fourteen

Here Comes
the Rating!

In the fall of 1969, the name Tiny Tim would have meant only a kid in A Christmas Carol had Johnny not introduced to America the improbable long-haired, ukulele-playing, falsetto-voiced hippie whose endearing bizarreness had first charmed America on Laugh-In. And, as you may remember, Tiny Tim was married on The Tonight Show—a wedding that got the biggest audience in the history of the show. Ironically, Tiny Tim had auditioned for Who Do You Trust? and had been rejected by Art Stark, perhaps because not too many men were wearing lipstick in 1959.

Accompanying himself on the ukulele, Tim used to sing not only “Tiptoe Through the Tulips,” but also a song that was a lyrical request for medical help:

I gotta see a doctor,
I gotta see a doctor,
’Cause there’s something wrong with me.
What can it be?

A WEDDING TO REMEMBER

If ever a man begged the question, Tiny Tim did in that song. There is, of course, something wrong with all of us. However, Tiny Tim seemed to have gotten an extra share.

Or had he? Was is all just a clever act? Like most people, I never knew if Tim was bizarre just on the surface or if he was a fruitcake at the core. Was the real Tiny Tim a man who had his mother’s voice and hair? Perhaps when he went home, he bacame Herbert Khaury again, his voice dropped an octave, and he thought, I gotta find a new act where I don’t have to look and sound like Madame Butterfly.

It all began casually. One night late in ’69 when Tiny Tim was on the show, Johnny asked him, “Is there a girl in your life?”

Tiny Tim began to giggle.

Raising his pencil, Johnny said, “I’ll mark that as a yes.”

And then Tiny Tim began talking about Miss Vicki, who was so wonderful that he had fallen in love with her and would never tiptoe through the tulips with anyone else.

“So does that mean you’re getting married?” asked Johnny.

“Oh, yes!” said Tim in a voice slightly higher than Miss Vicky’s.

“Well,” said Johnny, “you’ll get married on the show.”

It was an offhanded remark, but it turned into something that belonged on the cover of Modern Bride.

And lo, it came to pass that Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki Budinger were married that December in the Church of Carson by a real minister, who may have been defrocked immediately afterward.

The wedding ceremony itself, for which 268 studio tickets were given to guests of the bride and groom, should have been nullified by the groom’s first words: “I, Tiny Tim, being of sound mind . . .”

Instead, all of us onstage were in black tie, while Miss Vicki sat demurely beside me on the couch, her one hand clutching one of Tim’s and her other clutching the bridal bouquet. She should have been tossing it to some single young woman who would then have a souvenir of a marriage that might have made Freud want to switch to pediatrics.

The wedding of Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki was America’s second-highest-rated television event, behind only the Super Bowl.

When Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki got married, it was an event that made Tim “so happy” until six months later when they parted ways.

Miss Vicki should have suspected that her husband wasn’t headed for a white picket fence but perhaps white-coated men when he sang:

Oh won’t you come and love me, oh pretty Vicki mine?

Oh, won’t you come and love me and be my valentine?

Like violets and roses, our spirits will entwine.

Like violets and roses, our bodies will entwine.

Miss Vicki wasn’t to spend very long in that garden; Tiny Tim divorced her in less than a year.

After the ceremony, Tim prepared milk and honey for a toast, but milk and honey never did much for Johnny and me. They made a lousy martini.

“Gordon,” I whispered to Johnny. “For that little boy.”

“Even better,” he said, opening a bottle of champagne. “For those two grown men.”

“Graduates of major universities.”

Johnny did respect marriage—four times, in fact—and he did not play Tiny Tim’s wedding for laughs. With his usual good taste, Johnny didn’t let the show mock Tiny Tim in any way. He must have done it the right way because the show became America’s second-highest-rated television event, behind only the Super Bowl: More than twenty-one million people watched Tiny Tim and Miss Vicki march through the white canopy on our stage and over to Johnny and me at the desk, while Wagner’s “Wedding March” was played.

After the wedding, in keeping with the absurd nature of the whole NBC event, there was a reception on the ground floor of the CBS Building. The happy couple, however, missed the trifecta by not spending their wedding night in a green room at ABC.

At the reception, Tiny Tim came up to me and said, “Oh, Mr. McMahon, I’m so happy!”

“That’s nice, Tim,” I said.

“And I was so honored that you came to my wedding.”

I didn’t want to deflate him by saying that I worked in the chapel. “Well, Tim,” I said, wondering if the solemnity of the occasion called for my calling him Mr. Tim. “It’s an event I will never forget.”

I also will never forget The Wizard of Oz.