Traveling In Style : THAT CARLYLE STYLE : New York Is Full of Luxury Hotels, but There’s Nothing Else Quite Like the Fabled Carlyle--Remarkably Comfortable, Distinctively Stylish and <i> Very</i> Discreet

On a balmy Wednesday evening two years ago, three businessmen sat down for a dinner meeting in the Fortuny-silk-upholstered dining room of New York’s Hotel Carlyle. One guest, half-jokingly, commented that he hoped the meeting could wind up by 10 because he wanted to watch the season’s concluding segment of “Twin Peaks.”

One of the dining room’s staff must have overheard him. As the hour approached, and it became clear that the meeting would last much longer than 10, one of the hotel’s assistant managers approached the table. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but I’ve taken the liberty of inserting a blank tape in the VCR in your room and setting it for 10 o’clock on ABC. So you can watch ‘Twin Peaks’ at your leisure.” This is obviously not the sort of service one would expect at an ordinary hotel. But the last thing the Carlyle has ever wanted to be is ordinary.

For nearly 60 years, the 38-floor, 426-foot-high Carlyle--with its sleek Art Deco lines and graceful tower (that doubles as a smokestack to accommodate wood-burning fireplaces in some of the grander suites)--has dominated the skyline of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Because it soars above its shorter neighbors, the upper floors of the hotel command breathtaking views of the city in all directions, including Central Park. (The hotel, at Madison Avenue and 76th Street, is one block east of 5th Avenue, which forms the park’s eastern boundary.) In fact, the Carlyle’s residents (there are 74 co-op apartments in the building, in addition to 183 hotel rooms and suites) feel that theirs is a better address than one on 5th Avenue, since they are spared nuisances that 5th Avenue dwellers complain about--the pungent odors that occasionally waft upward from Central Park Zoo and the periodic noisy, messy parades.

The hotel has always been something of an anomaly. Its construction in 1930 and 1931 was thought to be ill-timed. The nation was sliding into the Great Depression, and the market for luxury hotel rooms and apartments had already shrunk disastrously. Still, its builders blithely ignored hard times and spared no expense--bedrooms and bathrooms (some with views of the park) are oversize--and sacrificed rentable space in order to provide, on the tower’s setbacks, rooms with spacious terraces and outdoor gazebos. The hotel’s location was considered inconvenient, too--far from the Midtown department and specialty stores, even farther from the Broadway theater district--and the immediate neighborhood was downright tatty, with brownstones that had seen better days in an earlier century, grocery stores and inexpensive restaurants. Even the hotel’s name was capricious. Thomas Carlyle, it seems, was the builder’s daughter’s favorite author.

Still, with its lush Dorothy Draper interiors, the hotel survived through a series of benevolent owners--including, for a while, the Rockefellers. For the first 18 years of its life, it remained something of a well-kept secret among the seriously but inconspicuously rich (through a period, it might be added, when it was considered unwise to be conspicuously rich). During the ‘30s and early ‘40s, the Carlyle became what was described as “the kind of hotel where mothers stayed when they were taking their children on tours of Eastern boarding schools,” and there was even a period when it used the Social Register as a reference for guests seeking reservations. As recently as 12 years ago, the then-general manager overheard his reservations clerk say on the telephone, “No, I’m sorry, but we’re fully booked on the 18th and 19th. . . . No, I’m sorry, we’re also fully booked on the 20th and 21st.”

When the conversation was concluded, the manager said, “But, George, we’re not fully booked on those nights.”

“I know,” the clerk replied. “But we don’t know those people.”

The Carlyle is nowhere near as la-di-da about whom it accepts today. It has become a favorite New York hostelry for everyone from U.S. Presidents and foreign royalty to rock stars and members of the capricious aristocracy of Hollywood. The Carlyle has put up David Bowie, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Julie Andrews, Jack Nicholson, Anjelica Huston, Jack Lemmon, Prince Philip, Prince Edward, Princess Michael of Kent, King Hussein, Burt Reynolds and Leontyne Price.

Mike Nichols lived there for a while. So did Michael Milken, the junk-bond king. Hubert de Givenchy owns an apartment there as his New York base and, when he is not in town, shrewdly lets the hotel rent it out for him, keeping 80% of the proceeds for himself, the balance going to the hotel for acting as his agent. The designer has another arrangement with the hotel: Free samples of his toiletries are placed in all guest bathrooms.

The change in tone of the Carlyle’s clientele, from low-profile rich to high-profile rich--from gloved-and-hatted, Socially Registered mums in Delman pumps to the sort of people profiled by Robin Leach--has been gradual but profound. Two events triggered the change, and both occurred in 1948. First, Parke-Bernet built a gleaming auction gallery, with its imposing sculpture of “Venus Bringing the Arts to Manhattan” directly across the street. The auction house has since moved to the far East Side, but its initial presence had the effect of turning the once-drab upper reaches of Madison into a glittering stretch of street filled with important galleries (with the Whitney Museum of American Art as a centerpiece), pricey restaurants and elegant shops.

Also in 1948, President Harry S. Truman discovered the Carlyle and began taking morning walks from there whenever he was in New York, conducting alfresco press conferences as he went. Suddenly, the Carlyle was not only fashionable, it was also front-page news.

With celebrity, perhaps inevitably, the hotel also gained a certain notoriety. Other Presidents have stayed there, including Ronald Reagan, but our most glamorous President remains John F. Kennedy--who throughout his White House years kept one of two duplex apartments that occupy the 34th and 35th floors. Kennedy’s extramarital sex life has by now been exhaustively chronicled, but supermarket tabloids continue to report tales of “orgies” in J.F.K.’s Carlyle apartment, with a cast supposedly including the President, his brother Robert, Peter Lawford and, naturally, Marilyn Monroe.

Whatever the truth behind these stories, the Carlyle remains an excellent venue for such activities. Solidly built, its rooms are exceptionally soundproof, and its staff famously reticent. One person who might be expected to have knowledge of indiscretions that might have occurred here is Michael O’Connell, the senior bell captain, who has been with the hotel for more than 40 years. When asked, O’Connell smiles a knowing smile and says, “What can I say? I work for the Carlyle.” But his wink says volumes.

One Kennedy tale is told by C. David Heymann in “A Woman Named Jackie.” Kennedy, it seems, misplaced his little black telephone book while traveling in Arizona, where it was recovered by an aide who was instructed to mail it back to the President at the Carlyle. When the package arrived, it was mistakenly delivered to the apartment across the hall, occupied by the Soviet foreign minister. Learning of the error, and with visions of the list of presidential lady friends published in Pravda, Secret Service agents supposedly sneaked into the Soviet’s apartment and retrieved the unopened package.

In the late 1960s, the Carlyle was bought by Peter Jay Sharp, scion of a New York-based hotel-keeping family. A modest, retiring and publicity-shy fellow, Sharp has spent lavishly on the hotel and gives the delightful impression of indifference about whether it makes money or not.

The Carlyle is small by Manhattan standards, but its ratio of staff to guests is much higher than most hotels in its class. When the hotel redecorated recently, under the guidance of noted New York interior designers Mark Hampton and Nelson Ferlita, it spent about $100,000 per room, more than twice what most hotels in its class spend during construction.

The hotel’s elevators are fully automatic, yet each is manned by a white-gloved operator. Because Sharp plays both classical and jazz piano, Baldwin parlor grands have been placed in the larger suites. Sharp runs the Carlyle in the grand but relaxed style of the great European hotels. Because 80% of the guests are regulars, or “people we know,” guests are not asked to produce credit cards when checking in. Checking out can be accomplished with a wave of the hand to the front desk.

The hotel takes considerable pride in what it does not do. It has no computerized reservation system; reservations are overseen by Ronald Hector, who performs a daily juggling act, making sure that certain longtime patrons get their favorite rooms. The hotel has no marketing or sales department; does not offer discounted, group or weekend rates and, gasps Hector with a look of horror, “certainly no conventions!”

Today, the Carlyle is something very close to a private club, with its member-guests enjoying special perks. A Brazilian guest gets his daily newspapers faxed to his room from Rio. In pre-fax days, a movie producer who was a Carlyle regular needed a script delivered to him in Paris the following morning by way of the Concorde. John Neary, the head concierge, has faced all sorts of odd assignments: A guest had a 50-foot yacht shipped to the hotel, with instructions that it be sent on to him in Texas. It was done. Another guest once telephoned Neary from Iceland, where she was on a motor trip. She was low on fuel. Could he direct her to the nearest gas station? He located one for her. Still another guest complained to the manager that she wanted another bedroom in her suite, but didn’t want to change suites. While she was out to lunch, carpenters cut a doorway into an adjoining room.

To New Yorkers in the neighborhood, the Carlyle’s Bemelmans Bar--with its fanciful murals by the late Ludwig Bemelmans--has become the equivalent of a Londoner’s favorite local. When, as a part of the recent redo, it was announced that the bar would be remodeled, there was such outcry that the hotel backed down.

In the intimate Cafe Carlyle, murals by Marcel Vertes animate the walls and Bobby Short has been stylishly singing Cole Porter and Noel Coward songs in semiannual engagements for more than 20 years. Short has his regulars with whom he chats and visits between sets. “Alistair Cooke and his wife often come by,” he says, “and Jack Lemmon and his wife when they’re in town, and Burt Reynolds and Leontyne Price and Cicely Tyson. They’re all old friends by now.”

Short also speaks of the hotel’s “gentilesse.” “Everything Peter Sharp does is very elegant but very low-key,” he says. “Everybody is pampered to death, including the staff. I think the best example of the Carlyle’s gentilesse was during the hotel strike some years ago. Peter and the rest of management brought out sandwiches and iced tea, on silver trays, to the picketers on the line. When it rained, they brought out umbrellas. Now that’s style. At other hotels, strikers were breaking windows!”

Charles Dean, the smooth, pencil-slim dining-room captain, would agree. Dean defected to Donald Trump’s Plaza Hotel, but two months later he was back at the Carlyle. “I suppose I was flattered when Mrs. Trump called me personally,” he says, “and she offered me a lot of money. But it just wasn’t the same. I don’t want to bad-mouth Mrs. Trump, but she was very high-strung and didn’t have much organizational ability. It’s more a matter of taste. Everything she did at the Plaza was very expensive but somehow wrong. The lobby carpeting was custom-woven, but all wrong. In the dining room entrance, she put a tall, thin silver vase, and filled it with a huge spray of silver and blue orchids, and it was just all wrong. And the Plaza’s clientele is--well, it became a tourist hotel.

“Let me put it this way: There’s a type of guest the Carlyle sometimes gets on weekends. The Plaza gets that sort of person every day!”

GUIDEBOOK: CARLYLE STYLE

The Carlyle Hotel,35 E. 76th St. (at Madison Avenue), New York, N.Y. 10021; (212) 744-1600. For reservations call (800) 227-5737. Rates: $250-$325 (single), $275-$350 (double), $500-$1300 (suite).