The Internet Movie Data Base gives 165 entries for Peter Falk between the first one, a bit on TV’s Robert Montgomery Presents in 1957, when Falk was approaching 30 years old, and Checking Out, the movie that was released nationally this past September one day before his 79th birthday. And the IMDB lists four new projects after that.
Of the 169 total entries, 69 (by my count) are Columbos, 35 years of ongoing chapters in what amounts to a fascinating novel about a police-department homicide detective who drives a battered old car and wears a battered old brown raincoat and traps murderers (and murderesses) who seem much smarter than him, by playing dumb.
One of the prime elements of Lt. Columbo’s art, or skill, the actor writes in an enjoyable, open-hearted recently published book of truths and memories, is “an obsessive insistence that minutia be measured accurately. This is something he [Columbo] got from me [Falk], and in this area I can say I’m his superior. For example, when I weigh myself … it is [for accuracy] not enough for me to remove all my clothes including my socks – I also remove my watch and my one contact lens – just kidding.”
What is not kidding, and what the whole world, or much of it, knows, is that Peter Falk has had only one working eye, plus one glass eye, ever since a cancer called retina blastoma dictated removal of the right-side orb at age 3. It has not stopped him. He can get you laughing about it. Once, as an adult, he was instructed to read down an alphabet chart by a bored eye doctor who said: “Start with the left.” Peter did that. “Now the right.” The right eye is glass, Peter told him. “Well, do the best you can,” the guy said. You’ll find that on page 7 of Peter Falk: Just One More Thing: Stories from my life (Carroll & Graf, 2006). I do not think you’ll stop reading before 281 – the last page but hardly the end.
“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” said Falk over the phone from Los Angeles two days before that 79th birthday last September. “Last night,” he said, “I was thinking about Louie’s Tavern. Jesus, what’s the name of that place, I was asking myself. Then it came to me: Louie’s Tavern, in Sheridan Square, next door to Circle-in-the-Square and the Iceman. Didn’t you and I first meet in Louie’s Tavern?”
I don’t think so, I said. Because as a newspaperman I’d written about Iceman, we somehow met, though not in Louie’s, and would shoot the bull together from time to time on the sidewalks in and around Sheridan Square. But no matter
I’d done more than just write about José Quintero’s historic 1956 revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh. I’d voted for Jason Robards, Jr., as Hickey, the smiling, glad-handing Mr. Death who blasts the play’s bar-full of losers and rummies wide open almost four hours into the thing, to be given an Obie in that first year of those Off-Broadway awards, and he got one.
Peter Falk was Rocky the bartender in that production.
“I never left the stage,” he reminded me on the phone. “I had the first line and I may have had the last line.” With an almost audible transcontinental grin: “There was a kid I grew up with we called Nicely Nicely Shamus. His real name was Jimmy Cronin. He came to the show. I asked him: ‘How’d you like it, Jimmy?’ He said: ‘I wouldn’t watch a bullfight for four hours.’
“But Jason,” Falk said. “This is what Jason had to do. The audience is sitting there for three hours, more than three hours, and getting a little drowsy. Jason had to take that last big speech, all by himself, for maybe half an hour, and hold that audience. The thing I remember about Jason is that up to that time, nobody had ever heard of him. He’d been knocking around for 10 or 15 years, a great actor long before Iceman, and nobody knew. I’d only been an actor for like two minutes.
“I did mention in the book there were stretches when some of the actors in Iceman fell asleep.”
Like Grampa Al Lewis?
“Yeah, Al Lewis for sure.” Falk paused, shifting gears. “George Segal,” he said after a moment, “was an understudy in that show for Larry Robinson in the part of a kid who’s a kind of troubled, suicidal character. One night George had to go on. And I’m so stupid, not sensitive enough to know this was his first time, I whispered to him: ‘George, I’m going to sleep. Wake me up in three-quarters of an hour.’ ”
Segal, be it said, was not amused. “Insensitive!” Falk exclaimed again, flagellating himself 50 years after the event.
Peter Falk was born in Manhattan on September 16, 1927. The family moved first to the Bronx “very near Yankee Stadium,” and then to Ossining, New York.
“I remember my father got a baseball signed by Ruth, Gehrig, and somebody else. I still have that baseball. Don’t ask me where it is.”
Is it irrelevant that there’s a famous prison in Ossining, New York?
“It’s not irrelevant,” the actor said. “A lot of kids I grew up with had fathers who worked in that prison as guards. My high school, Ossining High, once played basketball against some of the prisoners. I was a point guard,” said the 5-foot-6 Peter Falk. “They killed us.”
Peter’s father, Mike Falk, also called Mitch Falk, opened a women’s and children’s store in Ossining “during the Depression, 1931, ’32.” Mitch Falk worked very hard, was always the first one there at 6 in the morning. He was not thrilled when -- after four colleges, a hitch in the Merchant Marine, a CPA, and a job on the square as a budget-efficiency expert for the State of Connecticut -- son Peter finally decided to try to be an actor.
Peter’s mother, Madeline “Mardi” Hochhauser Falk, worked in the store and took part in amateur theater in Ossining.
“They were both born in the USA. My grandparents were Russian, Polish, Hungarian, and Czech. Yes, all Jewish people. There’s no Italian in me,” said the man who’s played many an Italian-American on both sides of the law – not least, Lieutenant. Columbo.He lost his mother in 2003, and his father way back in 1981 “when I was in the middle of making California Dolls, a movie about lady wrestlers.”
Did your father ever come round to appreciating what you’ve done?
“Yes. I’d been nominated for two Academy Awards. I know he saw Murder, Inc. and he probably saw the Frank Capra film.”
(The Oscar nominations, early in Falk’s career, were for his performance as Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, the canary who flew out of a window of the Half Moon Hotel at Coney Island, in the 1960 Murder, Inc., and as Joy Boy, a gangster of another sort, in Frank Capra’s comedic 1961 Pocketful of Miracles).
Speaking of Capra – well, let Falk tell it, on page 81 of his book:
“Growing up, my favorite pictures, like everybody else’s, were those of Frank Capra. John Cassavetes, looking back, observed: ‘Maybe there was no America – maybe there was just Frank Capra.’ ”
Which bridges us from the miracle worker of Lady for a Day, It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can’t Take It With You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to the very different sort of miracle worker of Shadows, Faces, Husbands, A Woman Under the Influence, and Opening Night.
“Cassavetes,” said Falk over the phone. “A magician, a sorcerer.”
But we will have to let that wait a moment while we get Peter Falk onto the stage and in films in the first place.
“I got into acting by a fluke,” he said. “At Ossining High School I was president of my class, and every year thre was a senior-class play. In my senior year the play happened to be a murder mystery, and the guy playing the detective got sick two or three nights before the show. So they came to me. They said it isn’t all that hard a part, you only come on in the fourth act, and if you don’t do it we’ll have to cancel it.
“So I did it.”
Stops. Thinks. Says: “That was actually the second time I acted.”
The first time had been up at a camp in the Catskills.
“Every summer there was a tug of war between my mother and me. Every summer she wanted to send me off to camp to meet a better class of kids. I wanted to stay in Ossining. Finally we compromised: One month camp, one month home.
“There was a kid in this camp – Jesus, what was his name? He and I had a fight about whose trunk was to go where in the bunk we had. They put on a musical in this camp – kids 12, 13, 14 years old. He was the star. For some reason I had never seen a stage. I wandered down that way, and got a character part as an old voice trainer. Of course I couldn’t sing a note. Jesus, what was that guy’s name? He was a Hollywood actor, he’d been in movies ”
At this end of the phone, I hazarded a guess: Roddy McDowall?
“Yes!” said Peter Falk. “Yes, that’s it!”
Once upon a time, I said to Peter, Roddy McDowall was on Broadway in a play called Compulsion, about the thrill-killing Leopold & Loeb case. I went to interview him. This was 1958, and the interview was at Downey’s, the actors’ hangout at Eighth Avenue and 44th Street. McDowall’s role in the play was that of “Artie Straus,” based on the real Richard Loeb, and it was one hell of a performance, wild, frenetic, arrogant, crazy – the diametric opposite of sweet chaste Roddy McDowall of the movies.
I must have asked him how he did it, how he could be so amazingly extroverted on stage and so quiet and reserved here in Downey’s. Roddy McDowall looked at me and said: “There’s something you don’t realize. Acting can be terribly embarrassing.”
Over the phone you could feel Peter Falk thinking. After a bit he said: “The remark has an ambiguity to it. Are you asking me have I ever on stage or in any movie played a part that while I was doing it I was embarrassed? I would have to sit down and think of parts and scenes.” Two beats. Then, dryly: “If something comes to mind, I’ll call you back and answer.”
John Cassavetes. He and Peter first met at a Knicks/Lakers basketball game in Los Angeles. They then had lunch, because Falk was all excited about a script Elaine May had written about two petty gangsters, Mikey and Nicky, and he wanted to talk Cassavetes into playing Nicky opposite his, Peter’s, Mikey. (It would happen, but not until seven or eight years and much else had passed.)
When the coffee came, Cassavetes said (Falk writes on page 187): “I’m going to make a picture. I’m going to be in it, and I want Ben Gazzara in it. It’s about these men from Long Island. They commute each morning to Manhattan. They’re married – they’re husbands. There are three of them. I’d like you to be one of them. What do you think?”
Whatever Peter thought, what happened next was nothing. “A year goes by, maybe two, not a word.”
At which point Peter is in Siberia – or is it Serbia? -- making a movie called Castle Keep, Gazzara is in Czechoslovakia or Hungary making some movie that never got made, Cassavetes is in Rome, Italy, “and I get this telegram from him saying: ‘I’ve got the picture, I’ve got the money.’ I called him and said: ‘What picture is it?’ I didn’t believe him, for Chrissakes.”
Cassavetes said: “Come to Rome.”
“I go to Rome, I meet John, and he tells me [again] the story of the husbands. That night he and I went out with some friends, and he told a whole different story. Two or three weeks later, Benny [Gazzara] comes to Rome from Hungary.” And Cassavetes, still teasing his Husbands idea into life, like a balky outboad motor waiting for new sparkplugs, tells his buddies Falk and Gazzara that he wants them to join in, make up scenes, make up dialogue, dive in, collaborate. Which is the way Husbands, with its three married men going off on impulse on a weekend’s tear of London – drinking, gambling, bedding women, then going home to wives and kids – got to be made. “Bottom line [Falk writes], the story was John’s – the structure was John’s – the scenes were John’s. Within those boundaries, Benny and I would improvise – some of which appears on the screen.” And movies, in a little way, are reborn.
Falk has also had the privilege of making a Cassavetes film called A Woman Under the Influence with the brilliant Gena Rowlands [Mrs. John Cassavetes]. In it she has a 12-minute cadenza that shows what acting is all about.
“In John’s scripts,” Falk said now, “things happened when you didn’t even know they were happening. There’d be [a camera] shooting and you didn’t even know it. He liked that. Keeping you off balance. Instead of [in loud boring studio voice]: ‘Lights! Camera! Action! Quiet! Quiet! Quiet!’ That’s what you sensed in John’s movies: an intensity, an immediacy.”
Toward the end of Falk’s book there’s revelation about Marlon Brando that really shocked this reader: That when Brando made a movie he had an earpiece through which his lines were read to him just before he had to say them.
The reason? As relayed to Falk by Bob Dishy, an actor who was with Brando and Johnny Depp in a pretty good 1995 comedy called Don Juan DeMarco: To make him, Brando, less conscious of the camera. Spontaneity.
“Boy, did that ring a bell,” Falk writes. “I immediately knew exactly what Brando meant. Actors are like everyone else. Everyone loses spontaneity when a camera is pointed at them, We all tighten up – become self-conscious.”
To me he added: “I don’t think there’s an actor who ever lived who isn’t aware of the camera, especially when it’s only two or three feet away … I was once in an early Columbo under – who’s that famous director? the most famous director in Hollywood – and for the first time in my life found myself doing a scene where I had no idea where the camera was. A big relief. The camera was across the street in a third-floor window.” And the famous-to-be director who had hidden it there was (if one has figured it out rightly) Stephen Spielberg.
But Peter, I say on the phone, you’ve never done the earpiece thing, I’ll bet. Never needed it.
“Whether or not I would act better,” Falk said – “that’s an open question. One thing I’ll tell you: To do that [the earpiece bit], requires that you have total control of the set. How is it going to affect the other actors, affect the director? The only place I’d do that is on a Columbo – and maybe I will.”
Will there be more Columbos?
“Right now there’s a script I like very much, and another script I didn’t like and will never be made. The one I like? I’ll give you a little – what’s the word? – a little taste.
“The murderer is a woman. She writes celebrity biographies, She’s being interviewed by Larry King, and you see her go to the telephone to take a call away from the interview. It’s a call from a young woman in Beverly Hills. The younger woman, while on the phone, collapses, falls to the ground, and dies. I won’t give away how this happens, but I checked it out and have been assured that it’s all credible.”
Peter’s book doesn’t make it entirely clear how Lieutenant Columbo came into being in the very first place, before hitting the small screen.
“It was originally a Broadway play called Prescription: Murder, by Bill Mink and Richard Levinson, starring Thomas Mitchell [great character actor of 1940s flicks, who smoked a cigarette – made love to a cigarette -- like nobody before or since], but it never came to Broadway. The producer didn’t bring it in. But Mink and Levinson believed in it, got the money to take it to television, and their first choice for Columbo himself was Bing Crosby. But Bing was off to a golf match and couldn’t be bothered. Thank God for the game of golf.
“So I got the part, and – ”
And the first thing you did was scrounge that old raincoat from somewhere –
“That’s right, and to this day it’s a mystery to me why that popped into my head.”
Does the actual raincoat still exist?
“It does indeed. And when I get a Columbo to do, I go up to my bedroom closet and grab it. Then, later, I put it back so it doesn’t get lost in the Costume department or something.”
Peter’s wife since 1977 is the actress Shera Danese. She has played the lead on one Columbo and had leading parts in two other TV series. Their home life is shared by many dogs.
His two daughters – by first wife Alyce Mayo – are Catherine, who was once herself a store detective and has now given him two grandchildfren, and Jacqueline, or Jackie, who has a degree in psychology and works for a psychologist.
One other huge part of Peter Falk’s life is his painting and drawing, a dozen or so compelling examples of which are to be found in Peter Falk: Just One More Thing. I told him that I thought some of his images of women had (however distantly) the feel, the angularity, the tension, of Klimt and Schiele. It sort of took his breath away.
“When I was in Vienna,” he said after a while, “making The Great Race [1965], “there was a girl in the movie, a Viennese girl, who started talking to me about a guy named Egon Schiele and another guy named Gustav Klimt. I’d never heard of either of them. She took and showed me a Schiele. Four or five years later I was on [New York City’s] 57th Street, passing – what’s that bookstore? [Rizzoli’s]. I walked in, and there was a book with Egon Schiele on the cover. Jesus, this is the guy that girl was telling me about. I bought that book and one on Klimt and – ”
Then my guess, Peter, wasn’t all that wrong?
“Not wrong at all, and I’m deeply flattered. Thank you.”
Speaking of painters, maybe this is as good a place as any to sign off with an anecdote about Leo Penn, actor, acting teacher, father of Sean and Chris Penn, that appears on page 57 of Falk’s book. He and Leo Penn are in a TV show in the 1950s, when TV shows were done live.
In the show, Leo played a dimwitted character who stopped by my apartment for a visit. The scene took place in my living room. At the last minute just before shooting, the set decorator spruced up the room by adding some photographs, including one of the Mona Lisa. During the scene, Leo, seeing the picture for the first time, turned and asked: “Your mother? Pretty woman.”
“Absolutely true,” said Peter Falk.
Just one more thing: Let’s you and I meet in Sheridan Square one of these days, okay pal? José and Jason would like that.
