His greatest television success, however, was on the Tonight Show. The fan mail was abundant and usually negative. In January 1968 he appeared in the first broadcast of Laugh-In he eventually made several other appearances on the show. Ostin promptly signed him to a recording contract.Īt last, Tiny Tim’s career was beginning to move. Yarrow brought Mo Ostin, an executive for Warner Brothers Reprise Records, to see Tim’s act at The Scene. He got a small part playing himself in a documentary film, You Are What You Eat (1968), produced by Peter Yarrow of the musical group Peter, Paul and Mary. In March 1966 he appeared on the Merv Griffin Show, singing “People Will Say We’re in Love,” one of his “duets.” After a trip to California, Tim went back to The Scene and stayed there for the next year and a half. That same night Tim auditioned at The Scene and was hired for three months without pay. On 5 December 1965 Tim did his act at yet another amateur show, at the Champagne Gallery, and won first prize. Tim stayed at Page Three until the police closed it in July 1965. His act consisted of four numbers: three in his “high” voice and one duet with himself, using his own baritone and the falsetto. He was popular with the audience, and his falsetto versions of “I Feel Pretty” and “I Enjoy Being a Girl” invariably brought down the house. His next engagement, in March 1963, was at the lesbian club Page Three. Tim’s manager, George King, renamed him Sir Timothy Tims, but Tim could not master the English accent required by the “role,” so King renamed him Tiny Tim, a comic touch for the six-foot, one-inch-tall singer.
Although the job only lasted a month, other gigs in the Village followed. In March 1962 he got a job at the Cafe Bizarre in Greenwich Village, working two nights a week at $10 per night.
He left Hubert’s in 1960 and changed his name to Darry Dover. In 1958 Tim, using the name “Larry Love, the Singing Canary,” was a regular at Hubert’s Museum and Live Flea Circus, a “freak show” in New York City’s Times Square. One night at the Old Alliance Club amateur night he tried singing in a trembling falsetto, and his rendition of “You Are My Sunshine” took second place. In 1953 he had an inspiration to sing in a different voice from his pleasant baritone.
From 1950 to 1953 he sang on amateur nights at a number of clubs in New York and New Jersey, but never won. Tim had a number of pseudonyms in accordance with his belief that changing a name was like changing luck. He played the guitar at parties in the Bronx and began to develop a reputation under the name Larry Love. He enjoyed listening to Arthur Godfrey on the radio, and because Godfrey played the ukulele, Tim decided to try it. Tim dropped out of George Washington High School following his sophomore year. He grew up in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood and showed an interest in music early. Tiny Tim was the only child of immigrant parents Butros Khaury, a Lebanese textile worker, and Tillie Staff, an Orthodox Jew who worked in the garment industry. 30 November 1996 in Minneapolis, Minnesota), songwriter, musicologist, and “lovable eccentric” best known for his appearances on television, dressed in outlandish costumes, playing the ukulele and singing his one hit, “Tiptoe Through the Tulips with Me,” in falsetto.
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