By Steve Crum

What should have been, could have been. I am talking about the celebrated actor Peter Falk (1927-2011). 

On Sept. 1, 2005, I sat with the personable yet guarded Falk for an hour-long afternoon interview held in a luxury hotel room on The Plaza in Kansas City, Mo. It was all about publicity for Falk’s soon to be released flick, The Thing About My Folks. So a fun yet not so revealing experience happened. Soon after, I hurried home to spend a few hours writing what I considered one of my best interview pieces—even better than the similarly styled feature I used in my 2002 interview with Shirley Jones. [/?p=860] The Jones story had garnered my First Place Award plaque from the Kansas City Press Club as Best Entertainment Story of the Year in tri-state area newspapers. 

At that time, I was no longer working for the Kansas City Kansan. Neither was former Kansan assistant editor Mary Rupert. She now edited a far lesser weekly, The Wyandotte West. And I was its occasional writer mainly covering local theater. 

Then came Columbo himself, Mr. Falk.

To put it ever so truthfully, Wyandotte West (Rupert and/or an assistant editor) butchered my story. What happened was far below mere editing. Without contacting me, my cleverly written feature story was choppily transformed into a one paragraph, dimwitted “news” story. Basically it gave the who and what of Falk’s movie—minus any information about Falk himself. 

I remain insulted about never being CONsulted—emphasis on the con. No courtesy about contacting me for anything regarding writing or editing. Shabby, unprofessional bullarky. Adding to my outrage was the fact I had not kept a copy of my original story. WWest had it. My mistake, my big mistake. Now I cannot post it here. (Their “edit” is not worth a reprint. Trust me.) I loudly complained by phone to an editor there, and quit writing for Wyandotte West immediately. 

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I will share some asides about the Falk experience, however. KC was part of a cross-country promotion for the The Thing About My Folks, in which Peter Falk portrays Paul Reiser’s father. I was supposed to have a separate half hour with each actor, but Reiser could not make it.

So Falk’s time was extended. I was seemingly blessed with getting to pick Falk’s brain for an unexpected 60 minutes. Questions ranged from Columbo to John Cassavetes to It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World to his numerous movie and TV parts. Falk would start to answer, say, one about his work with John Cassavetes. Then he would catch himself, and say, “Naw, naw…let’s stay with the reason I’m here. Let’s only talk about The Thing About My Folks.” After a couple of mundane publicity questions and answers, I would stroll back into Don’t Ask territory. “Mr. Falk, your years on Columbo were….” And Falk would interject, “Er…that’s all covered in my upcoming book, Just One More Thing. Now let’s get back to The Thing About My Folks, which is one terrific motion picture, maybe my best performance.”

Back and forth we went, trying to get to the interesting stuff. But Falk was savvy, and politely balked at answering anything outside of his current flick. It became a game of trickery, but I was up against Detective Columbo. 

He could not lose.