Table Of Content

This book is dedicated to my mother, Michelle Audette O’Donnell, and also to two of Tiny’s biggest advocates and my friends, the late Martin Sharp and the late Ernie Clark. —Justin Martell For my strong mom, who gave me books. —Alanna Wray McDonald ETERNAL TROUBADOUR The Improbable Life Of Tiny Tim Justin Martell with Alanna Wray McDonald A Jawbone book First edition 2016 Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press 3.1D Union Court, 20–22 Union Road, London SW4 6JP, England www.jawbonepress.com Volume copyright © 2016 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Justin Martell. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers. Edited by Tom Seabrook Cover design by Mark Case Contents Introduction by Harry Stein One Neighborhood Children Two The Human Canary Three America’s Answer To The Beatles Four You Are What You Eat Five Welcome To My Dream Six The Holy Freak Seven My Community Eight Beautiful Thoughts Nine Miss Vicki Ten ‘Being Of Sound Mind …’ Eleven Don’t Bite The Hand That’s Feeding You Twelve The Blessed Event Thirteen ‘This Thing Kills Me To The Bone’ Fourteen Fears Of Failure Fifteen Can’t Help But Wonder Where I’m Bound Sixteen The Eternal Troubadour Seventeen Do You Think I’m Sexy? Eighteen Forever Miss Dixie Nineteen Miss Jan Twenty The Great American Circus Twenty-one Marvelous Mervo Twenty-two Tiny Saw Elvis! Twenty-three Hide Away In I-O-Way Twenty-four Sweet Sue, Just You Twenty-five Some Sort Of Bad Alice Cooper Video Twenty-six I Know God Still Loves Me Twenty-seven This Is Not Madness Or Acting Twenty-eight ‘Tiny Tim Is Signing Off!’ Twenty-nine Tiptoe To Eternity Acknowledgments A Note On Sources Illustrations I feel that I’ve done my best to keep romantic crooning alive. It’s not really that hard. I would say it’s just a matter of closing your eyes and dreaming. People may say that now is not the time for crooning, but I think that if a song is good, it’s good for all time. There have been thousands and thousands of hit songs on record and sheet music—songs that deserve to be remembered forever. After all, just as much happened yesterday as is going to happen tomorrow. That’s why words like then and now don’t mean anything to me. It’s true the great crooners have faded away, but that doesn’t mean that the beauty and romance and peace they worked so hard to create has faded with them. It can still be with us—it’s alive and real—in fact, I heard it just this morning. —Tiny Tim, ‘The Great Crooners,’ Playboy, December 1969 The Tiny Tim image is not one that people rejoice over. It is an image that [is] the Master of Confusion. What is he? What is he saying? Is he a geek? Is he a queer? They can’t relate and they’re ashamed to say they even remember me. … If I say I’m putting you on, they’d say, I told you so. If I said I’m not, they’d still say the same thing. The difference between me and Rudy Vallee, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, is with them, people said, Aaahh! With me they said, Uugghh! The emotion of negativity was so, so emotional that they had to be there. I was the one they loved to hate. —Tiny Tim to the Phoenix New Times, November 3 1994 Introduction by Harry Stein, author of Tiny Tim: An Unauthorized Biography When Tiny Tim burst on the scene in the late 60s, like most everyone else I assumed that if not precisely a fraud, he was surely a put-on. How could he not be? From that otherworldly falsetto to his stringy hair and pancake makeup, from the ukulele in the shopping bag to the absurd formality with which he addressed even children, to his bizarro answers to questions about women and sex, no one was that weird by accident. Not even in the 60s. Indeed, smirking away with friends in my girlfriend’s dorm room the night in 1970 he married Miss Vicki on The Tonight Show, we had no doubt this was America’s new low in anything-for-ratings cynicism. It was only about four-and-a-half years later—November 12 1974, to be precise, as the vastly entertaining and scrupulously researched book in your hands confirmed—that I began to understand how wrong we’d been. Unable to sleep that late evening, I snapped on the TV, and there was Tiny Tim, back on Johnny Carson’s guest couch after a long hiatus. I would soon learn that this is what was known as a ‘charity booking,’ for in the interim, both Tiny’s career and his personal life had taken a steep nosedive. Talking to Carson, he was almost somber, seeming to have no interest in playing to the audience. When Carson expressed his regret over the collapse of his marriage, Tiny waxed philosophical: ‘Well, Mr. Carson, we’re still married in the eyes of the Lord. My door is always open to her. All I ask is that she get a VD test.’ As the audience erupted in astonished laughter, Carson bounced his pencil on the desk and gave his patented blank stare. Yet, watching, it couldn’t be clearer the guy meant it. I walked into my editor’s office the next morning and announced: ‘I want to write about Tiny Tim.’