That’s kind of because I didn’t travel in those exalted circles yet, being only a young songwriter from Queens. Not sure, but I think a meeting was going on with Pete Schekeryk and Melanie. I missed that, but everyone was talking it up.Īnother time, I went to Peter Yarrow’s apartment near Central Park South. Not finding any, one of their members allegedly pissed into a desk before leaving. Although uncertain, it seems that the FBI or some other law enforcement agency had come looking for illegal drugs. Carey.” During an odd and often frustrating hour, and while keeping a straight face, I showed Tim the chords, words, and melody, I heard a commotion in the main office. Press play to hear a narrated version of this story, presented by AudioHopper.Īnd so I was relegated to a side room alone with this strange man who only spoke with a falsetto voice and who kept calling me “Mr. Johnny wanted me to teach a song we’d written about a yellow canoe to Herbert Khaury, aka “Tiny Tim.” All I knew about Tiny Tim was his 1968 hit song: “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” Taken from his first album called God Bless Tiny Tim.
In my teens and newly signed to a $50 a month songwriting job, I was in awe of visiting the offices of the Loving Spoonful’s record company. We were going to the offices of Buddha and Kama Sutra Records. Which was becoming an extension of the new Tin Pan Alley, now the center of Pop Music’s song publishing world, in the famous Brill Building, some two streets away off 49th street. My songwriting partner, the under-assistant east coast promotion man, Johnny Wonderling, brought me to New York’s famed “1650 Broadway”–the office building at the corner of 51st and Broadway. He supplied 10,000 tulips for the bride and groom to tiptoe through.I first met Tiny Tim sometime in the late 1960s. “However, once that florist discovered that Aberdeen’s had purchased all the tulips in Holland for that month, they called Jim back and hired him,” according to his family’s memoir. The network told him NBC’s florist would handle the arrangements. “Then, he called the people at NBC that produce ‘The Tonight Show’ and asked if he could provide the wedding flowers.”Īt first, his maneuver looked like a failure. “Jim called his flower suppliers and ordered all the tulips that would be available on the Holland Tulip Exchange in December,” the bio said. Harney “had an epiphany,” according to a biography written by his family. When he heard the “Tulips” singer was going to marry on “The Tonight Show,” Mr. The couple married on “The Tonight Show” in a much-watched spectacle in 1969, and Mr. Jim Harney, then-owner of Chicago’s Aberdeen Wedding Flowers, leans over “Miss Vicki” Budinger and the entertainer known as Tiny Tim. He resembled a cross between John Turturro and “Weird Al” Yankovic but sang like a 1920s throwback, strumming a ukelele and emoting in a tremulous falsetto.Ī viewing audience estimated at 45 million tuned in to gape at his nuptials, which combined hippy-dippy flair and Johnny Carson’s razzle-dazzle as the 37-year-old singer wed “Miss Vicki” Budinger, 17. The entertainer known as Tiny Tim was a hot novelty act, perhaps because of a bizarre yet unthreatening persona at a time when the nation was rent by conflicts over the Vietnam War. He persuaded rose growers Jackson & Perkins to name a new hybrid after presidential daughter and bride-to-be Tricia Nixon - and received an invitation to the White House as a result.īut his biggest marketing coup occurred in 1969. Daley and Malcolm X - and for the 76 attendants at a single Polish wedding at St. He provided flowers for the weddings of children of Mayor Richard J. Then he called the brides and pitched his services. He delivered bud vases to banquet halls, where charmed staffers shared the names and phone numbers of brides-to-be who had booked weddings. To make sure it was listed at the front of the phone book, he named it Aberdeen’s.
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