Palm Trees on the Hudson: A True Story of the Mob, Judy Garland & Interior Decorating

Among the many things to love about New York City is the fact that this teeming metropolis holds the intellectual property rights to characters like Eliyahu Teichberg, the restless young son of immigrants who, cardboard suitcases in hand, flees his native Bensonhurst, moves to Manhattan, changes his name to Elliot Tiber (because, as Judy Garland later says, it sounds more “chic,”), becomes a retail window display artist in some of the smarter shops on the island (laying the groundwork for Simon Doonan to later build upon at Barney’s), and then a celebrity interior decorator, who throws stones during the Stonewall riots (fueled by rage over police misconduct and grief over the sudden, early death of Judy Garland), and finally moves upstate in a moment of defeat and disgrace to White Lake, where his parents (who had fled Bensonhurst with cardboard suitcases of their own) had bought a motel near the spot where Mr. Tiber would be a key figure in the creation of an entire nation that was called Woodstock.  Mr. Tiber already has told the Stonewall and Woodstock bits in an earlier work, Taking Woodstock, and lived to see his book made into a movie by noted director Ang Lee (thanks to a chance encounter in a TV studio green room), himself portrayed as a young man by comedian Demetri Martin.

With Palm Trees on the Hudson, he gives us a prequel of sorts, a slim volume that serves three purposes: First, it is something of a memoir of his childhood, filling in the back-story for his previous work, and telling the tale of his childhood in Brooklyn.

Second, it is the story of his sexual self-discovery in late 1950s Greenwich Village and of his evolution as a gay man, whose personal trajectory matches that of the nation as it moves from the shadows to the streets and from shame to sexual revolution.

Third, and perhaps most important, Palm Trees on the Hudson is Elliot Tiber’s excuse to tell a whopper of an anecdote—one that most surely has earned him rapt attention, shocked laughter, and thunderous applause at many a dinner party table during these last 30 years.

That Mr. Tiber is himself quite a character is a given. He is the genuine item, the real deal—as New York as Ratner’s. But, the reader asks, despite the success of Taking Woodstock and the presence of this new work and a past novel called High Street, is Tiber also a writer—in the Faulkner/Fitzgerald/Hemingway sense?

The answer to that is an obvious “No,” based upon those specific skills that such writers possess—and by what passes for sentences in this book.

But Tiber is something else again. An entertainer. A monologist. And something that has been missing from the American scene for the past few years: a raconteur—in the Orson Welles/Peter Ustinov sense—which is a very pleasant thing, indeed.

Palm Trees on the Hudson reads as if Tiber were staging a one-man show within your frontal lobe, with myriad gestures, postures and vocal mannerisms to suggest variation of character while he plays all the parts.

Or better, it is as if our author were sitting on the long, low couch of Merv Griffin’s old afternoon talk show, telling his precious anecdote and making his host helplessly laugh that raucous laugh of his while Arthur Treacher looks on askance.

Of that anecdote itself, the reader can say no more than that is involves, as the book’s title promises, the mob, Mr. Tiber’s talent for interior design, the Hudson River, and a goodly number of palm trees—to say nothing of the late, great Judy Garland.

But then, Miss Garland is more to Mr. Tiber than just the subject of his crown jewel of an anecdote. She is the heart of his book. Its pages open with a very young Eli Teichberg in rapture while seeing The Wizard of Oz for the very first time.

And she returns to the pages again and again, as an icon—perhaps the first and most indelible gay icon—as a voice of comfort emanating from a cherished record player, as an entertainer who brings down the house right in front of Mr. Tiber’s eyes at both the Palace and at Carnegie Hall and, finally and very briefly, as the tiny little flesh-and-blood woman that she was.

To say more than that is to say too much and to rob future readers of the full joy of hearing Mr. Tiber’s story for themselves.

Palm Trees on the Hudson, read on its own, is a quick, pleasing memoir, a story of a particular moment in the life of the world’s greatest city. Read with its companion volume Taking Woodstock it becomes something more—something richer. The two books together form a cultural tapestry of an era in which our nation was, at once, so vibrantly alive and so foolishly naive that only the explosions that occurred (Stonewall and Woodstock chief among them) could have relieved the pressures that had festered deep, deep within.

Which leaves the reader to wonder if Tiber will one day present a third volume—one in which he reveals that he had a hand in yet another culture-rocker: a little thing called Watergate?