Within a year, he had an album produced by Richard Perry (“God Bless Tiny Tim”) in the Billboard Top 10, he was on the cover of every magazine, including Rolling Stone, and he did every talk show, becoming a regular on “The Tonight Show” and at one point even guest- hosting for David Frost. You can feel it within seconds: A star is born. He walks out toting his trademark shopping bag, pulls out the ukulele, and starts to sing. Singing the sissy way was his ticket to an appearance on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” in 1968 (his debut on the national stage), and we see that spot. They screamed! I must sing the sissy way. “Today,” he writes, “I tried my new style at the old Alliance Club. He divined, early on, that it would be his ticket to fame. Pennebaker, who says of Tiny, “He was a complete outlaw.” In his diary, Tiny says that he prayed to Jesus and woke up with the ability to sing in that high voice. Dylan planned to make a film with him, to be directed by D.A. He had an instinct for celebrity before it was fashionable, and the hipster world was onto him - people like the avant-garde guru Jonas Mekas and Bob Dylan, who became a friend of his. We see early versions of the Tiny Tim look, most strikingly in a photograph taken by Diane Arbus in 1966, when he was becoming a featured player on the Greenwich Village coffeehouse circuit, and in footage shot at the Andy Warhol Factory. “ The fellows kidded me about my sissyish appearance,” he writes, “but the girls looked at me.” He had a shy crush on his strapping friend Bobby Gonslaves (who is interviewed in the film, and is shocked to hear that Herbert was in love with him), and we hear excerpts from his diaries, which are read on the soundtrack by “Weird Al” Yankovic, who captures their plaintive sincerity. He was born in New York City in 1932 to parents of strikingly mixed heritage (his mother was a Polish-Jewish garment worker, his father a textile worker from Lebanon), and out of this union Herbert Khaury emerged as a lonely-boy romantic who became a teenage Jesus freak.
Johan von Sydow, who directed the documentary, has done his research, unearthing mountains of footage of Tiny Tim along with startling photographs, and he puts together the story of how Tiny invented himself, from an early age, as a knowingly “queer” revolutionary of oddness. He was a prankster who was also a disarmingly sincere outsider artist of crackpot passion. And that face had a skewed glamour: He looked like Lord Byron crossed with Nosferatu, with the hair of Jimmy Page and the eyes of Lillian Gish. He could truly sing, sometimes in a lower register in the film, we hear his cover version of “People Are Strange,” and it’s oddly delectable.
But the most arresting of them was that his entire act flirted with looking and sounding ugly, yet the more you looked and listened to him the more you realized he was beautiful. His image, and soprano flutter, called up a lot of paradoxes he was angel and creep, male and female, innocent and libertine. In 1959, he joined a Times Square flea circus, where he was billed as Larry Love, the Human Canary, and even there, in the snake-pit dregs of showbiz, he had the surreal magnetism of self-creation. He was a visibly fractured human being, yet one of the strange things the documentary captures is that Tiny Tim, who started off in the ’50s playing amateur singing contests and dive bars, was one of those people who always knew he was going to be a star. Watching him now, 50 years later, you can scarcely take your eyes off him. As the documentary captures (and as I never quite understood back in grade school when I would see Tiny Tim on TV), he was the freak of all freaks, but only because he possessed a singular charisma. The enticing documentary “ Tiny Tim: King for a Day” captures the delightful insanity of how Tiny Tim, the kind of elfin novelty act you could imagine getting booed off the stage at an open-mic night, became, for a while, the biggest star on the planet.
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