bohemian tea hall and the hidden restaurant, photography and illustration dress, Dowling’s.
These retreats have always been a discreet refuge for the rich and high roll, presidents and film stars, Bon Vivants and Manqué artists. Jackie or lunch regularly at the same table in the back corner (the Cobb salad and a G&T was your standing order). So did his son, he turned through Central Park on a couple of skates. And yet, you will also find a retired stockbroker with horseshoe twins and an inclination for agitated Martinis, the eyes closed while listening to Earl, one of the resident pianists of the bar.
Carlyle feels like the safest place in the city. But the city in question remains New York. Recently I found a 1977 journalistic article about an attempted robbery for a band of thieves who entered the lobby just before dawn in wigs and false mustaches, hoping to break the manager’s safe. They fled without cents, leaving their costumes behind. Obviously, the band had been pointing to the most elegant hotels of the time, such as Plaza and Pierre.
It is my type of criminal union to have that demanding taste. In fact, it is a crime running in the Carlyle every hour of the day: in the middle of the Rabbit Murals of Bemelmans Bemelmans Central Park in Arc ties and elephants that enjoy a band vapor concert, a drawing shows a man with a top hat and stove with his hands in the air, sustained by an annoyance that caresses in one of the park’s subpasses. Bemelmans had the instinct of a novelist. I knew that a little mischief and danger gives life to the whole garden.
Havoc of Christopher Bollen is published by Harpercollins at £ 16.99