Bemelmans Bar, the watering hole at the Carlyle hotel, is certainly one of the world’s best places to get a drink—and has been for most of its 75-plus-year existence. But it’s also undergoing a bit of an identity crisis. For seven decades it was simply a good place to enjoy a cocktail surrounded by whimsical wallpaper by the guy who did the Madeline books. Circa 2019 one could reliably find a spot to have a too-big martini as the tickling of ivories wafted through the room. Now, it’s a full-blown TikTok hot spot, and the lines for tables start forming around five, and quickly wind down Madison Avenue. Waiters dodge Gen Z selfie-takers. The days of seeing Paul McCartney drinking pineapple margaritas or Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tippling incognito in the corner might be over. It’s good to share a favorite place with a new generation, and it’s still got that Bemelmans magic during off-hours, but maybe it’s not clear who Bemelmans is for these days. 

Not that any of this seemed to bother Hamilton Leithauser, the six-foot-four lead singer of the beloved aughts rock band the Walkmen, as he walked into Bemelmans on a busy night last month, and was seated immediately at a table right next to Earl Rose, the most senior of the bar’s piano men, prompting Earl to call out to Leithauser mid-croon for a hello. A red-tuxedoed water promptly brought him a whiskey sour. 

Does it seem odd that a 45-year-old rock star best known for a series of albums more than a decade ago is treated by the staff of The Carlyle as if he lives there? Actually, he does live there, kind of. On and off for the past five years, Leithauser has used the Walkmen’s extended hiatus as an excuse for a residency at Café Carlyle, the intimate cabaret nestled in the opulent lobby. While he’s performing he lives in a suite upstairs. After his shows, he drinks at the bar and parties in the suite. He had just wrapped another residency in March, spending every night at this exact place, so between sips of a martini, I had to ask, “Ham, do you ever get sick of hanging at Bemelmans Bar?” 

“Fuck no,” Leithauser said. “The last time I was sitting here, this was two weeks ago, I was right over there, and Eric Adams was sitting right there. He walked in at one in the morning. Isn’t that weird? He was with his group. The weird part was, we were all kind of like, ‘Um?’ and the waiter was like, ‘Oh, yeah, he comes in every single night.’”

He had some other fun stories. 

“I met Bill Murray here five years ago, and he and I sat over there”—pointing to the golden-lit counter—“until the entire bar was closed and then they just kept it open and we got completely shit-housed drunk, and it was incredible,” he said. “And then two years later, I’ll walk in and he’s sitting right there.” 

Murray and Leithauser, upon reuniting, embraced, and carried on the imbibing from years back. Why not? 

“I was just like, ‘Fuck, when am I ever going to do this again?’”

The uptown days are numbered for Leithauser. Last year came the shock announcement that he would reunite with his bandmates for a string of shows at Webster Hall, marking their first time playing together in nearly a decade. For literate indie rock fans of a certain age, the idea of just one more Walkmen show is a huge deal—one friend dubbed it “The Last Waltz for people who watched season two of The O.C. in real time.” (Seth Cohen got a job at the Bait Shop just so he could see the Walkmen perform, in case you forgot.) For a stretch of a few years, few bands were as exciting and fawned over as the Walkmen, who blasted a U2-esque squall of electric shimmer cut through by Leithauser’s Dylan-like wails, all washed in a church organ that gave the proceedings their spectral oomph. The shows at Webster Hall sold out immediately. 

As Leithhauser and I drank, the shows were a few weeks out. You might think it’d be good to bang out a few songs to shake the cobwebs off. Instead, they decided to go on national television cold, a decade since they last played together. 

“Paul lives in Spain, Pete lives in LA, Walt lives upstate, and Matt lives in Philly—I’m the only one that lives here,” Leithauser said. “We’re going to do The Colbert Show without having rehearsed a single time.”

If you were wondering why this art column took time off from mega-collectors and biennales to talk to an indie rocker at a hotel bar, well, have I got a surprise for you. Following in the tradition of musicians like Silver Jews’ David Berman and Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus, who both worked as security guards at The Whitney when it was on the Upper East Side, Leithauser held a job as a security guard at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1998 to 2004, quitting only when Bows + Arrows came out and his band started getting booked on mid-aughts prime-time TV.  

“Oh, this was my entrance,” he said as we walked into the VIP door of The Met near 81st Street on a spring afternoon, ducking to make sure he entered the door without knocking his head. I wanted to bring him back to his former place of employment, and he obliged, enthusiastically. 

He worked there a lifetimetime ago. In the late 1990s Leithauser moved to New York when he transferred to NYU, and needed a side gig. His father was the chief of design and senior curator at the National Gallery of Art in DC, and teenage Hamilton nepo-babied his way into an internship, which led to a guard gig.

“Because my dad always worked in a museum, I always figured that would be the path I would choose,” he told me, as a Met staffer led us into a museum after hours. “No matter what you’re doing you’re always at least surrounded by cool stuff. And the great thing about working here is there’s a lot of downtime. It’s a big bureaucracy and to get things moving takes a lot of emails and phone calls and stuff. So I could find myself with a lot of hours on Monday to just walk around.”

He was living on Sixth Street in the East Village, taking the 4/5 up to The Met, working until 11 p.m., then taking a crosstown up to Harlem to record at the Walkmen’s studio, Marcata. And so during the day he tinkered with lyrics and melodies in his head while wandering through the galleries. “We’ve Been Had,” the standout track on the Walkmen’s first album, was written at The Met, and decades later the lyrics still hit. It’s a pre-jaded thinking man’s rejection of the nostalgia of a city he’s just moved to (listen up, TikTok teens), determined to make it against the odds: “Well I’m a modern guy I don’t care much for the go-go / Or the retro image I see so often, telling me to / Keep trying, maybe you’ll get here someday…” 

“I wrote many, many, many songs here,” he said, as we went through the main hall. “I would have been here five days a week. I do all my songwriting in my head. I really don’t do it when I’m playing an instrument that often. And so I would just sit there paying no attention to whatever anybody was telling me. Just singing something, you know?”

We had wandered through the Egyptian sculpture wing and into the contemporary wing, where Cecily Brown’s retrospective, “Death and the Maid,” had opened to members just that morning. Unfamiliar with Brown’s work, Leithauser was an instant fan.

“This is the first show in a while where I thought, Wow, I would love to own one of these,” he said, checking out the semi-abstractions of nude bodies writing in sunshine.

The museum was closing up for real this time, and when we walked outside Leithauser remembered another perk of working there in the late 1990s: access to cheap tickets to Met events, even the big Met event. Hard to believe, but before it became fashion’s biggest night, the Costume Institute Gala was simply another Met fundraiser that even security guards could secure tickets to. 

“I got to go to the gala, like, twice or something,” Leithauser said, affectless, looking both ways as his gigantic frame jaywalked across Park Avenue. “You could buy the discounted ticket. It was pretty posh.”

At Bemelmans, as cocktail number one became cocktail number two, Leithauser was telling me how the members of the band finally all got together, years after the hiatus, with most of them fully invested in solo projects and post-Walkmen life. 

“To be honest, the first time we were able to be in the room together, all five of us, was at my mother’s funeral, which was in October two years ago,” he said. “It was heavy but funny. We didn’t even realize that was going to be the first time, and then all of a sudden the five of us were standing there and we were like, ‘Wait, it’s the Walkmen.’”

They had always gotten offers to reunite for festivals and such, and their manager always passed them along. Usually it was an immediate no, but after the impromptu get-together, they took a beat to think about it. Leithauser had befriended a few younger musicians, such as the former Vampire Weekend member Rostam Batmanglij (with whom he recorded a fantastic joint LP) and the arena-filling pop star Maggie Rogers (who asked Leithauser to star in a music video). Rogers was one of the many next-gen musicians who loved the Walkmen but missed them while they were around. 

“She listened to the Walkmen forever,” Leithauser said. “She never saw a show.”

Eventually, the band relented. 

“We agreed to do two shows,” he said. “It sold out in, like, three minutes or something like that.”

They expanded the tour across the US and Europe, but they did it on their own terms. Unlike the more self-serious, self-consciously cool bands of the day, the Walkmen have an aloof sense of chivalry, a preppy touch seemingly baked into them while they were students at St. Albans, a fancy private school in DC where the kids of presidents and senators enroll. Several Walkmen stunts bordered on performance art—covering a whole boozy Harry Nilsson album, serving spaghetti dinners to fans—and they even jointly wrote a novel. 

Their stunt of playing for the first time without a single rehearsal was typical. What was even more typical was that they pulled it off. 

“They are reuniting for the very first time in a decade tonight,” Stephen Colbert said, looking legit excited, before the Walkmen sprang into “The Rat,” a perfect song, and sounded a hell of a lot like the Walkmen. A few days later, bedraggled now-middle-aged fans packed their way into a sold-out Webster Hall for the first show of the New York run. Around 9:15 the guys came onstage and launched into the first two tracks from their debut album, songs about anti-nostalgia played by members 25 years older than when they wrote them.

“It’s good to be back onstage with my best friends tonight,” Leithauser said. 

The set wound through their half-dozen albums, with songs about long-gone DC dive bars and childhood blizzards and pre-9/11 downtown and growing old and fucking up and going out alone, if they go out at all. After returning for an encore, Leithauser launched into “We’ve Been Had,” the song he wrote while walking around The Met guarding the cherished masterpieces of civilization.

“See me age 19 with some dumb haircut from 1960 / Moving to New York City / Live with my friends there / We’re all taking the same steps / They’re foolish now,” he sang, with the audience singing with him.

Then he bowed, left the stage, and got ready to do it again the next day.

Your crib sheet for comings and goings in the art world this week and beyond…

…A new tranche of Jeffrey Epstein docs have dropped, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal, and they’ve revealed more lost secrets of the late power broker and convicted pedophile, including what studio visits the guy was going on. Apparently, according to the documents, he was set to do a studio visit with Jeff Koons, accompanied by Woody Allen, sometime around 2013. There’s no indication that the visit actually happened, but that cursed Upper East Side mansion certainly would have been enhanced by, say, a work from the celebration series, maybe a Balloon Dog or two. Epstein and Allen also planned a trip to Sotheby’s in 2017, according to the Journal docs—and I have, on occasion, seen the film director and his wife at the evening sales on York Avenue. Never, for the record, with Epstein. (Koons didn’t respond to the Journal’s request for comment, the paper said. Allen’s rep told the paper he went with his wife to group social events at Epstein’s New York home.)

…The blockbuster gallery shows in Chelsea are only starting to roll out, but two big ones opened Wednesday evening. At Gagosian on 24th Street, Harold Ancart unveiled his first show with the gallery called, simply, “Paintings.” The lush depictions of flowers and sunsets are some of the hottest things in the market, and all sold well before the opening in the succinct light-filled space that was once home to Mary Boone’s gallery. Three blocks south, Gladstone Gallery had its first show of works by Robert Rauschenberg since it officially took on the artist’s estate earlier this year. Parties followed. Gagosian fêted Ancart at the new Ritz in NoMad, while Gladstone went big with a buyout of The Odeon, the ultimate artists’ canteen, every table stuffed with luminaries. And it was only a Wednesday, with weeks of fairs to come. 

…Veteran art dealer Bill Brady died this week of cardiac arrest at the too-young age of 55. Brady has galleries in Los Angeles and Miami, as well as a partnership with ATM Gallery in New York, co-run by Will Leung. Brady championed artists such as Huma Bhabha and Tomoo Gokita early on, was an East Village legend with a gallery on Avenue B, and also had an influential gallery in his hometown of Kansas City for many years. He will be missed. 

…After Tucker Carlson got fired at Fox News, banker and art collector Andy Hall took to his Instagram to share a story about seeing the former anchor at a local establishment in Palm Beach. “The other day this POS sans pareil sat down at a table next to us at a restaurant here in Palm Beach,” Hall wrote. “I had to switch seats and turn my back to him in order to stomach completing my meal. I debated whether to say something as we left. I ended up just giving him and his guests the finger, to their wide-eyed astonishment. Maybe I hexed him?” I guess Tucker won’t be welcome at Hall’s wonderful art-filled Vermont foundation during one of the weekends this summer. 

The gala itself is as exclusive as it gets. The after-parties are refracted in a series of tipsy party reports. So what about the press conference for the exhibition at the Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum, the first time that one can get eyeballs on the exhibition that fuels fashion’s biggest night? On Monday morning, the rubbernecking crowds had already picked their places outside, squatting by The Met’s steps hours before for the chance to see Dua Lipa in Chanel and Jared Leto in cat regalia, and docents at work early to lead the special few on a circuitous route through the museum to the American sculpture wing. Director Max Hollein began remarks promptly at 9:30, and explained that he first met Karl Lagerfeld as a young boy, after he collaborated with his father, the Pritzker Prize–winning architect Hans Hollein.

“Karl bridged the gap between art and commerce with sophistication,” Hollein the younger said at the press conference. 

Up next was Lagerfeld muse Carla Bruni, the former first lady of France. She said Lagerfeld had a somewhat prickly reputation that he himself certainly supported, but deep down he was a softy. 

“He had a bewitching charm and wicked sense of humor,” Bruni said. “But it is his kindness I remember most. I am so sorry for this, Karl.”

After Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch gave the final remarks (hi, boss!) the masses were let in, the Euro journos hauling big pallets of photo gear. All the classics were there, and there’s even some of Lagerfeld’s own gear on display. And that is why a pair of sunglasses by Chrome Hearts is now in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

And that’s a wrap for this week’s True Colors. Like what you’re seeing? Have a tip? Drop me a line at nate_freeman@condenast.com.