Tiny Tim - King For A Day: A surprisingly conventional doc about a crazily unlikely celebrity

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-minus

There’s at least one mystery, personal to me, solved by the bio-doc Tiny Tim – King For A Day. It’s about shopping bags.

In 1983, Herbert Khaury – a.k.a. the stringy-haired, ukulele-playing, falsetto singing ‘60s pop artifact Tiny Tim – was hired to be a celebrity grand marshal at Ottawa’s Festival of Spring, a.k.a the Tulip Festival.

One of the world’s most unlikely celebrities, Tiny Tim in action.

It was somebody’s idea of a marketing brainstorm, to hire the guy who’d had a novelty hit with the song Tiptoe Through the Tulips. And it was my editor’s idea at the Ottawa Citizen to have “the kid” follow Tiny around for a week and write about it. 

So, it was that the now ironically named Tiny (he was heavy enough to sit on and break a hotel room chair at one point in our time together) arrived with his “luggage,” four paper shopping bags of his stuff. Somewhere there’s a photo of the both of us, bags in hand on route to his limo.

The surprisingly conventional Tiny Tim – King For A Day mixes archival photos and film, and animation, to present an image of the man before and after he hit the pinnacle of pop culture by getting married to first wife Miss Vicki live on The Tonight Show. He died of a heart attack onstage in 1996, onstage (footage morbidly included in the film).

And in all those early bits from his days as a Greenwich Village novelty act in search of an audience, we learn he always went to auditions and gigs with shopping bags. So, I know now what I didn’t know then. Shopping bags had been a “thing” with him since about the time I was born.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

What was the significance of this? Was it a “shtick?” An affectation? Did it somehow reflect his unsettled, troubled childhood?

There are few motivations offered or attempts at psychological insight in Tiny Tim – King For A Day. All we get is that he had a fairly defined vision of wanting to be famous, to be somebody. There are meaningless platitudes offered by writer Martin Daniel about his place in cultural history, how he transcended politics and ethnicity, offering silliness as a balm for a troubled and divided America.

As for ethnicity, tell that to the mostly Lebanese cab drivers who scrummed him at the airport, excited at meeting a Lebanese-American celebrity.

And as much as the androgynous Tiny Tim was right for the late ‘60s, his act and image stretched back to the ‘50s, when simply being weird was arguably a political act, inviting scorn from “normal” people.

Though he told good stories, I never figured out Tiny Tim in several sit-downs and chats, and neither does this documentary. But it is a pretty good tiptoe through Tiny’s travels. We even meet Tulip (now Tulip Stewart), the daughter from his marriage to Miss Vicki, who has a wry take on her one-degree separation from fame. We see the marriage on Johnny Carson’s show - at the time, the second-most watched event on television after the moon landing.

We meet counter-culture activist and clown Wavy Gravy, who “discovered” Tiny in New York and brokered his introduction to L.A. (It’s not mentioned in the film, but Wavy Gravy had Tiny play at his famed commune The Hog Farm, where, I was told, attendee Charles Manson professed himself to be a fan).

We hear about a gay experience as a young man, which preceded a lifetime of awkwardly aggressive expressions of his heterosexuality (An erstwhile Tiny Tim fan-club president talks about his strange attempt at hitting on her. In my case, a phone-call to his room was followed by him saying, “That’s a young woman I met who’s coming up to see me. You’ll have to leave now.”)

Tiny’s diary entries, earnestly read by “Weird Al” Yankovic, reveal a streak of religious torment, which is hard to see behind his public façade of frivolousness.

What goes unmentioned is that Tiny took his music seriously, and actually recorded some, um, interesting, non-falsetto stuff during the years when he was off the “hot” radar (a jazz-swing version of Stairway to Heaven comes to mind). Famed producer Richard Perry signed him early on, and in interviews here, he genuinely expresses respect for Tiny as a performer.

Tiny Tim was strange, and sweetly sincere. There may have been no other time when his alchemy and personality could have produced stardom. It may be hard to understand in 2021, but it’s still entertaining.

Tiny Tim – King For A Day. Directed by Johan von Sydow. Written by Martin Daniel. Starring Tiny Tim, Wavy Gravy, “Weird Al” Yankovic. Available across Canada on VOD on Friday, April 23.