Peter Falk Pens Autobiography
Just One More Thing: Stories From My Life - Review
It wanders and weaves like the three drunken husbands in the John Cassavetes film of the same name - but proves just as amiable company
Despite contributions to many a script (from the 'open invite' films of close friend John Cassavetes to standard studio fare like the World War Two drama Anzio,) veteran actor Peter Falk never once imagined that he was possessed of the literary wherewithal to write a book. How then, he must have asked himself, to come up with an autobiography? The answer was an obvious one: to write his life in the manner of his trademark character, that world-wide icon, Lt. Columbo.
Hence, the perfectly titled Just One More Thing: Stories From My Life gives us the life of Falk as if fed to the smart, amusing, and above all, easily distracted mind of the lowliest logician in TV history.
The story of Falk moves from tragic beginnings in Ossining, New York - where, at the age of three, Falk had a cancerous eye removed - through to a model high school life, a stint in the navy, a flirtation with joining the CIA (thwarted by a history of visitations to communist hotbeds,) a latent career as an off-Broadway force and finally, a surprise career as a big screen character actor and small screen icon - all in step to a line as jagged as the one Falk and Alan Arkin took in their 1978 cult comedy The In-Laws (one of Falk's favorite films.)
Falk the writer jumps to and fro in time, makes frequent stops for anecdotes (many by people other than himself,) omits occasional details (there are references to a longtime girlfriend and two wives but no description of the transitions from one to the other,) and inserts generous examples of his middle-aged hobby, charcoal drawing (at which he displays a Degas-like hand.)
This willy-nilly approach has its frustrations, to be sure, but it's a blow seriously softened by the richness of the author's asides. Falk displays a genuine flair for bar stool storytelling; sidebars about his current wife (an admitted bubblehead with a Gracie Allen-like wit,) lifelong friends (particularly unheralded animator Lou Levy, of Bugs Bunny fame) and the stranger aspects of life as an internationally recognized personality (don't skip the chapter about Columbo and the Romanian government) are delivered with palpable relish. For half of the book, you feel you are seated across the author at a downtown New York deli, while he chews your ear along with a cream cheese-laden bagel, a cold draft and a ten cent cigar.
If this doesn't exactly make for the narrative we all wanted on Falk - that task will be left to a more experienced biographer - it's extremely agreeable company nonetheless, and it would be hard, frankly, to imagine a veteran chronicler being able to serve up so substantial and uncorrupted a helping of the Falk personality. This is a funny, loving, talkative, scatterbrained soul - every man's ideal sidekick.
The book, then, is Falk as a badly assembled jigsaw puzzle. It doesn't create the image that we bargained for, but the one that it does create is surprisingly satisfactory...oh, and just one more thing: that famous raincoat that Columbo wears - it isn't in the Smithsonian after all; it's in Falk's upstairs closet.
