TLDR: The raincoat was Peter Falk’s own coat, bought at a Spanish store on a rainy New York day in 1967. The Peugeot was spotted by Falk tucked in a corner of the Universal Studios motor pool.
The basset hound was a professional actor named Henry, introduced as a compromise with NBC. “Just one more thing” was born from a writers’ room shortcut to avoid retyping a scene.
And Columbo whistles “This Old Man” because Falk started humming it during a phone hold to fill dead air.
Every detail of Lieutenant Columbo’s appearance feels so inevitable that it is easy to assume someone designed it that way.
Almost none of it was designed at all.
The character’s most recognizable elements accumulated through accidents, arguments, and improvised decisions made over several years, and almost all of them trace back to Peter Falk’s personal instincts rather than a costume department or a production meeting.
The Raincoat
Falk bought the coat himself, on a rainy day in New York City in 1967, at a Spanish department store called Cortefiel. He was walking down the street when it started raining, ducked into the shop, and bought the coat.
When he was later cast in the 1968 pilot Prescription: Murder and asked to find suitable wardrobe for the character, he retrieved the coat from his home closet.
The show’s creators, Richard Levinson and William Link, maintained for years that the script called for an overcoat, not a raincoat.
Falk insisted the script specified a raincoat. The dispute was never resolved because neither man’s position could be disproven and the coat worked so well it didn’t matter.
Falk wore the original through the entire original NBC run.
When the series returned on ABC in 1989, the coat had deteriorated enough that tailors constructed a replacement, artificially aging it by staining the fabric with tea and running it over with an automobile in the studio parking lot to achieve the right level of convincing disrepair.
The Car
Before filming the first regular series episode in 1971, Falk was taken to the Universal Studios motor pool to select a vehicle for the character.
He toured rows of standard American sedans and found none of them right. Then, tucked away in a corner, he spotted the nose of a battered, non-running 1959 Peugeot 403 Cabriolet, a small French convertible that had seen better decades.
Falk insisted on it despite objections that the car didn’t run and would require significant work.
His reasoning was simple: the eccentric, foreign design of a broken-down French import perfectly mirrored the detective’s outsider status among the wealthy, high-society Los Angeles world he navigated.
The car was restored to running condition and became one of the most recognizable vehicles in television history.
The Dog
The basset hound known simply as Dog was not Peter Falk’s dog.
The animal was a professional canine actor named Henry. He was introduced to the series as a compromise after NBC executives pushed the production to give Columbo a human police sidekick.
Falk initially opposed even the dog, arguing the character already had more than enough signature elements.
When writer Steven Bochco formally introduced him to Henry at a Burbank animal shelter, Falk saw the dog’s lethargic, drooling demeanor and immediately changed his mind, recognizing that the animal’s physical personality was a perfect visual echo of Columbo’s own unhurried manner.
Henry died during the series’ run and had to be replaced by a younger basset hound. Maintaining visual continuity required the replacement dog to undergo makeup application, including temporary graying of his fur to simulate the original dog’s older appearance.
Falk later joked that the dog’s preparation in the makeup chair took longer than his own.
The Catchphrase
“Just one more thing” was born from a practical problem.
While writing the stage play that preceded the television series, Levinson and Link realized they had written a scene where Columbo exited a suspect’s office before asking a vital investigative question.
To avoid the effort of retyping the entire scene on a manual typewriter, they simply had the detective turn around in the doorway and deliver the question as an afterthought.
The phrase worked so effectively as a character device that it became the detective’s most recognizable verbal tic, used across decades as the signal that the trap was about to close.
The Whistle
Columbo’s habit of whistling or humming “This Old Man” was entirely unscripted.
During the filming of “Any Old Port in a Storm” in 1973, Falk was performing a scene that required his character to be placed on hold during a phone call.
Uncomfortable with the silence, he began humming the old children’s nursery rhyme, a tune he frequently whistled in his personal life off camera.
The producers found it such a perfect fit for the character’s absent-minded, unpretentious quality that it was kept in the final edit.
Falk continued incorporating it into subsequent episodes, and series composer Patrick Williams eventually arranged versions of the song into the show’s background scoring and closing credits.
The Wife We Never Saw
Mrs. Columbo was mentioned in nearly every episode and never once shown on screen.
Her perpetual invisibility was entirely intentional. The show’s creators felt that keeping her unseen allowed audiences to imagine her however they liked and preserved the character’s mystery.
She had no first name in the original series. When NBC launched a spinoff called Mrs. Columbo in 1979 over Falk’s strong objections, the character was named Kate and played by a 24-year-old actress.
When the original series returned on ABC in 1989, a line was inserted to clarify that the spinoff’s Kate was an impostor.
The real Mrs. Columbo went back to being off-screen and unnamed, which was where she had always belonged.
Why did Columbo always wear a raincoat?
Peter Falk bought the coat himself at a Spanish store called Cortefiel on a rainy New York day in 1967, before being cast in the role. When asked to find wardrobe for the character, he simply retrieved it from his closet.
What did Columbo always whistle?
Columbo whistled “This Old Man,” a children’s nursery rhyme that Peter Falk started humming during a phone hold scene in the 1973 episode “Any Old Port in a Storm” to fill dead air. The producers kept it and it became a recurring character element.
Was the dog on Columbo Peter Falk’s real dog?
No. The basset hound known as Dog was a professional canine actor named Henry. When Henry died during the series’ run, a younger replacement dog was used with temporary fur graying applied to maintain visual continuity.
