A Cop (And A Raincoat) For All Seasons

His tie is askew. His third-day shirt has ring-around-the-collar. His thick, wavy clump of dark hair overhangs eyes screwed tight in a lopsided squint, a brow that is permanently furrowed and a leathery puss smudged with unshavable stubble. With stocky shoulders hunched forward at a 45DEG angle, he looks like an ambulatory cypress stump in baggy brown pants. And the raincoat. The raincoat is an oversized, unhung affair in the last stages of decomposition, scarred and seasoned with the grease of a thousand fingers, its hems frayed and stringy, its pockets attached more by habit than by thread.

This one-man disaster area hardly resembles a detective lieutenant of police, much less the hero of a successful television series. But he is both. He is Peter Falk as Columbo, on the NBC series of the same name. Every fourth week, some 37 million viewers tune in avidly to watch him shamble, sniffle, fidget, mutter and gesticulate his way through a case. The fans may be slower to pounce on a clue than he is. But usually they anticipate their favorite Columbo routines--deceptively plodding, cunningly naive--and see them coming a mile off, which is half the fun.

Columbo treats his invariably rich and stylish suspects with politeness, even deference. He apologizes for taking up their valuable time. He prattles incessantly in a New York accent that seems to be coming down with a sore throat. He gee-whizzes over their luxury houses, stopping in mid-sentence to ask ingenuously what the property taxes might be on such a splendid estate, pausing to work them out in terms of his $11,000-a-year salary. His darting, jabbing gestures carve lexicons in the air. He interrupts interrogations to rummage in pockets crammed with scrappaper reminders of marketing chores as well as murder clues.

He always just happens to be in the neighborhood, hounding his prey relentlessly, unnerving them, distracting them. Then he walks away. But wait. He turns and takes a few steps back into the room. Here it comes. The zinger. "Oh, excuse me, sir, but just one more question. I been thinkin', and you know it strikes me kinda funny that..."

Such antics have made Columbo conceivably the most influential, probably the best and certainly the most endearing cop on TV. Which is saying something, since prime-time TV this year is a parlor game of dial-a-cop, a badlands preserve patrolled by a superfluity of sleuths.

A crowded police-court docket, said Mark Twain, is the surest sign that trade is brisk and money plenty. The current season would seem to bear him out, with a slight twist. There is brisk betting and plentiful money riding on a schedule that is up to its antenna in crooks and crime, cops and private eyes, crusading attorneys and special investigators.

In all, there are 29 crime shows on the network schedules, plus a few in syndication, accounting for roughly 21 of the 63 prime-time hours each week (last fall's average total: 16 1/2 hours). When this fall's program lineup was unveiled, 13 of the 24 new offerings were crime shows (see box page 118).

Even the instigators of the trend now feel that it has gone too far. "We've overextended ourselves in this form," says NBC Program Chief Lawrence White. As a result, notes Fred Silverman, CBS'S vice president of programming, there is a "public thirst for comedy" and for positive, nonviolent drama. Both executives agree with the president of ABC entertainment, Martin Starger, that "there's going to be a drift away from the law and order shows." If so, the drift will be so gradual as to be barely noticeable this year. Among the midseason replacements being readied for January are at least two more cop shows.

Why is catch-the-criminal so overwhelmingly the name of the game on TV? It makes for sheer escapist fantasy, of course. It also caters to the immemorial fascination with a puzzle, something which has enthralled and tantalized generations of mystery addicts. On a deeper level, however, TV's idealized cops, lawyers and shamuses may satisfy a yearning for a more ordered world--a world where pure good triumphs over pure evil, where justice is just, where the System works.

Dr. George Gerbner, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications, who is preparing a series of reports on TV violence for the National Institutes of Mental Health, points out that the overall amount of TV time devoted to "action" programming has not changed significantly in the past several years. But the focus of that programming has shifted from the western to the urban setting. (There are only three westerns this year, Hec Ramsey, Kung-Fu and granddaddy Gunsmoke.) "When the norm shifts to the urban and contemporary," says Gerbner, "it implies an increased preoccupation with law-and-order and a general fear about the quality of life in our cities."

Another theory is that the crime shows do not reflect the tastes and preoccupations of viewers so much as the conservatism of advertisers, who prefer the lesser risk of wrapping their commercials around variations of a tried and true formula. Attempts to vary that formula have stretched as far as TV writers' imaginations can fetch. The good guys come in wondrous array: in uniform (Adam-12, The Rookies), in disguise (Toma), in court (Perry Mason, Owen Marshall) and in hayseed (Lawyer Hawkins, McCloud). They are black (Shaft, Tenafly), elderly (The Snoop Sisters), bald (Kojak), Polish (Banacek), portly (Cannon), paralytic (Ironside) and partly computer (The Six Million Dollar Man). They work alone (Mannix), in pairs (The Streets of San Francisco, Faraday and Company, McMillan & Wife), and in precision-movement teams (Chase, Hawaii Five-O).

Loves of a Blonde. Their methods of operation (M.O.'s) are predictably diverse. Take, for example, a time-honored triangle: a beautiful blonde, her millionaire lover and her poor but estranged husband. The blonde is found dead, floating in her millionaire lover's swimming pool. Mannix (Mike Connors) would suspect the estranged husband of her murder until the millionaire dispatched his three karate-black-belt Korean houseboys to give him a discouraging work-over. Mannix would then pursue the millionaire in a grand helicopter chase over Lake Tahoe, Nev., finish him off in a fistfight in the red plush office of a casino, then reveal that the millionaire had murdered the girl because she was about to disclose his illegal gambling operation.

Cannon (William Conrad) would trail the estranged husband to a tiny town in the mountains, befriend him, discover that he still held a multimillion-dollar insurance policy on his not yet exwife, sorrowfully turn him in and return to a gourmet dinner chez millionaire lover. Hawkins (James Stewart) would agree to defend the estranged husband after he was arrested for the girl's murder, force the millionaire to admit his gambling operation on the stand and then reveal that the girl was pushed into the pool by her 90-year-old maiden aunt, who disapproved of her extramarital misconduct.

And on Columbo? Well, on Columbo, the millionaire would plot the perfect murder. He would attend a business convention in another city, secretly fly back by hot-wiring an associate's private plane, drown the girl, leave a soggy suicide note near the pool, and speedily return to his convention. The girl's death would be written off as suicide by all but Columbo, who would realize that she had drowned while still wearing her Yves Saint Laurent shoes. A girl like that just wouldn't mess up an expensive pair of shoes, he would reason.

So he would doggedly harass the millionaire, turning up unexpectedly during his polo game or in his private sauna. Finally he would apologetically ask the millionaire "just one last question": Why does his conventioneer's name tag smell of chlorine unless, maybe, it got splashed as he held that poor girl's head under water? The millionaire would not even offer an explanation, just a small salute to Columbo's ingenuity as he is carted off to the pokey.

Of all TV's variations on the cops-and-robbers theme, Columbo's is at once the most classic and the most original. The title character's M.O. dates back at least to Sherlock Holmes--detection through pure deduction. There is no gunplay, no chase sequence, and the audience usually knows the identity of the culprit. The only puzzle is how and when Columbo's seemingly bumbling pursuit will lead him to the clue--the one misstep in an otherwise perfect crime. But, notes Actor Peter Falk, "Columbo is Sherlock Holmes ass-backward"--the opposite of the suavely self-assured and slightly pompous Englishman. And therein lies his infectious charm.

Wealthy Villains. His cases are always set amidst the manicured lawns and porticoed mansions of the wealthy for two reasons. One is to enliven an essentially nonviolent show with colorful backgrounds. The other is to play off a well-heeled villain against the down-at-the-heel Columbo. Last season he tangled with a famous actress on a movie set and an art dealer in a chic gallery. This season he has already stalked the owner of a cosmetics empire on her luxurious fat farm, a wine connoisseur in a wine cellar and a big-time politician in the corridors of power. Last week he also turned up in Humorist Art Buchwald's syndicated column, investigating the disappearance of President Nixon's mandate. Buchwald had Nixon telling Columbo that the tapes of presidential conversations "are in my bedroom, except for the two that are missing." "That's it!" said Columbo. "Whoever stole the two tapes probably stole your mandate."

Columbo works his murder cases alone, something at which a real homicide detective would probably only be caught dead. It is one of several ways in which he is unrealistic, despite his believable character. Were he an actual cop, his M.O. would get him drummed out of the station house. He tricks his suspects into confessions, and often his shenanigans are blatantly in violation of constitutional rights.

In one case last year, he trapped the murderer with a deduction about a sound that was missing from a tape recording made on an illegally bugged phone. In another, he pinned a murder on a symphony conductor who dropped his carnation at the scene of the crime, conducted his concert carnationless, then returned to retrieve the telltale flower before the police could discover it. Columbo's evidence? A film of the concert that exposed the conductor's barren lapel. Such slip-ups are damaging to a "perfect" murderer's ego, certainly, but not likely to stand in court.

In two years, Columbo has not been seen at police headquarters. He works in an unidentified city. The wife he talks about is only a voice on the other end of a phone. He does not even have a first name. "Columbo exists only in the cases he investigates," says Richard Levinson, who, with his partner William Link, created Columbo. "He comes from limbo and goes back into limbo."

When Levinson and Link wrote the pilot for the Columbo series, they set out to define "a character who's very bright but doesn't seem to be," says Link. "Somebody who's not got much of an education and no social graces but takes advantage of his shortcomings." From his earliest incarnation, Link explains, Columbo was modeled after the detective Petrovitch in Crime and Punishment, who pretends to defer to the murderer Raskolnikov's superior education and thus lures him into revealing too much. Columbo's ancestry can also be traced to the puzzlers of Agatha Christie and to O.K. Chesterton's disarmingly discombobulated priest-detective Father Brown. Levinson and Link, who have been writing together since high school, are mystery story addicts who also created Mannix, The Senator and the TV movie That Certain Summer.

Rare Match. For the series pilot, the writers' first choice to play Columbo was Bing Crosby. Crosby yawned, and eventually they were left with the actor who was at the very bottom of their list: Falk. At first Falk, too, refused the assignment, unwilling to lock his career into the usual 13-week series schedule. He finally consented when the network proposed a seven-segment miniseries, rotating Columbo with three other shows under the collective title NBC Sunday Mystery Movie. When the show was aired in March 1971, "that rare match between character and actor made it a hit," Levinson recalls. "Who can say what another actor might have done with the role? Now Peter is Columbo, and it is hard to imagine anyone else."

Says Actor Robert Gulp, a two-time heavy on Columbo: "In a series the one thing that matters is how much in love with the star the audience is; the rest is nonsense." The audience certainly seems to have fallen for Falk. He gets some 300 fan letters a week. Everywhere he goes, he is introduced to policemen who are nicknamed--or call themselves --Columbo. Currently, Falk heads TV Q, the TV networks' semisecret survey of stars ranked according to their familiarity and likability.

Sweet Animal. "All the women I know want to know about Peter," says Actress Lee Grant, Falk's co-star on Broadway in The Prisoner of Second Avenue. "He has something disarming that women feel is animal--sweet animal, not kick-the-stuffing-out-of-you animal. I've acted with a lot of supposed sex symbols, and I never had the kind of inquiry I get about Peter."

All of which is something new for Falk. The short, stocky actor was born 46 years ago in Ossining, N.Y., where his parents still run Falk's Department Store. Despite the loss of his right eye as the result of a tumor when he was three, he grew up a hell-raising street kid and amateur athlete, who also managed to become president of his high school senior class.

After two months at Hamilton College in 1945, he quit to enlist in the Marines. Memorizing the eye chart in advance, he almost passed the eye test before his glass eye was noticed ("One eye didn't move, and they thought something was fishy"). The glass eye also kept him off the decks and out of the engine room in the merchant marine, so he signed on as a cook.

A year later, he went back to Hamilton, then to Manhattan's New School for Social Research, where he earned a B.A. in business administration. He and a girl friend took off for five months of thumb-tripping and odd-jobbing in Yugoslavia. He returned to get a master's degree in public administration from Syracuse University and decided to become a spy. He went to Washington to offer himself to the CIA, but it was 1953, the McCarthy era, and after one look at his record, "the guy at the CIA laughed and told me to get the hell out of there." The union he had joined as a merchant-marine cook, it seems, was considered "pink," and then there was that trip to Communist Yugoslavia.

Falk went to work as a "management analyst" for the State of Connecticut and, on the side, started acting in community-theater groups. He had flirted with the theater in high school and college but had quashed any thoughts of an acting career. "The truth was," he explains, "I was afraid I'd fail. When you're a kid, certain things are out of the question, they're so alien. Ordinary people didn't become actors, especially people from Ossining."

Then he began taking classes with Eva Le Gallienne in Westport, Conn. Late for class one day, he excused himself by saying that he was not an actor. "You should be," Le Gallienne snapped. "That's when it hit me," says Falk. "Finally someone I believed in--a really formidable woman, no bullshitter --told me what I knew I wanted."

Two Eyes. Less than a month later, Falk, then 26, landed a role in an off-Broadway production of The Iceman Cometh, and for the next eight years he worked steadily, mostly as a heavy, in TV and films. At one point Columbia Pictures summoned him to Hollywood for a screen test but did not sign him. "For the same price," said Columbia's boss Harry Cohn, "I can get an actor with two eyes."

Nobody knows which two-eyed actor Cohn finally hired, but in the next two years one-eyed Falk won two Oscar nominations (for his portrayals of the vicious killer Abe Reles in Murder, Inc. and the Brooklyn hood in Pocketful of Miracles). His career then settled into a series of forgettable Hollywood films (The Great Race, Castle Keep, Luv) and a sprinkling of Italian epics. A TV series in 1965, The Trials of O'Brien (in which he played a slobbish lawyer similar to Columbo), folded after one season.

Not until 1970, when he played one of the restless family men out on a spree in the film Husbands, did things get going for Falk again. He did Husbands gratis in return for a part-ownership in the film, which turned out to be critically controversial but financially successful. "It was the best payday I've had," he smiles.

Paydays for Columbo are not that bad either. Falk gets some $100,000 for each of the seven or eight 90-minute episodes he makes each season. For the four months he now puts in, however, his involvement is total. He quietly calls almost all the shots, from the choice of directors to the approval of locations. His lunch hours are spent watching the rough footage from the previous day's shooting, and his nights are spent rewriting the scripts.

With Columbo-like self-effacement, Falk shrugs off his writing contribution. "I think I can write some of the dialogue and some of the touches, the mannerisms, but it's a far cry from writing a total script," he demurs, at the same time putting the finishing "touches" to an eleven-page scene he has just written into an upcoming show. Falk wrote Columbo's often-quoted shoe gambit. Smack in the middle of questioning his suspect, he stops suddenly to ask: "How much did you pay for those shoes?" After a pause, the nonplussed suspect answers: "Forty dollars." "What I wanted to ask," confides Columbo, "is do ya' have any idea where I can get a pair like that for around eighteen?"

Although the false exit, followed by the innocently lethal "one last question," was dreamed up by Levinson and Link', Falk has so perfected the business that it has become a Columbo trademark, often occurring more than once in a single scene. Trademark No. 1, the magnificently grubby raincoat, was Falk's own stroke. The coat is his, bought in New York for a European trip years ago and stuffed away in a trunk until he fished it out to wear over the studio wardrobe's baggy brown suit. Falk worries like a mother hen over the coat's progressing disintegration, but he refuses to exchange it for a duplicate aged and soiled by the studio, clinging to the original like an identity blanket. Says a crew member: "The minute he puts that raincoat on, he becomes Columbo."

Glass-Eye Tales. Falk's only concerns with the technical end of the show are the camera and lighting angles, because of his glass eye. "When I throw one of these," he says, dancing his left eye around until the pupil is nearly out of sight, "I ask for a retake." Otherwise Falk seems unconcerned about his disability and willingly regales listeners with suspiciously tall glass-eye tales. Examples: unfairly called out at third base during a high school baseball game, he handed the umpire the appurtenance, saying, "Here, you could use another eye"; at a girl friend's house a few years later, he put the eye under his pillow, only to wake in the wee hours to the sound of crunching glass--the girl's dog had found the eye.

Falk tells these stories, or others about his adventures making Italian potboilers (an Italian producer once hired him by mistake to play a tall, blond soldier) with graphic glee, acting out all the parts as he goes. About his private life he is more reticent. He concedes that he is partly akin to Columbo. "I'm a worrier, I'm not the neatest guy in the world, I'm obstinate--but I'm not as clever as Columbo."

He lives quietly with his wife Alyce, an accomplished pianist, and their two daughters in Beverly Hills. A sports fan, he gets to every prizefight and Los Angeles Lakers game he can manage. He plays golf in the low 80s and is a self-confessed "pool junkie" who cut himself off cold turkey a few years ago. "I liked it too much," he says. Now he spends his spare time developing a recently discovered talent for drawing.

The Falks shun the cocktail-party circuit, but their small circle of friends includes his Husbands buddies, Director John Cassavetes and Actor Ben Gazzara, as well as Mike Nichols, Elaine May and M--A--S--H's Wayne Rogers. The circle is tightly knit. It was Nichols who directed Falk in Prisoner of Second Avenue on Broadway. Last summer Falk completed a film directed by May, Mikey and Nicky, in which he co-stars with Cassavetes. He has also helped to finance a new Cassavetes-directed film, Women Under the Influence, in which he co-stars with Cassavetes' wife, Actress Gena Rowlands.

At work, Falk is an obsessive perfectionist, "a tenacious worker capable of wanting to repeat a take 200 times to get it right," says Ben Gazzara. That tenacity led to some bitter arguments with Levinson and Link in the beginning, but when the writer team reminded Falk of those blowups recently, he protested. "Those were just getting-acquainted fights." In private, Falk is noticeably more even-tempered. "Nothing really touches his equanimity," says Lee Grant. "You could explode a bomb next to him, and he would just look at it with extreme interest." His wife describes him as "a man of long indecisions," and Falk agrees. "I don't bust into or out of anything. I get down on my hands and knees and crawl very slowly. It took me nine years to get married, ten to decide to become an actor."

Trendy Pendulum. How long it will take him to decide to leave Columbo is, therefore, anybody's guess. Falk has characterized the shuffling little detective so completely that his moves are now almost completely predictable, with the kind of sameness that is anathema to an actor of Falk's ability. Falk's contract has three years to run, and those around him do not expect him to remain longer. "I'm not tired of Columbo yet," he says. "But I'm getting close."

"Right now if the show went off the air, we'd be very happy," says Levinson, "because people would remember it with affection. But if you create a successful vehicle, the network won't let go of it."

Unless, as the network programmers suggest, TV's Year of the Cop (year of the pig?) turns out to be just another swing of the old trendy pendulum that in other years brought spates of westerns and spies to similar prominence. "I don't think the trend's going to last very long," Falk says. "All it needs is for another hit to come along in another area and then there'll be a lot of shows in that area. Anyway, to me the big dividing line is between the ocean of crap cliche and the small amount of quality." Wherever the pendulum may swing, Columbo and Falk are on the right side of that line.

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