More secrets of Ludwig Bemelmans’ Carlyle mural

SELF-PORTRAIT? SELF PORTRAIT? “Madeline” creator Ludwig Bemelmans worked in hotels for many years before launching a career as an artist. Many of the Carlyle’s workers believe that he painted himself — as a mustachioed server — into the mural at the hotel’s Bemelmans Bar. “Roger, the waiter at the bar, who’s been there a really long time, informed us that this is a kind of self-portrait of Ludwig,” said “Always at the Carlyle” director Matthew Miele. “He signed his name here, too.” STICK-UP: Bemelmans’ seemingly whimsical drawings are tinged with violence, such as this scene of a mugger robbing a man at gunpoint in Central Park. “Bemelmans was a real bad boy,” said art historian Jane Bayard Curley. At age 16, “He shot somebody . . . who had been bullying him.” That’s when his uncle shipped him off to New York. GRAFFITI ADD: Not everything in the mural is original. One of the bar’s pillars has a doodle of Strawberry Fields, John Lennon’s Central Park memorial, which was erected more than 20 years after Bemelmans’ death. “There are a few things in [the mural] that are postBemelmans,” said Miele. “Maybe an artist or two snuck in there over the years to add something.” CENTRAL PARK ZOO: Bemelmans swapped the people and animals in his depiction of the Central Park Zoo. ”From the time he was a little boy, he was always tangling with authority,” said Curley. “Of course he’d put the banker in a cage!”