Grand, ritzy and splendid

A consolation of being an international foot-in-the-door man in the 1970s, albeit one selling Monets and Moores, not Hoovers, was arriving from JFK at the Hotel Carlyle in Manhattan. You reached the superlative place at about 10 in the evening, and even though flesh complained that it was the middle of the night, spirit insisted on a Martini before bedtime in the Bemelmans Bar. Bobby Short would play a few Bogartish tunes on the piano, Ludwig’s own murals soothed the eye and the America you entered seemed a throwback: older and more elegant than still trendy London, or the rest of busy neurotic New York fighting off its post-Vietnam blues.

Ludwig Bemelmans, like Cole Porter, Dorothy Parker or that living centenarian, Mrs Vincent (Brook) Astor, was the epitome of New York in the middle decades – the Thirties, Forties and Fifties – of the last century. Mitteleuropa incarnate, sent down to beatify Manhattan, he was born in Meran in the Tirol in 1898; it is now Merano, in Italy.