FIXATIONS : A Few Wood Men

I am a calm professional. I am a calm professional. This is a good phrase to repeat if you’re ever stuck in a mobile home next to a bed loaded with 25 ventriloquist’s dummies, some with moving eyes, no less, accompanied by their 6-foot-7 owner, Glenn James, who sounds disconcertingly like Woody Woodpecker when he laughs.

I’ve seen the “Twilight Zone” where the dummy drives Cliff Robertson insane, thank you, as well as similar scenarios with Michael Redgrave in “Dead of Night” and Anthony Hopkins in “Magic.” These dummies can be evil . The most disturbing thing about Trailer No. 9, where James lives, is that he has 50 dummies, which left 25 of them out of sight that could conceivably be sneaking up from behind.

Meanwhile, on James’ TV, it’s all puppets, all the time. His VCR was airing eerie black and white footage of a ventriloquist museum in Kentucky, which has 500 vintage dummies, seated in row after row of old movie theater seats. Then his TV showed a commercial for “Magic,” with a dummy so malevolent the ad was pulled off the air. Then there were shots from James’ own in-production gore-fest “Devil Dolls,” showing an archetypal “foxy woman in the tub while the little wooden hand reaches for the latch” scene.

“They can be scary,” James said of the wood, plaster and plastic characters he’s collected for the past 13 years. “Most kids I’ve showed these dummies to won’t even get near them. I brought this big wooden one over to a friend’s house, and this kid there came unglued, just crying ‘Noooooooo . . . ‘ And my girlfriend tells me to put them away. She doesn’t really like them too much.”

James, 29, has been fascinated with dummies since he saw a few episodes of the “Winchell-Mahoney Time” television show in its final season in 1968, and was captivated by the humor and skill of master ventriloquist Paul Winchell and his wooden characters Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smith.

“I was 5 years old and it just stuck in my head, those two dummies fighting and throwing spaghetti at each other. Then I found out later that they’d had Jerry Mahoney dummies in stores once but they’d been discontinued in 1965. I started hunting, and it just took me forever--until 1980--to find one. I paid $10 for it at the La Mirada Swap Meet and it just got me hooked. I started going to every swap meet I could every weekend. When I buy one--I don’t know--there’s just something about the way Jerry Mahoney looks that makes me want to buy another one.”

Many of his dummies are valued from $200 to $1,900 in toy collector mags, though most of them were swap meet bargains for him, picked up for $5 or $10. The most he ever paid was $100 for a rare make of Mahoney dummy. He had been discussing dummies one day with a co-worker on a construction job (and you thought all construction guys talked about was women and beer) and the fellow said, “Oh, I got one of those things” and had his mom ship it down from Portland, still in the original box.

His rarest dummy is a 1940 wooden handmade professional model made by Fred Peterson, one of the minor lights of the craft. Where Peterson’s carvings were custom-made for aspiring young ‘quists at about $200 a pop, the dean of the dummy makers was Frank Marshall. He made the biggest dummies in the business, Edgar Bergen’s Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd and Winchell’s Mahoney and Knucklehead. An original Marshall, not counting his priceless stars, can go for $30,000.

With the exception of the handmade Peterson, James’ dummies are all mass-produced copies. Once the “voice-throwing” craft was popular enough for the dummies to occupy their own page in the Sears-Roebuck catalogue. Moving eyes were an option for $5 extra. James’ newer dolls have plastic heads, while older ones are made of fired clay and straw composition. “Here, feel the difference,” he said, and suddenly I was patting dummy heads.

James has McCarthy and Snerd dummies, but he doesn’t have the highest regard for their boss. Edgar Bergen, he asserts, “moved his lips,” which are fighting words in ventriloquist circles, one supposes.

James instead favors Winchell. One of his most valued things is a videotape of the few surviving snippets of the “Winchell-Mahoney Time” shows. They appear to be only legacy of the program, since the master tapes of all 62 episodes were negligently erased by a storage vault in 1981. To hear James describe it, one would think this was an artistic crime ranking alongside the destruction of the original 1924 cut of Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed.”

“To me Winchell was the ventriloquist, and he was forgotten about. You can go to the toy store and buy Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd, but you can’t buy Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead, and I think by far they were funnier,” James said, his voice raising in indignation. “Remember when they used to fight, Jerry and Knucklehead? All the time they were throwing food at each other. They were great.”

James has only a few gaps in his collection of Winchell items, which currently includes Mahoney and Knucklehead dolls through the ages, record albums with such titles as “Chips of Wisdom,” pencil erasers bearing their images, an Oswald disguise kit (Oswald was a novel and highly creepy creation of Winchell’s: His face from the upper lip up was covered by an inverted suit of clothes; eyes and a nose were painted on his chin; the camera would flip the image and you’d get a dome-headed man with a huge human mouth), and a Paul Winchell Fun Kit full of toys and games.

One thing certainly not included in the Fun Kit was dynamite, though that hasn’t kept James from blowing up a dummy or two. He works as a Hollywood sound man, but in the ‘70s he was the singer with a North County punk group called the Assassins. One of their self-produced videos, James says, was “crazy, where all there was was destruction. We had this half-stick of dynamite we’d bought in Mexicali and put it in one of the more common dummies. We showed another dummy lowering a shotgun on him and then blew him away.”

James comes from a show biz family. A granddad was a B Western star named Jack Pitts. His dad was an NBC cameraman and his mom a professional dancer who got her start with the Little Rascals. Like nearly everyone else working in Hollywood, James hopes to be a director someday. Along with his stage experience with the Assassins--of which he now says, “I burned out on it; I just can’t scream about violence any more in that alligator voice”--he has tried his hand at ventriloquism.

“I did a talent show in high school with one of my moving-eye Jerry Mahoneys and my best friend threw stink bombs at me. But I had a lot of fun too, because I’d rig dummies up with spitting action. I’d run an aquarium tube up through their neck and make them spit at people.”

Though he’s more interested in collecting them now, he does still sometimes stick his arm in a dummy and perform. Along with scaring kids, he’s entertained some.

“I used to drive an ambulance in the mid-’80s, what they call an ‘ambulette medical transportation van’ actually. I brought one of these (dummies) into the hospital on Christmas Eve, walked in the lobby, and it was like a magnet. Kids think they’re real, and they came around, and the Jerry Mahoney dummy was saying, ‘Hiya kids, how ya doing? My name’s Jerry. Hope you’re feeling good today!’ ”

And then he’d spit on them?

“No, but I found kids always want to put their fingers in its mouth.”

Like other ventriloquists, James has found that his dummies can get away with things that humans can’t.

“I’ve experimented with that. Two years ago I went to a Halloween party as a ventriloquist. I dressed up in a bow tie and brought that big wooden dummy with me, just to see if I could still do it. I was talking real dirty to all the girls at the party and people just do act like it’s the dummy. And you’re thinking, ‘This is kind of cool. I can say things that I couldn’t normally say,’ ” he said.

James has a 5-year-old son he is teaching to throw his voice, but he fears that the days of the old-fashioned ventriloquist and dummy are over, replaced by Muppet characters. “I don’t think these guys will ever make a comeback,” he said, sadly. Propped up on the bed, malevolent gleams in their eyes, his dummies may have other ideas.