Singers: The Purity of Madness

“Hel-loooo, my dear friends,” flutes the voice. Blowing kisses, fluttering his large, bony fingers and rolling his eyes, Tiny Tim skips onstage like Bea Lillie in drag: shoulder-length locks, tattersall sports jacket decorated with a sheriff’s badge, plaid shirt and orange socks. He always carries a copy of the New Testament and lugs a soiled brown shop ping bag in which he always keeps such talismans as a dime-store compact (he uses pale Elizabeth Arden foundation makeup), two notebooks containing the lyrics of 500 songs, and, of course, his “dear, sweet” ukulele.

Giggling, he takes the uke from its old cardigan wrapper. Plink-a-plank-aplink. His thin, reedy tones soar into an unearthly falsetto, the vibrato voice quavering like a hummingbird’s wings: “Come tiptoe through the tulips with me . . .” In the audience, as at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium last week, his listeners are rapt, incredulous, amused—everything but indifferent.

And no wonder. Tiny Tim is a gentle soul who happens to be the most bizarre entertainer this side of Barnum & Bailey’s sideshow. His specialties are pop songs from early decades of the century, and his performances flicker with a genuine talent for re-creating the styles of such stars of the era as Arthur Fields, Gene Austin, Ruth Etting and Russ Columbo. But Tiny dismisses the notion that he does imitations. “The spirits of singers whose songs I do are living within me,” he insists. All this is pathetically easy to mock, yet Tiny’s total absorption in his role—what one friend calls “the purity of his madness” —cloaks him in an impervious aura of innocence. Blithely he goes on communing with his windup Victrola and 400 old recordings, and indulging such eccentricities as taking “a big shower” for 90 minutes each day, plus several “little showers after nature calls,” and brushing his teeth six times a day (three times with toothpaste, three with papaya powder).

The son of a Lebanese immigrant, Tiny was born as Herbert Khaury in New York City 35 or 40 years ago (he is coy about his exact age). After high school, he began performing at night under such names as Larry Love and Deny Dover in dreary Greenwich Village bars. Since becoming a regular two years ago at a midtown nightspot called The Scene, he has risen to the status of court jester in the local realm of camp. Now six network television appearances, and the recent release of his first record album, have helped place him in a cultish tradition, that goes back through Shakespeare’s clowns all the way to the Roman circus—that of the holy fool.

But holy papaya powder, who is fooling whom?