A Mutt for All Seasons

He is the star both of Broadway's hottest play (Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue) and television's highest-rated new series (the triweekly Columbo portion of NBC Mystery Theater). But Peter Falk is nobody's idea of a leading man, not even his own. "I'm a mutt," he says, "not a thoroughbred." A very New York mutt at that: uncurried, uncurbable, and bristling with street moxie and manners. His appeal as an actor is neatly summed up in his own description of the police detective he plays in Columbo: "He looks like a flood victim. You feel sorry for him. He appears to be seeing nothing, but he's seeing everything. Underneath his dishevelment, a good mind is at work."

For years, the public saw little but the dishevelment. Falk was admired in the trade as a compassionate, thoughtful character actor, but the mantle of mass appeal kept sliding off his round shoulders. In 1964, for example, TV audiences were not ready for his first series, The Trials of O'Brien, in which he played a lawyer who could not resist a crap game or meet an alimony-payment deadline. Now, after the troubled '60s, viewers seem readier to identify with a loser hero. In the ratings among TV's new law-and-order leading men, Falk is murdering such handsome smoothies as Glenn Ford, Rock Hudson and James Garner.

Banal Lunch. To Falk, it long seemed impossible that he would ever be in the same league with the Glenn Fords. "I always romanticized that artists were a very special species and that ordinary people didn't become actors," he says. The son of a clothing retailer in Ossining, N.Y., Peter was ordinary people all right--a roughneck kid who dropped out of college to join the merchant marine in World War II, later got a master's in public administration at Syracuse University and spent three bemused, bored years as an efficiency expert in Connecticut's budget bureau. All along he had acted with school and community-theater groups. Two things made up his mind to try it professionally: the urging of his drama coach, Actress Eva Le Gallienne, and an incident that occurred when he was 27. "I stopped by a theater in New Haven," he recalls, "and I followed Roddy McDowall, Estelle Winwood and Maria Riva to lunch just to hear what they'd talk about. The conversation was absolutely banal, and here I thought they were all geniuses."

During his first 30 months in New York, Falk found stage and TV work for all but six days. His credits included Siobhan McKenna's St. Joan and numerous TV tough-guy roles, among them an Emmy-winning performance on the Dick Powell Show.

He was invited to Hollywood by Columbia Pictures, but the studio's boss at the time, Harry Cohn, vetoed him on the grounds that Falk had a glass eye (he lost his right eye as the result of a tumor when he was three). "Look," Cohn said to him, "for the same price I can get an actor with two eyes." Falk went to other studios, and in his first two pictures earned Oscar nominations in the supporting-actor category--one for his vicious evocation of Abe Reles in Murder Inc. (1960), the other for his Runyonesque hood in Frank Capra's Pocketful of Miracles (1961).

His most gratifying and demanding role since then was in Husbands (1970), the tour de force about three middle-aged men on a desperation bender. He co-financed the film and co-starred with two of his best cronies, John Cassavetes and Ben Gazzara. In the self-conscious and easygoing Archie of Husbands, Falk found a character who was the image of his own half-studied, uncouth offstage self. A onetime "pool junkie" (the all-nighters over the billiard table may explain his hunched posture), Falk is still a steady gambler on "baskets, pro ball and the fights." Though his wife of eleven years is fond of her modish lifestyle in Beverly Hills, Falk says, "I don't go to nobody's home. I'm not comfortable sitting in living rooms. I happen to like the kitchen better."

In his current Broadway role as Mel, the harried adman who is having a mental breakdown, Falk sees more of the "screamer and worrier" he would like to be. "I'm incredibly even-natured, and I don't like that," he says. "It's better when an actor responds like a child --fast. For the short haul, I find a maniac more interesting than someone in control." Still, he is the first to admit in his best hangdog manner that it is too late for a lifelong mutt to become a high-strung thoroughbred. As he says in one of his lines in Prisoner: "Miracles don't happen when you're 47. When Moses saw the burning bush, he must have been 23."

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