The Tom Selleck Thread

[litefoot]

Tom's memoir is published in one month's time on May 7th.

[litefoot]

As we approach the release of Tom's memoir, the media coverage has started already. he's on the cover of People magazine. here's part of his interview.

https://people.com/tom-selleck-lucky-li ... ve-8633635

[Luther's nephew Dobie]

As we approach the release of Tom's memoir, the media coverage has started already. he's on the cover of People magazine. here's part of his interview.

https://people.com/tom-selleck-lucky-li ... ve-8633635

Thank you litefoot.

Hey guys,
Everybody should keep alert for Tom appearing on talk shows to hawk his book, then alert everyone else here, PLEASE.

[litefoot]

Tom's doing 'An Evening With Tom Selleck' at Glorya Kaufman Performing Arts Center in Los Angeles on Wendesday May 29th. $55 for a ticket and a signed book apparently! tickets available here

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/an-evening ... 0748100007

[litefoot]

Tom's book is out next week!

[Pahonu]

My preorder copy has been shipped and arrives Tuesday.

[litefoot]

There's a lengthy, and interesting, interview in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph with Tom this weekend:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2024/05/ ... ue-bloods/

If you can't access it for geographical reasons or article read limits, I'll copy and paste the text in (if that's allowed!).

The interview's in yesterday's magazine supplement that came with the paper:

[Luther's nephew Dobie]

There's a lengthy, and interesting, interview in the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph with Tom this weekend:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2024/05/ ... ue-bloods/

If you can't access it for geographical reasons or article read limits, I'll copy and paste the text in (if that's allowed!).

The interview's in yesterday's magazine supplement that came with the paper:

litefoot,
That magazine cover is funny and clever. You have to subscribe to read the article, though. Please share the text with us?
It's unlikely the Daily Telegraph would ever come across it here.

[litefoot]

Tom Selleck interview: ‘There’s more to me than the moustache’

Ahead of his new memoir, the Magnum P.I. star reflects on ‘bruising’ headlines, being too handsome in Hollywood and the US election


If pushed to rank the big players in the 20th century, I begin saying to a mildly curious Tom Selleck, it probably goes you right at the top, then a few unspeakable dictators, then a big gap. Or maybe them first. Selleck, leaning in close, raises a dark loaf of an eyebrow and laughs.

‘Well, mine’s different from theirs, thank God. But what about Burt Reynolds? It was very fashionable in the ’60s. Burt is – was – a friend. I didn’t grow it cos of Burt, but I think he thought I did.’ We think some more. ‘My friend Sam Elliott?’

We are, of course, talking about moustaches. Specifically, iconic moustache-wearers. And have been for a good five minutes. If you spend any meaningful time in the company of Tom Selleck, then eventually, inevitably, you will bristle against the subject.

He has joked that he and his moustache are actually separate stars – that he’s not a diva, but the ’tache can be; that he’d never run for office, but he can’t speak for the ambitions of his upper-lip furniture – yet we know this isn’t true.

Because if you think of moustaches, you think of Tom Selleck. He’s acted without it many times, but the major roles associated with his name, from Magnum P.I. to Three Men and a Baby, Quigley Down Under to the suave Dr Richard in Friends, have one striking, hirsute thing in common.

‘Yeah, I know,’ he concedes. ‘It just got to the point where I’d go on a talk show and they’d say, “Now Tom, we have a surprise – act shocked but at a certain point, everybody in the audience is going to put on a moustache!” And I’d have to say, “Look, I know you thought you had a good idea but I’ve done that five times…”’

In 2010, when he took on the part he’s still playing, that of grizzled NYC police commissioner Frank Reagan in the CBS drama Blue Bloods, he planned on doing it clean-shaven. ‘Leonard Goldberg, the creator, later told me that he freaked out inside. He was like, “Oh, that’s interesting, let me check with the network…” Then, “Tom, the network is insisting.” So it’s a thing.’

Still, he’s not entirely sure how he came to be The Moustache Guy.

‘Look, I was born without it. It’s not as important to me as it seems to be to people. And every month or so, it’s completely new. The hairs have grown out, they’ve been trimmed. So I don’t know, it’s something I live with. I don’t resent it, but there’s more to the work than a moustache…’

We are sitting in Selleck’s hunting lodge/guesthouse/cigar lounge, on the 63-acre ranch that Magnum P.I. paid for, in a rural haven an hour or so west of Los Angeles. Flagstones cover the floor and walls. A set of cattle horns hang above the fireplace. Various taxidermy animals stand stock still. A cushion, embroidered with Mark Twain’s words, ‘IF I CAN’T SMOKE CIGARS IN HEAVEN THEN I SHALL NOT GO!’ rests on an armchair.

Driving from the main house, Selleck pulled up moments earlier in a Kubota utility vehicle with Jillie, his wife of 36 years, alongside him.

Selleck is 79, and every inch the ranch owner: red plaid shirt, tweed waistcoat, Wrangler jeans, leather hiking boots. (And, yes, grey-flecked moustache.) The only touch of showbiz is the Rolex he bought himself for the 250th episode of Blue Bloods.

A little slower and harder of hearing these days, he carries a touch more bulk on his 6ft 4in frame, but still gives the sense he could bench press a Hummer. His old friend Frank Sinatra used to call him ‘The Moose’. Today he’s more The Grizzly Bear.

Is he in rude health? ‘Yeah, aside from being an old guy. If you do action movies all your life, you get a lot of aches and pains.’ He floats a hand around his legs. ‘This knee is new, this hip… but it’s a miracle you can even do anything about it.’

Jillie is British. A former actor, she was born in Devizes, Wiltshire, but three decades of Californian living means she’s now West Coast through and through: 66 but ageless, all designer athleisure, sunny smiles and easy charm. They met in London’s West End in 1983, when she was playing Rumpleteazer in Cats. Brian Blessed, Old Deuteronomy in the production, was their cupid.

‘Ah, lovely Brian, a very large personality,’ Jillie says. Selleck nods. ‘Do you remember, he was always going on about climbing Everest? I wonder if he ever did…’ He definitely tried, I inform them. They beam. ‘He did? Oh, good for him.’

Selleck purchased the property in 1988, sating a desire instilled nine years earlier – while making the western The Sacketts – to one day own land. ‘Sometimes you’re really wrong about what you think you want, but I was really right.’

Built in 1910, the ranch is in an area called Hidden Valley. Thick with trees and only the occasional vast compound, it’s attracted shy Hollywood icons for decades. Selleck bought his from ‘a used car salesman’, but the châtelain before that was Dean Martin.

‘There’s an easement on the road between here and next door. It was signed by Deano and William Holden. I guess Bill lived next door. Around the valley were Alan Ladd, Roy Rogers, Richard Widmark… Sophia Loren was right across the street. Donna Summer was up there…’

They’re all gone now, of course, but Britney Spears’s mansion is just over the rear treeline. ‘This is such a counter to the entertainment business. I’ll go back to the craziness in two days, to shoot Blue Bloods [in New York], but my time here is a really good antidote.’

He farmed avocados here for 20 years, despite once saying they make him ‘gag’, but drought has seen all but a few of his 2,000 trees die off – killing the business in turn. Otherwise it’s a satisfyingly consistent place: across the driveway is the paddock in which his daughter, Hannah, learned to ride. Now 35, she is an international showjumper.

There are great oaks he remembers as saplings, buildings he’s restored, fences he’s installed. Some of the staff are old-timers. The estate, and much of Selleck’s life, is managed by a genial Yorkshireman, John, who’s worked with him for over 30 years. He showed me through the gates while keeping half an eye on the Arsenal score.

‘Everywhere I go there’s a memory for me,’ Selleck says. ‘I can go away, do all these high-powered scenes, then come back here and just watch the trees I planted grow. I know that sounds a little…’ He trails off.

Jillie has excused herself (‘Well, I’ll let you boys go ahead and talk…’) and leaves Selleck in a reflective mood. During lockdown, he began jotting down his life story. Four years later, the product of those sessions is here in the form of a memoir called You Never Know.

It is the story of ‘an accidental career’: Selleck never dreamed of being an actor, and still can’t quite believe how things turned out. The second child to Martha, a housewife and later charity coordinator, and Robert, who worked in property, he was born in Detroit but the family moved to Sherman Oaks, just north of Hollywood, when he was three.

Completed by older brother Bob, younger sister Marti and younger brother Daniel, the Sellecks were a happy clan. ‘Yeah, I could go into analysis for 20 years and not blame my parents for anything, so for a while I didn’t know what I was going to write a book about.’

‘Terrible’ at school, he enrolled at the University of Southern California on a business major, ‘but if I had a fantasy, it wasn’t to be a star, it was to be a professional baseball player’. His siblings all went into real estate, but it took Selleck a while to discover what he’d learned from his parents. ‘My dad always said, “Risk is the price you pay for opportunity,” and I kind of knew that.’

An inveterate ‘yes’ man, friends convinced him to appear on a game show called The Dating Game. Tall, strapping, chiselled, bashful – the camera, and producers, loved him. It led to opportunities in adverts, which led to the Fox New Talent programme, a training school for new acting talent. He soon dropped out of college.

‘All of it happened so quickly, I never once stopped to ask myself, why? Why am I doing this? I’m not sure I can answer that even now,’ he writes. Today, he doubles down. ‘It’s true, I was never interested in becoming an actor. I don’t have any lightbulb moments.’ It’s why he had no qualms about serving six years in the United States Army Infantry, rising to sergeant, in the middle of his time at Fox. (Despite a close call, he was never sent to Vietnam.)

The book is a collection of reminiscences from a man who seems to see his work as more an honest trade than an art. He refers to building a career as ‘bricklaying’, each job a useful contribution to the overall structure. He has no memory of many credits on his CV.

Early roles made the most of his looks. He played ‘Young Stud 4’ opposite Mae West, his childhood pin-up, in the 1970 adaptation of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge. West, who was born in 1893, became a friend. She later told a journalist that ‘Cary Grant had a look’, then: ‘Tom Selleck has a look.’

It’s been said that Selleck ‘hit the genetic lottery’, but it reads as if that luck hampered him in the early days. He was often turned down for ‘conflicting with the lead’ – an industry euphemism for being ‘distractingly beautiful’.

He shrugs. ‘Everybody has a cross to bear as an actor, and everybody has a task to be taken seriously. In the age I was going into acting, Dustin Hoffman didn’t have as tough a time getting to be taken seriously. I’m sure he did for years, but my first acting coach said, “Look, you walk through the door, you’re 6ft 4in, you’re pretty good-looking, Tom, you have to deliver that.” And that was a struggle – in that era it was probably harder to be taken seriously [looking like him] than in the 1950s. Unless you delivered. I think a lot of the time I walked in the door and they didn’t take me seriously.’

Despite dozens of supporting credits, Selleck didn’t truly break through until he was almost 36, when Magnum P.I., about a private investigator and Vietnam veteran living in Hawaii, started. By that point, in 1980, he had been married to Jacki Ray, an actor and model, for nine years, and he adopted her son from a previous relationship, Kevin. The marriage broke down just prior to Magnum, provoking media speculation that only reaffirmed Selleck’s long-standing reluctance in the spotlight.

‘I have never been totally comfortable with the expression “it goes with the territory” – people who say that have probably never been in the territory. But I had to find a way to keep at least some part of me private,’ he says. At that time, ‘Jacki got the rough end of it. They said I left her because of Magnum, well we split up about a year before the pilot, so all those things were a little bruising.’

Magnum, a brilliantly written show with mad plots but sophisticated character arcs, proved a healthy escape, and an instant hit, consistently ranking in the top 20 US TV shows during the first five of its eight seasons. Selleck, with his Hawaiian shirts, convertible Ferrari 308 GTS, baseball cap and abundant facial follicles, was an ’80s icon. ‘By the third episode I was getting recognised by tourists in Hawaii [where he relocated for filming], but for a long time I wasn’t aware of my level of fame.’

Hollywood had noticed, though. Before a camera had even rolled on Magnum, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, seeking a macho unknown for their new adventure trilogy, offered Selleck the role of Indiana Jones. CBS, who were making Magnum, refused to release him. An actors’ strike meant Selleck could, in the end, have done both. Harrison Ford, though already a star, was to gain.

‘Before an audition, I’ve always said to myself, sometimes out loud, you’re enough, Tom. You’re enough to find your own way,’ Selleck says. This crops up a lot in his memoirs. ‘Errant thoughts’ is what he calls it, but it often comes across as imposter syndrome.

‘The ultimate acceptance of “you’re enough, Tom” was Spielberg and Lucas wanting me. And I always held on to that.’ Did he dwell on what might have been? ‘No, people bring it up, but I put it to bed long ago. It made my work better, that they’d thought I was enough.’

At the time, friends urged him not to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. ‘I said, “Why?” I saw it and I was able to be, most of the time, objective. It was such a good movie, and so much [Ford’s]… Yeah, a couple of times I got a little mad at myself because I thought, “What if…?” But that was a minor distraction, an errant thought, if you will. It was Harrison’s thing.’

Thanks to Magnum, Selleck was nominated for five Emmys, winning once, and became a global sex symbol. ‘And that was embarrassing. You get put on magazine covers and they give you titles, but I won’t go into what…’ He must be referring to being voted the sexiest man in America by a more than two-to-one ratio by readers of Ladies’ Home Journal in 1986. He winces. ‘If you buy into those polls, what happens if you start losing?’ Mmm, ‘former’ sexiest man doesn’t sound quite as good. ‘Ha, exactly. If you’re named person of the universe, pretty soon you’re not going to be.’

He met Jillie while making a film in the UK, and ended up seeing Cats ‘eight and a half times’. She was, he writes, ‘the personification of joie de vivre’, and had no interest in his celebrity. In fact, when a castmate told her that Tom Selleck kept staring at her, she replied: ‘Who the f—k’s that?’

She relocated to the US, in time to accompany Selleck to a state dinner at the White House in 1985. Already friendly with the Reagans, he was selected – alongside John Travolta and Clint Eastwood – as one of three actors personally invited by Princess Diana. The evening is remembered for Travolta’s dance with Diana, but it was Selleck who cut in and took over, at the behest of royal aides who thought people might talk if she and Travolta danced till dawn.

On the other side of the dance floor, Jillie was twirling with the future king. ‘She danced with him twice!’ Selleck recalls now. That night, Charles told Jillie: ‘I was so happy you rescued me. Nancy’s friends kept stepping on my toes.’

Selleck’s career by no means stalled after Magnum ended – Three Men and a Baby was the box office hit of 1987; his cameo entrances in Friends allegedly all had to be re-filmed without an audience because it sounded like Beatlemania whenever he appeared; and Blue Bloods runs and runs. But it’s still Magnum people talk to him about. ‘I still get fan mail – it means a lot to people.’ He has a few Hawaiian shirts left, but ‘I don’t think they’d fit, and it’d be like wearing a flag. People on the street would go, “Tom, it’s over. Let it go.”’ He laughs.

Aside from the small matter, in 2015, of being accused of stealing water from a public hydrant to use on his ranch during a drought (Selleck settled the lawsuit), his reputation is remarkably blemish-free after more than 50 years in the business.

Jennifer Aniston once joked that he was the one awful guest star on Friends. ‘You just don’t know how cruel and unusual he is,’ she quipped, before clarifying: ‘Tom has an angel’s halo over his head – it’s just a permanent halo.’ By all accounts, he’s one of the good guys.

His memoir travels from the post-war boom to Covid. In that time, he has witnessed America change dramatically. ‘I have. It’s enormously evolved in many ways, and not necessarily for the good. I don’t think we’ve handled the miracle of social media, it’s corrosive.’ (He is ‘computer illiterate – I don’t send texts, I don’t email’.)

Selleck’s politics are deliberately vague. An independent, he has acted as a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, endorsed Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, then Dallas police chief David Brown in 2016. (He made no public comment in 2020.)

‘When I started Blue Bloods, I just said I’m not talking about politics, I’m in an ensemble show, everybody has opinions, I know they’re different [from mine], and it would be very divisive. I’m happy to say maybe that set an example.

‘But [America] has changed a lot. I think one of the things is that social media has put everybody on guard and looking for offence in order to gain fame. It’s pretty easy to take a deep breath and try and walk in the other person’s shoes, even if they’re a jerk. We don’t have that in our culture any more. The debate has become, “If you disagree with me, you’re evil.” In America, reasonable people can and maybe should disagree. I think [the opposite] is very dangerous and divisive.’

The coming election will ‘not be my favourite, and a lot of people feel that way’. He sighs. ‘I don’t know, I don’t fear it, I just wish I had more choices.’ Does he know how he’ll vote? ‘No, I don’t. It’s not a good choice, and I mean that both ways, not just as a Trump thing. Things that are being said on both sides are unacceptable.’

Selleck remains a proud gun owner. ‘I’ve owned firearms all my life, yeah.’ How many does he have? He fixes me a look. ‘That’s none of your business.’ Shall I put ‘a few’? A tilt of the head. ‘Yes, a few. A few’s a good number.’

He no longer hunts, ‘but I went through a phase where I kind of thought all we [men] are useful for is to be inseminators and then be put aside. I wanted to experience what we’re good for as men.’

The startled duck on the coffee table before us was the first his cocker spaniel retrieved. The American buffalo foot on a siding is from the largest animal he’s killed. ‘I did not shoot that owl,’ he says, pointing at a barn owl in the rafter. ‘That got caught in the grill of our car.’

The guns thing is, he says, ‘a little like a moustache, it’s just a small part of things, and a little more shocking to Brits. I have dear friends who don’t necessarily agree with me, and I don’t agree with them. It hasn’t cost me friendships in the business, but there’s more people blowing their own horn. That’s why I just said I’m done, I won’t talk about [politics], because it’s no longer productive and it’s bad for my work, and my work comes first.’

Happiest here, in blue jeans and boots, Selleck hadn’t owned a suit for years, borrowing from the Blue Bloods costume department when necessary, but he went to a tailor a year ago. ‘I said I need a black suit, because, you know, at my age you’re losing friends.’ Several times in our conversation he catches himself speaking of an acquaintance in the wrong tense.

Retirement is anathema to him. ‘Acting is a very unusual life, and when you have it for 50 years, you either handle it or go crazy. There’s fewer and fewer people at the age I am, so the talent pool thins out. A lot of people didn’t handle it, some people passed away… So there’s work, which I hope continues.’

Brick by brick, he continues to build. ‘I have one standing want, which is to do another western. Other than that, I like challenges.’ No bucket list, then? ‘I haven’t really looked at life that way. I’ve done so many things I never expected I’d get to do, pretended to be all sorts of people I never thought I could have been.’

He slaps his thighs. The moustache leaps into a smile. ‘But right now, I gotta go.’ He has to make the most of being Tom Selleck. And who could blame him?

You Never Know: A Memoir is out on May 9 (HarperCollins, £22); pre-order at books.telegraph.co.uk