‘Mr. Punch’ Only the Beginning at Alan Cook’s House

On the front door of Alan Cook’s North Hollywood home hangs a black cast-iron “Mr. Punch” door knocker.

Inside, behind the snickering Mr. Punch, a narrow path winds by hundreds of boxed puppets and other paraphernalia. Perched on window sills, hanging from the ceiling, stashed in the fireplace are puppets--headless puppets; bodiless puppets; puppets without hair, teeth and eyes; nude puppets and puppets that seem to leer; sociopathic “if I could only cut these strings” puppets piled on claustrophobic “get me out of these boxes, I can’t breathe” puppets.

Everywhere.

Puppets, most of them wooden, in the living room, dining room, bedroom, kitchen, back porch, hallway, closets, cupboards, fireplace, bathroom and refrigerator.

“Things can get overwhelming at times,” Cook said, pushing through boxes strewn on his pathway. The destination was the kitchen, where a solitary chair stood ringed by puppet parts. “This house is so clogged. I can hardly turn around. I’m just trying to keep the rain off these things until I can find them a home,” he said.

Puppet People

Cook is preservationist and unofficial historian of Puppeteers of America, a national organization for 2,000 puppet builders, performers, teachers, psychiatrists, therapists, librarians and all those who love and use puppets.

He envisions an “International Puppetry Museum” for his puppet family of 3,000. He collected the first member, a Dutch boy, at age 5.

Cook’s collection for the proposed museum, a solo project not associated with Puppeteers of America, has overflowed the home he has occupied 20 years into storage spaces in Pasadena and Covina. Besides puppets, the diverse collection contains puppet theaters, posters, masks, slides, books and other puppet odds and ends from 25 countries.

He has begun an inventory of his collection, and as soon as he secures nonprofit status will begin fund-raising and searching for grants, he said. He hopes to have the museum somewhere in Los Angeles.

“He probably has more knowledge about puppetry in his head than anyone I know of,” said Gayle Schluter, membership officer of Puppeteers of America, which was founded in 1937.

Schluter said Cook’s dreams can be realized as long as he can secure funding.

“He has the best individually owned collection in the United States,” she said, reflecting statements of others in the puppet business. “He has so much to give, we fear some of the art will be lost if he doesn’t get funding.”

Bruce Schwartz, a puppeteer who received a $215,000 no-strings-attached grant from the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, said it was Cook’s nudge in 1973 that helped propel his own career. Schwartz, who has not performed in two years, is perhaps best known for “The Rat of Huge Proportions,” a medieval farcical romp once shown at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire.

Speaking of a visit to Cook’s home several years ago, Schwartz said: “I remember there being puppet books in his kitchen cabinet.

“He went out on a limb for me,” he continued. “Alan has made a unique contribution. What most people think of as questionable value, Alan has placed an inestimable value on.”

Schwartz has given Cook a William Shakespeare rod puppet, which he said is one of the few puppets he has released to a collection.

Cook’s fascination with puppets began in a childhood where evenings were spent at the Turnabout Theatre on La Cienega Boulevard, an important tourist attraction in the 1940s and ‘50s. The theater was famous for its streetcar seating, which was reversed during intermissions to provide audiences a second stage at the opposite end of the theater.

Cook later became a marionette operator for Les Poupees de Paris, a topless-celebrity puppet show run by Sid and Marty Krofft. The Kroffts now produce “D.C. Follies,” a satirical revue airing Saturdays on Channel 63, and featuring caricatured puppets of politicians.

Leading the way past some 200-year-old Burmese puppet heads that he obtained for $15 from a Sunset Boulevard junk store in the early 1960s, Cook mentioned several highlights in his collection: two Robin Hood characters, a Maid Marian and a Friar Tuck from Tony Sarg’s 1920s national touring company; Carmen Miranda and Sonja Henie marionettes built by Frank Paris; three characters from the 1953 MGM film, “Lili”; vaudeville figures and a shipping trunk from the 1920s “Mantell Manikins” touring company, and several Bil Baird marionettes and hand puppets.

Figures Fashioned in Wax

And stashed next to the carrots in Cook’s refrigerator are Gumby and Pokey figures fashioned from modeling clay and beeswax.

Cook once worked on the “Davey and Goliath” children’s television show, centered on the adventures of a boy and his dog, with Art Clokey, creator of the quirky Gumby character. Clokey told him that Gumby’s slanted head was inspired by his father’s hair style, Cook said.

Cook has spent a lifetime recording his conversations with famous puppet people and stories about them. But his major concern is now focused on the restoration of the puppets themselves.

Moth-eaten clothing, smashed noses, crossed strings and chipped paint attest to the decades of neglect that many puppets endure before someone rescues them for eventual restoration.

Cook described the typical life cycle of puppets while demonstrating some Turkish shadow puppets, flat figures covered with camel skin, and some 100-pound, heavily mustached Italian rod puppets, discovered in a New York antique store in 1957:

“First you dump the puppet stage, then you dump the scenery, then you dump the puppet body and finally keep the heads.” At his museum, Cook plans to have a shop for restoring puppets as well as video presentations of puppeteers he has known.

Has Puppets, Will Tour

Cook at present tours around the United States, lends portions of his collection to museums and special exhibits and gives demonstrations at local schools. Most recently, Cook exhibited his collection at the Long Beach Museum of Art and also assisted in operating puppets for the television show last year, “Howdy Doody Time, a 40-Year Celebration.”

“I’ve hit gridlock,” Cook said, returning to the subject of his puppet-packed house. He said he daily agonizes over the possibility of never properly assembling his collection.

His friends kid him, Cook said, about his similarity to the Collier brothers in New York who “collected all kinds of junk”--mostly piles of newspapers they eventually tunneled through with the help of wooden supports. The supports eventually gave way, Cook said, and the resulting avalanche supposedly killed one of the brothers.

“I don’t want to be thought of just as eccentric,” Cook said. “At the risk of sounding too eccentric, I’ve been sleeping on a half a bed for half a year,” he added, pulling back some suit coats hanging in the doorway to reveal a clogged bedroom where half a bed was used for puppet storage.

“This sort of thing worries me because it’s happened to other people--they have a collection, and they’ve never gotten it together.”