A Polish Sherlock

New York Police Lieut. Theo Kojak is a man of parts: jutting ears, a billiard ball of a pate and a squashed nose. As played by the movies' perennial heavy, Aristotle ("Telly") Savalas every Wednesday night at 10, this street-smart tough yegg also has a soft and thoughtful center. He wears vests, and sucks lollipops in an attempt to give up cigars. The combination makes for one of the more intriguing cop characters on TV. It has also made the show built around the character, CBS'S Kojak, the first new program of the season to crack the top ten in the Nielsen audience ratings.

Very Tough. Kojak shows New York City in all its roach-and-racketeering misery. The directors neatly capture the alternately plodding and explosive rhythm of police work. But ultimately the show is a one-man operation. "Kojak is Telly," says Universal Television's Vice President Tom Tannenbaum, who chased Savalas around Europe to snag him for the part. "He's a suave, bright guy who always gives you the forbidding feeling that he can get very tough."

Savalas' Kojak is far less violent and ready for the chase than CBS'S Mannix. He solves crimes with his head, like a Polish Sherlock Holmes. In last week's episode, fragments from a dead man's glasses ultimately led him to the heart of a crooked urban-renewal scheme. This week he pieces together clues from a drug addict that set him on the trail of a fellow detective turned criminal.

Savalas has invented some of the best bits of Kojak's character right on the set. It was his idea for Kojak to suck on lollipops and wear three-piece suits. He also wants Kojak to go to night school in future installments. For the most part, however, the 6-ft. 1-in., 200-Ib. actor does not have to invent a character for Kojak, because he is playing himself.

Born more or less 50 years ago (he won't tell exactly when) in Garden City, N.Y., of Greek immigrant parents, Savalas knows from experience those mean streets he now uses for locations (some of the show is also shot in Los Angeles). He graduated from a noisy family whose fortunes fluctuated from wealth in the tobacco business to bankruptcy in the Depression and back to affluence in the bakery business. He earned a degree from Columbia University in psychology, an experience that permanently turned him off the subject.

He took a job at the U.S. State Department Information Service, rose to executive director for the Near East, South Asia and Africa, and, under fire from jealous colleagues--according to his version--switched to being a director for ABC television news and special events.

In that job he won a Peabody Award for a series he developed, Your Voice of America. On the side, he also took the helm of a theater in Stamford, Conn., that quickly folded under him.

Savalas' career as an actor began when he was 37, and more or less by accident. An agent asked him to find someone who could play an East European judge on television's Armstrong Circle Theater. Although totally untrained, he auditioned for the part on a whim and got it. "I became an actor out of curiosity," he said during a Kojak shooting break last week in Hollywood, "and at first my career was fascinating because the parts were varied." Savalas won an Academy nomination for playing a convict colleague of Burt Lancaster's in the 1962 movie Birdman of Alcatraz. The studios then typecast him in a long series of heavy roles, notably the swinish pervert in The Dirty Dozen (1967). When Hollywood sagged as a film center in the '60s, Savalas moved his wife Lynn and their three daughters to Europe, where he worked unenthusiastically as a villain in Italian potboilers. "One day," he says yearningly, "they will realize I can do a romantic story. Forget the gorilla exterior. Inside is a 16-year-old Romeo."

Enjoying Life. Middle-aged Lothario might be more accurate. Lynda Day George, who acted with him in a recent TV movie of the week, observes: "When he finally relaxes and finds it isn't necessary to conquer every woman he meets, he'll begin to enjoy life more."

Meanwhile, Savalas is giving a pretty good imitation of enjoying life. He storms without a fluff through grueling six-day weeks of shooting, barely stepping out of character to slip off the set and make phone calls to his bookie, and slurps ice cream happily, surrounded by Greek crew members. "Forget the fame, forget the money; that's nonsense. You get your friends jobs."

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