Before attaining his current status as a rugged éminence grise of network TV, Tom Selleck bestrode half a century as a certain hirsute ideal of American manhood: in 1970s commercials, the mustachioed yang to Farrah Fawcett’s feather-haired yin; in the ’80s, as the beach-casual private eye in Magnum, P.I. (not to mention one of the adoptive hunks in Three Men and a Baby); in the ’90s, as the 50-ish divorcé who breaks Monica’s heart on Friends (and whose set entrances required numerous reshoots due to the Beatlemania-level applause from the studio audience). With his decades of Hollywood success—up to and including the CBS police drama Blue Bloods, now in its 14th and final season—Selleck, a hale 79, may seem too natural a screen presence to offer life lessons to struggling actors. His new memoir, You Never Know, is full of just such advice, though, and calling in from Los Angeles, he sums up his accumulated wisdom thusly: “Develop an appetite for failure. I had lots of it. Failure in school, failure in sports, and for many years failure in show business. It all gave me the tools to deal with what was a much, much longer ride than most people think.”
In your memoir, you write, “I’d never had the slightest interest in acting. Ever.” So how did you approach learning the craft and the profession?
I called it “laying bricks”: one brick after the other, learning from each experience, plodding ahead. I was 35 when I got Magnum, and I was blessed with a long, long road of failures before that happened. I don’t know how, say, a 17-year-old would handle that kind of success. It’s very difficult in today’s culture—probably much worse. You get a little attention, land a big job, but maybe nobody calls for a while after that, and maybe you start doing outrageous things to get attention. When I was 35 and had some success, I was a stronger person and a better actor. I gotta say, once you get in that fishbowl, you better have a real strong sense of who you are. If you don’t develop an appetite for failure, you’re gonna be in trouble. Look at failure as a teacher, a part of the past, right?
You got a full ride to USC as a basketball player, and your brother, Bob, played in the Dodgers’ minor-league system. How did sports help you in your career?
It was certainly an advantage, learning how to take losses, help your team, be a leader. I wasn’t one to give pep talks, but I worked on a lot of sets that were uncomfortable. Occasionally you get into a really good set, but that was the exception, and it became important to me to do things differently once I got my own show. That’s also something I learned from James Garner, working with him on The Rockford Files. He knew that his mood would rub off on everybody—cast, crew—and that it helps you, if you’re feeling super- tired, burned-out, or miserable, to get invigorated by the rest of your team. When I got Magnum, I had to live up to my earlier pledge to do right for the cast and crew, which isn’t easy when you’re working 14-hour days, but I certainly tried.
One early experience you share in the book is worth the hardcover price on its own: You’re in 20th Century Fox’s New Talent program and get called to meet with the ’30s bombshell Mae West—first in her dressing room, then her apartment—and you wind up getting cast as “Stud” in Myra Breckinridge. The whole thing’s so wonderfully surreal.
It was fascinating. Everything in her apartment was white. White couches, white carpet, white piano, white clothes. She always wrote her own stuff, and when we were talking, she wasn’t really Mae West, she was more Brooklyny. But then she asked me to read, and, right at her first line—“Well, I don’t care about your credits as long as you’re oversexed”—she totally transformed into Mae West. It was all I could do not to start cracking up, which she took as a compliment. I was as starstruck as if I were doing a scene with John Wayne.
Soon after, West told a magazine about discovering Cary Grant, saying “Cary Grant had a look.” Then: “Tom Selleck has a look.” At that stage of your career, you were still figuring out how best to use what you call your “instrument.” You often got cast as what you call “Harry Hormone” or “Vic Virile.”
Well, for a while they were pushing the hunky thing, and I found that a little embarrassing. I mean, it’s not a cross to bear. For Magnum, I had lived in Hawaii for a while, and I’m sorry, I dressed the way people in Hawaii dress, not the way actors who pretend they’re in Hawaii dress. People wear shorts; people wear bathing suits. It was just the character. But I do think it got a bit exploited, and I just had to learn to say no sometimes in photo shoots. When you’re new, it’s, “Can you just unbutton your shirt?,” and you want to be polite. But there are plenty of pictures I just don’t like to see. The picture I hate the most was from one of my very first photo shoots. The photographer had a hammock, and he said, “I want you to lie down on that hammock, in your Hawaiian shirt and shorts, hold this pineapple with the top cut off and a little umbrella and a flower in it, and look like you’re in paradise.” I didn’t want to do it, but I did, and now that picture is everywhere. If I had all the money in the world, I’d buy ’em up and destroy every single one.
Note to the editor: Find this shot for the illustration.
There was a part of Magnum that was really important: He’s a former Navy SEAL who saw action in Vietnam, but he wasn’t a disaffected serviceman or vet. The reason he was in Hawaii was, he says, “One day I was 33 and realized I’d never been 23.” A part of him was this guy who never had a chance to be a kid because of all his responsibilities with the Navy. We wound up telling stories about his background in Vietnam and all the tragedies in his life. So we did really silly shows, stupid shows, funny shows, but we also did some very, very serious shows that really connected with people.
Right after you landed the career-making role of Magnum, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg cast you as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. You were all set to do it, but CBS nixed it for scheduling reasons, even though you could have been in both. You described that as “the World Series of disappointments,” but how did you ultimately become OK with how things worked out?
I don’t like the idea of being a victim. I somehow stayed somewhat philosophical about it, concentrated on the journey I was on. When I signed the contract for Magnum, finally, after a lot of strife around that, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. So Raiders comes along, and some might say it’s an even better opportunity, but nobody made me sign the contract. There were lots of people who said, “You gotta do whatever it takes [to do Raiders].” I mean, there was a story about an actor who did a pilot for a series, then got a big movie, and he drove his car into a wall—really permanently injured himself—to get out of the show so he could do the movie. But this was not a cross to bear for me. Yes, it was disappointing, especially when it turned out that I could do both, but Magnum was a pretty great consolation prize.
When Raiders came out, friends advised you not to go see it, but you went to the theater and had a blast.
It was so good! And it was so much Harrison’s accomplishment, as well as Steven and George’s. I just enjoyed it. I may have gotten a bit mad at times, thinking, What if?—but not really, because the movie’s just so great, and obviously Harrison is indelible in the role.
You may not have a four-decade-long movie franchise, but you have been married to the same person, the actress Jillie Mack, for 37 years. What’s the secret to a long, successful marriage in Hollywood?
Well, I love my wife. I don’t have the secret properties. Maybe the answer is not to search for the secret to how to behave in a long and happy marriage. It helps that she has an absolutely wonderful sense of humor and a kind of obvious joie de vivre. And we both come from the same backgrounds: She’s from a small town in England; I came from a little house in the Valley. I want to stay married, and I want to keep working. My dream is that the phone keeps ringing.
You’ve worn a mustache through countless fads and trends. Do you feel vindicated for having stuck to your guns, facial-hair-wise?
The mustache is just something—well, I wasn’t born with it, but there wasn’t a lot of conscious thought behind it. In those days, post-’60s, it was quite common, and I happened to have one, and I kind of liked it, and that was that. It doesn’t really matter to me whether I have a mustache or not. That said, I can’t say how many talk shows I’ve been on where they’d pull me aside beforehand and say, “Listen, when we bring you out, everyone in the audience is going to have a mustache, and we want you to act surprised. It’ll be great.” And I’d have to tell them, “Thanks for thinking of a bit for us to do, but I’ve done that on, like, seven shows already. I don’t think it’s quite so funny anymore.”
One last thing from your book that stopped me: You write that you tried out for The Dating Game in college—not with an eye to being an actor but to do “something that made me stand out a little, something girls might notice.” Something girls might notice? You’re Tom Selleck! Weren’t you Tom Selleck then?
No, I wasn’t. I was very shy. If I found a girl I’d like to go out with, I’d ask my friend Doug to fix us up, maybe take us on a double date. That was very much a part of me then, and it still is today—which I’m grateful for. After all, if you pick up a Person of the Universe Award one year and don’t get it the next, aren’t you in a lot of trouble?
