LENNY KRAVITZ DOES NOT BLEND IN. WE’RE SITTING IN Bemelmans, the iconic piano bar at the Upper East Side’s historic Carlyle Hotel. Here, things are done properly. Have been since 1947. Waiters wear white coats. Cocktails, served exclusively in etched crystal glasses, arrive on silver trays. Fancy little bowls full of fancy little bar snacks adorn the tables. Murals by Ludwig Bemelmans—of the Madeline children’s book fame—decorate the walls. And some of the country’s most celebrated jazz pianists still play the black and whites nightly. It is a place completely synonymous with old-school New York City glamour. It’s also maybe the last place you’d expect to spot a certified rock god during daylight hours.
But this is where Kravitz wanted to meet, so here we are. It’s 3:00 P.M. on a very rainy Yom Kippur; the remnants of Tropical Storm Ophelia are battering Manhattan outside, and the sparser-than-usual crowd is almost entirely drinking martinis. Kravitz, who is staying at his daughter’s Brooklyn apartment while she’s holed up in his Paris home, looks like he beamed in straight from 1975. Tailored brown-leather jacket, turtleneck, flared trousers. His signature locks are pulled half back, and gold rings wrap around a few of his fingers. He orders a hot green tea.
Surprisingly enough, Kravitz is right at home at the Carlyle. This is where his mom, Roxie Roker, then an assistant at NBC and an aspiring actress, asked Bobby Short, the fabled cabaret singer who headlined here for decades, if she should accept the marriage proposal of a news producer who worked in her building named Sy Kravitz. (Replied Short: “I don’t see anyone else asking!”) When Lenny’s classmates were with sitters on Saturday nights, Short visited him and his parents at their table between sets. He met Andy Warhol here many years later at a party for Bret Easton Ellis. Kravitz even hosted his dad’s final birthday party here in the early 2000s. “This place is all over my life,” he says plainly.
Besides, has Kravitz ever blended in? The only son of Roxie and Sy, he is equal parts his mother, a Black woman of Bahamian descent, and his white, Jewish father, whose family came to America from Kyiv before Sy was born. Growing up biracial in the sixties and seventies, Kravitz stuck out as much in the largely white East Eighties of Manhattan as he did in the primarily Black Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where he lived during the week with his maternal grandparents while his parents worked in the city. It wasn’t a problem.
“I was comfortable,” says the man who, decades later, would push the boundaries of rock and fashion—the very definition of cool, even—into new frontiers. “I dug that.”
COLSON WHITEHEAD ONCE WROTE THAT everyone’s New York is the New York they first arrive in, that they begin building their own private skyline the moment they lay eyes on the city. Kravitz, fifty-nine, has arrived in Manhattan a few times, always welcomed by a different city. His parents had an apartment around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Eighty-second Street. He spent his middle and high school years in Los Angeles but returned in the late eighties when he moved in with his girlfriend, Lisa Bonet—Denise Huxtable herself. And a decade and a half later, after trying out both New Orleans and Miami, he came back with his and Bonet’s daughter, a then-teenage Zoë Kravitz.
Kravitz misses all of his past lives in New York for different reasons. But as Whitehead predicted, his true New York is the one that sitting here in Bemelmans brings him back to. The Upper East Side. After all, he says, it changes more slowly than perhaps any other neighborhood in the city. Lobel’s, his mother’s favorite butcher shop, remains around the corner from their old apartment. Their preferred café, E.A.T., is still just down the street. Of course, some things inevitably change. And like any New Yorker, Kravitz delights in recalling what a current building used to be. Example: The Nectar diner on Eighty-second and Madison was once the Copper Lantern, where
