He Still Dreams of Jeannie : TV memorabilia collector has her bottle but is dying to find the Partridge Family bus

Forget the Holy Grail.

James Comisar seeks Norm’s bar stool from “Cheers.”

A child of his time, the 27-year-old Westsider is a man obsessed--with Gomer Pyle, Beldar Conehead, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy and all the other two-dimensional denizens of the medium that was the faithful, flickering companion of his childhood.

By profession, Comisar is a TV writer whose specialty is “punch-up,” putting jokes into scripts that sorely need them. But his passion is amassing the props and costumes that helped create the magic, such as it was, of “Green Acres” and “Hawaii Five-0.”

Arguably the leading collector of TV memorabilia in the world, Comisar is different from you and me. He paid $5,500 for a Batshield, made of genuine plastic, that once stood between Adam West and KAPOW! on the “Batman” series of blessed memory. Even stranger, Comisar turned down a Japanese investor’s offer of $100,000 for the Batshield and a pair of Batman and Robin costumes.

“I didn’t even pause to consider it,” Comisar says. “They’re irreplaceable pieces of history. Why would I trade some icon simply for gelt?”

Of course, this is a man who gets goose bumps at the prospect of finding the “Partridge Family” bus.

Comisar estimates that he has already invested at least $4,000 in an international search for the vehicle that once schlepped Shirley Partridge and her toothy brood from gig to gig. But for months now, Comisar has heard rumors that the bus had been stripped and is sitting, abandoned, on some street in downtown Los Angeles.

“I’m going to rent a helicopter and fly over every street downtown until I find it,” he vows, explaining that associates will join the search from the ground, keeping in touch with Command Central via their car phones. Comisar is convinced he would already have the unwieldy prize if he hadn’t been talked out of an earlier scheme--putting a plaintive “Missing: The Partridge Family bus” notice on the back of milk cartons. “It was in horrible taste,” he concedes.

The Comisar Collection, as he calls his assemblage of video artifacts, was appraised a year ago by Christie’s at $500,000--five times what he paid. Since then, new acquisitions and appreciation have boosted its value to $1 million, he says.

The growing collection requires a $15,000 security system and threatens to overflow Comisar’s modest Beverly Hills apartment. Where men who care less about the Partridge Family bus have a guest room, he has a mini-museum housing such treasures as a hideous blue dress, splattered with fake blood, worn by Klinger on “MASH” and the bottle that ostensibly sheltered the heroine of “I Dream of Jeannie.”

“People always ask me if the little couch and coffee table is still in there,” Comisar says.

Comisar, who would like to move the collection out of his home and into a real museum, began collecting seriously in 1989. Nothing in his heredity portended an adult life devoted to preserving Sonny Bono’s platform shoes or chatting on talk shows about the archival significance of Chad Everett’s surgical scrubs from “Medical Center.”

“My father’s a physicist, and I collect dresses for a hobby,” Comisar says. “So much for the gene theory.” Instead, he blames his early environment for his present preoccupation with “Bewitched” and “Happy Days.”

“I was a heavy kid,” he recalls. “I didn’t go to Little League or anything, God forbid. I came home from school, grabbed the cheese puffs and sat in front of the TV set. These were the friends I grew up with. When I realized I could have some of these things, I realized it was the right thing to do.

“Did I mention I was president of ‘The Gong Show’ Fan Club at age 12, just to prove that the engine block was cracked at an early age?”

Comisar has a few choice movie artifacts, including the fiberglass staff (cost: $7,000) that Charlton Heston waved over the Red Sea in “The Ten Commandments.” But he genuinely prefers TV, which he thinks is unfairly dismissed as a cultural bastard. “Everybody has some good childhood memory involving TV, this medium that gets such a horrible rap,” he says. “You have the silver screen and the idiot box. Believe me, if I was offered the S.S. Minnow, I’d sell that Heston staff in a heartbeat.”

According to Joshua Arfer, the New York-based director of animation and collectibles for Christie’s, more and more people would like to get their hands on the S.S. Minnow, the ship that left the Skipper and company stranded on “Gilligan’s Island.”

Christie’s has a core of about 50 serious collectors of TV material on its mailing list, Arfer says. That number continues to increase, as do the prices for choice video artifacts. Arfer pointed to the firm’s Dec. 16 sale of entertainment collectibles as an example of the shifting market. “A wicked witch’s hat from ‘The Wizard of Oz’ and Orson Welles’ own script for ‘Citizen Kane’ generated less interest than Thing’s box from ‘The Addams Family’ series,” he says. “That wouldn’t have been a natural occurrence two years ago.”

For Comisar, Thing’s box was the one that got away. He flew to New York City for the auction, determined to bring the box home at any price, but stopped bidding at $19,000. The brass-studded box, which Christie’s predicted would bring $3,000 to $4,000, sold to Anthony Magnoli of Redford, Mich., for $20,000. Obviously disappointed, Comisar said the sale was good news in that it indicated how hot the field has become. But he said he felt the price of the piece had been boosted unduly by the success of “The Addams Family” movie and that it would have been irresponsible for him to pay that much.

What distinguishes Comisar, Arfer says, is his ability to find the telling object, the item that epitomizes a character or a program. “Almost everything in his collection is iconic,” Arfer says.

Comisar sometimes spends 100 hours a week chasing video history, including artifacts from such future classics as “Married . . . With Children” and “In Living Color.” He is a familiar figure at the major auctions, although he grouses, “Going to an auction is like shopping on Rodeo Drive.” The tendency of the bidding process to drive up prices is compounded by the presence at auctions of such wealthy competitors as the highly acquisitive international chain of Hard Rock Cafes.

To find prime material at better prices, he advertises in newspapers and entertainment magazines throughout the country. “I pay eyes and ears in lots of towns,” he adds. He also cultivates contacts within the industry. He got Mork’s traveling egg for $1,500 through the son of a prop man. And he was given Uncle Fester’s shroud from “The Addams Family” by Jackie Coogan’s widow after she heard Comisar on a TV talk show, making his pitch to save TV’s material culture for posterity.

According to Comisar, buying is complicated by the wildly inflated notions that some people have of the value of items in their possession. “Some people’s expectations are prodigious,” he says. “There are people in the industry who think they are going to be able to retire on the pieces in their garage. We call it the Ruby Slipper Syndrome.” But the people who think they can parlay a chair that Joan Crawford once grazed into a small fortune are going to be disappointed, Comisar says. It’s true that one of the six pairs of ruby slippers made for Judy Garland for “The Wizard of Oz” brought a record $165,000 at auction, and that George Reeves’ TV Superman costume recently sold for $44,000. “But you can count on your hands and feet the pieces that are worth that money,” Comisar says.

Although Comisar believes his TV memorabilia have durable cultural significance, he has no illusions about their other qualities. Although some contemporary material is beautifully made, classic TV was characterized by some of the shoddiest craftsmanship in entertainment history, Comisar says. In contrast to the careful and costly workmanship practiced at MGM and some of the other movie studios, ‘50s and ‘60s TV was “gloriously tacky,” settling for makeshift props and costumes that a working mother wouldn’t put on a preschool trick-or-treater.

Thus, the first-season Jeannie bottle (for which Comisar paid $1,700) is actually “a 1964 Jim Beam Christmas decanter underneath.” And the miniature that stood in for Wonder Woman in her flying sequences “was just a jazzed-up Barbie doll with dyed roots.”

After only two years of acquisition, Comisar is already well-known enough to get pitches from cranks. He has declined such items of dubious provenance as porn star John Holmes’ most famous attribute and plaque said to have been scraped from the teeth of Elvis Presley. The latter was proffered by a Beverly Hills dentist, who, Comisar says, insisted it was “plaque from the skinny years.” Comisar also said no when “a tabloid called and asked me if I had ever tried to channel dead stars through their costumes.”

Comisar would like to see his collection find a home other than his own in the near future. So would his mother, who worries that, security system or no, Trekkies will try to break into chez Comisar. After all, her son has a Tricorder, a mobile communicator from the original “Star Trek” series whose value is immeasurably enhanced by the presence of lollipop residue of the type Leonard Nimoy was known to favor.

Comisar says the museum will happen as soon as he is able to raise enough money to do it right. “Tutankhamen’s treasures didn’t tour shopping malls, and these pieces won’t either,” he says. He envisions something dignified, something grand, something the public will want to visit that also reflects the historical importance of the Comisar Collection.

And Comisar isn’t kidding.

“Would I rather have Abraham Lincoln’s hat or Jed Clampett’s?” he asks, and it is clear that the question is purely rhetorical. “Hey, babe, I’m a Sagittarius.”