I try to make the best of the way I am," Tiny Tim says. Ahh, but just exactly what way is he? What is he? His admirers claim he is an accomplished musician; his detractors see him as the greatest put-on since Mrs. Miller. The New York Times suspects he is "a holy freak"; Newsweek calls him "The Last Innocent"; but Time magazine queries, "Who is fooling whom?" To attempt to ferret out the secrets of Tiny Tim's bizarre origin is to journey through Alice's looking-glass where nothing is as it seems. Refusing to give a birth date, Tiny Tim claims to be "ageless," which of course he is. "I really believe I'm nineteen," he insists, "and I try to stay that way." Time magazine, however, estimates him to he thirty-five or forty, and Newsweek says he may be as old as forty-five. Needing as much reassurance as stepmother, he regularly consults his mirror, mirror on the wall-which responds faithfully, "Tiny Tim!" And to see that it continues to do so, he carries a dime store compact filled with Elizabeth Arden foundation make-up. Other beauty aides include Elizabeth Arden Blue Grass Hand Lotion, Faberge and Maja body creams and Packer's Tar Soap. He bathes as often as five times daily—one "big shower," which lasts about ninety minutes, and several "little showers after nature calls." He brushes his teeth six times daily: three times with toothpaste, three times with papaya powder. "I love to keep continually clean," he says, "because when I'm with girls, they are always the essence of purity." While Tiny Tim has been billed variously as Vernon Castle, Emmett Swink, Rollie Dell, Larry Love and Darry Dover, he was born Herbert Kauhry, son of a Lebanese textile worker. "My dear, dear, sweet parents have been so wonderful to me," Tiny Tim says loyally. His mother selects all his clothes and, "my little ukulele" is kept in a shopping bag which "my dear sweet father bought me." From the start, young Herbert was not one of the gang on his native West 81st Street in New York City. He found solitary refuge at the age of five in old gramophone records, played by his mother on an ancient phonograph. And it was amid the dust, the scratch and screech of old 78's, that little Herbert found himself. Today, his collection of antique records includes hundreds of these cherished golden oldies. "I smell the shellac," he confesses, "and oh-oh-oh, I just wish I were the RCA Victor dog hearing His Master's Voice." It wasn't long before Herbert's involvement with that old crank-handle gramophone was total and he began to recreate the low-fi tones that came from behind its panelled doors. "I had the songs within me," he says, "and I had to present their goodness to somebody else. I began appearing in amateur shows in Brooklyn and just all over the place. I sang in hospitals and for the poor in the streets. I even sang in back alleys and on subway trains, just to sing whatever the people wanted to hear. After all, you just never know when a song might come along."
   After high school, Herbert began to pursue his singing career full time. He was not exactly an instantaneous success. "I was booed for years," he admits nonchalantly. "I had shoes thrown at me." And he remembers one performance at which a siren was set off, "just to stop me. But I always finished the song." Nothing could throw him.
   Perhaps it was during those trying times that Herbert acquired the concentration which now enables him to sing on undaunted, despite the laughter and jeers of his audiences who came as much to mock as to listen.
   During World War II, Herbert was eager to do his patriotic bit. "I tried to join the Army at least eight times," he says. "I couldn't pass the written test. There was a square and you had to choose which other square looked most like it. Well, all the other squares looked like it to me." And that was that.
   And so, Herbert's efforts were confined to the homefront. "All I wanted to do was to spread joy all over." But wartime audiences were not particularly receptive to Herbert's unique brand of joy. "I went from dive to dive and bar to bar all over New York and New Jersey." But the world was not yet ready for the appearance of Tiny Tim.
   Back in those days, using one of his early aliases and singing in a reedy tenor instead of his current falsetto, Herbert appeared not so much special as just plain seedy. His hair was a conventional length and his manner lacked the "abandon" which now characterizes his every single gesture. Then in 1953, he let his hair grow, started singing falsetto and billed himself as Larry Love, "The Singing Canary." Tiny Tim recalls: "At the Alliance Club in Greenwich Village, I won my first prize for singing 'You Are My Sunshine.' Oh, they loved me down there. That was my first winning performance."
   Despite this success, the only opening for Larry Love, "The Singing Canary," was in a downstairs Times Square freak show. In 1960, he started singing in small Greenwich Village clubs, dreary little bars and lesbian nightclubs where, Tiny Tim remembers, "happy women liked each other. It was a shame but the thing is we all have our own kind of problems."
   One of Larry love's problems was that disaster and eviction seemed to dog his footsteps. The Alliance Club, where he first tasted success, burned to the ground. The Big Fat Black Pussycat, where he first performed for a salary closed, as did the Page Three, scene of other triumphs for Larry love, "The Singing Canary."
   By the winter of 1965, "The Singing Canary" had found a new cage and a new name—Tiny Tim—by which the world knows him today. When a customer at the New York discotheque, The Scene, insisted Tiny Tim favor the crowd with a song, the management, which had been on the verge of tossing him out on his ear, recognized his appeal and hired him on the spot. "My dear sweet friends have been so wonderful to me," Tiny Tim says thankfully.
   But it took the combined power of Rowan and Martin's "Laugh-In" and Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show," to make Tiny Tim a star. With his curly hair to his shoulders, his fang-like teeth and beak-like nose, with his eyes rolling heavenward as his bony fingers strum his ukulele, with a voice like Jeanette MacDonald-gone-mad, Tiny Tim was literally not to be believed. And an instant hit!
   Albert Goldman of the New York Times was one of the first to take Tiny Tim seriously and, attempting to explain his appeal, wrote: "The new innocence saved him from obscurity; for the first time in generations, young people began to long for something pure and sweet and gay—a creature devoid of conventional beauty and glamour but possessed of an irresistible ugly-duckling charm."
   "I'm trying to bring back the happiness that was part of the beautiful tunes that were sung in the days of the past," Tiny Tim says, "the lovely days of vaudeville! What singers we had! Irving Kaufman, one of the first vaudeville singers; Arthur Fields, the first crooner, way before the electric phonograph; and, of course, Rudy Vallee, Gene Austin, Mr. Jolson, Mr. Crosby and Mr. Russ Columbo—God bless them all! Their songs even chill me today when I hear them."
   To those who ask, "Is Tiny Tim for real?" the answer can only be an ambiguous, "What is reality?" He is apparently always just the way he appears on TV.
   One friend has been quoted as saying that Tiny Tim is totally absorbed in his role and that this proves, "the purity of his madness." While it is indeed unfathomable that a Tiny Tim could be "for real," it is perhaps even more incredible that he be synthesized.
   And whatever he is, he is at least consistent. He keeps his "dear sweet ukulele" wrapped lovingly in an old cardigan; in a shopping bag he always carries a copy of the New Testament; he subsists on a diet of pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, honey and wheat germ, and can only mention such graphic words as sex and kiss by spelling them.
   Why does he sing in falsetto? "For me," he says in complete seriousness, "that voice is all happiness and sunshine, a field of flowers and the beauty in the face of a young girl. It is the light, youthful, gay romantic spirit of my heart."
   Only a few years ago Tiny Tim would call on record companies and shout hopefully through the doors, "Hello, my dear friends, I have a demo in my hand of the next big hit." Today, those who laughed are now watching the record charts. "God Bless Tiny Tim," his first album, has already sold over 100,000 copies.
   Tiny Tim's particular calling is to bring back the sounds and songs of yesterday when "very few people had phonographs and sheet music was the big thing. So many of those songs remained unknown." But with the help of Rowan and Martin, Johnny Carson and his "dear sweet ukulele," all that will be changed. "I believe that those songs can thrill the people of today as they thrilled the people of yesterday," Tiny Tim swears.
   Insisting he is not merely doing imitations of his faded idols, he says, "It's just that the spirits of the singers whose songs I do are living within me. That's why the songs come out in the voices of the original singers. I'm not doing imitations, that's the way they sound inside me. If I had a time machine, I'd love to be in New York on a hot summer day in 1890-to live month by month with those songs just drummed into me.
   "And yet," Tiny Tim declares, "I don't think I'm turning back the clock by doing these old tunes. I love rock 'n' roll and popular music." He also has a positive mania for baseball and is especially enthusiastic about the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Maple Leafs. His ballpark behavior is sometimes so unrestrained as to win him expulsion.
   "Really," Tiny Tim says, giving the last word on his life and art, "there are three main reasons why I sing. The first is to give thanks to God for the gift He gave me. Number two is to cheer people whether they are young or old—with a song of the past or present. And number three, and perhaps above all, is because of all the lovely women who, with their beauty, cause my heart to overflow with joy."
   Are those the words of a holy man, a businessman? Is Tiny Tim sincere or just this year's novelty act? Is he sweet and innocent or just plain weird? Is he dedicated or decadent? A saint or nutty as a fruitcake? A philosopher or a phony? What do you think?

August 1968
Source: Photoplay, Harriman Jamis
Reproduced according to "Fair Use"