Tom Selleck is 79 and, whew, just look at this magnificent specimen
Tom Selleck is 79 and, whew, just look at this magnificent specimen
Tom Selleck kills the engine of his ATV, and the world goes quiet. It’s mostly silent here on his 63-acre ranch, a hilly oasis about an hour west of the gaudy riches and beguiling promises of Hollywood.
“It’s like a dream to me. I kind of know every foot of it. And every day, I come out, check my wells, check everything out, see what’s growing. It’s a perfect antidote to all the madness.”
Selleck purchased the ranch, which used to belong to Dean Martin, in 1988 and has maintained it with proceeds made from a half-century of playing big men on the small screen: “Magnum, P.I.” in the ’80s, an arc on “Friends” in the ’90s, now the long-running CBS show “Blue Bloods,” on since 2010.
The ranch is Selleck’s refuge from red carpets and other settings where people look him in the mustache instead of the eyes, and ask the same questions over and over. (Who is he wearing? He’s wearing no one. He’s wearing a tux. The one he bought. C’mon.)
He wakes up and feeds four dogs, four sheep, two cows and a few horses. Selleck himself plants the oak trees, now more than 500 of them.
“My back knows how many.”
About half the memoir focuses on his failure to hit it big before 35. There are a few celebrity stories — one features an impatient Frank Sinatra, at the end of his acting career, demanding Jack Daniel’s and wearing a colostomy bag on the set of “Magnum, P.I.” — and a few soft complaints about various strikes by the Screen Actors Guild.
The book ends with the “Magnum, P.I.” finale in 1988 — leaving about half of his life (and all of his mustache!) unremembered.
He just started writing one day, got about 200 pages in, and realized it was still the 1980s.
“I had no plan,” he says.
Of course he didn’t have a plan. He rarely did, even before he got famous. As he’s fond of saying: He didn’t know where he was going, but there’s no use being late.
But when you’re that goddamn handsome, who needs a plan? He floundered at the University of Southern California, which he attended on a basketball scholarship. The only reason he’s an actor is because he took a theater history class for an easy A, and the teacher introduced him to an agent, who in the mid-1960s got him commercial work for the Air Force and for Pepsi. Then toothpaste, soap, auto parts, Schlitz beer. He went on “The Dating Game” with some frat buddies on a whim — Bachelor No. 2 “plans to enter the world of business” — and caught the eye of a casting director at Twentieth Century Fox.
Suddenly, he was in Fox’s new-talent program, with another young actor who could also grow a helluva mustache: Sam Elliott. Their peers’ reaction to Selleck at the time, Elliott says, was, “How could such a nice guy be so impossibly handsome?”
In 1967, Selleck received a draft-physical notice, which might have concerned someone with a plan. But Selleck rolled with it and joined the California Army National Guard, serving for six years but never seeing Vietnam.
The talent program shut down, which might have concerned someone with a plan. But he was handsome and kept working, in small roles like “stud” and “deputy.”
He caught the eye of Mae West, who objectified him in “Myra Breckinridge” (1970) and compared him to Cary Grant in the press.
He points to a young oak with a creeping dark coloration crawling up one side of its trunk.
“This one’s a little sick, and I really care about it. I planted that for my dad, and he pruned it.”
He flips the ATV’s engine back on and drives, crunching gravel as whiptail lizards scamper, until he reaches the ranch’s summit. Overlooking the valleys is a gazebo from the Halifax, Nova Scotia, set of the first of nine TV movies in which he portrayed yet another officer of the law: alcoholic detective Jesse Stone.
He calls this spot the Jesse Stone Lookout. From here you can see the contours of a 1993 wildfire that charred 53 acres of the ranch, prompting him to plant the newly barren land with 2,000 avocado trees — most of which later died in a drought. From here you can see a property developed by Sylvester Stallone that Selleck calls “Stallonehenge.” From here, he watches his 80th year roll along. This month is notable: His memoir, “You Never Know,” is out Tuesday, and on May 17 “Blue Bloods” airs the first half of its series finale.
On his ranch, Tom Selleck is a tree planter. In Hollywood, he considers himself a bricklayer. He built his ranch oak by oak, and he built his career brick by brick.
Eventually, you run out of bricks. Right? Selleck says he would’ve kept going with “Blue Bloods,” but CBS had costs to cut. Last month it was the seventh-most-watched show on broadcast television. Around 5 million Americans still tune in Friday nights to watch Selleck demonstrate stern but loving masculinity as a New York police commissioner. It’s not the 18 million that watched “Magnum” 40 years ago, but times have changed.
Has Selleck?
The first thing you notice, upon meeting him, isn’t the mustache. It’s his height: a towering 6-foot-4. On a warm spring day, he wears loose blue jeans, a red checkered shirt and a tweed vest.
At 79, he’s assumed a grandfatherly air. His stories are infused with nostalgia and introspection. He often breaks into mirthful laughter. His dimples form, and you can see the young heartthrob his friend Ted Danson calls “a magnificent specimen of a man.”
Selleck is fond of aphorisms and mantras, both in writing and conversation.
“Keep laying bricks.”
“Always expect the expected.”
And the line from his 1990 western “Quigley Down Under” that he wanted as the memoir’s title: “Don’t know where I’m goin’, but there’s no use bein’ late.”
Reading his memoir feels an awful lot like chatting with him in the 114-year-old hunting lodge on his ranch, decorated with a stuffed owl and a painting of the director John Ford, who made 14 films with John Wayne — the kind of westerns that Selleck would make in film and TV. Selleck wrote his memoir on lined yellow pads with the guidance of columnist Ellis Henican.
“You’re the first male I’ve encountered who read it,” he tells me, with delight. The foundation of his career, like Wayne’s before him, was his masculinity, his sheer size, his simple coolness, that bygone allure: Women wanted to be with him, and men wanted to be him.
“He is an old-fashioned — in the best sense of the word — gentleman,” says Danson, who co-starred in Selleck’s only bona fide hit on the big screen, “Three Men and a Baby.” Danson adds, “He is that perfect western hero, the embodiment of that old Gary Cooper leading man.”
Selleck is a private person, particularly about his politics. He was briefly an unpaid board member of the National Rifle Association but has made it clear that he was never its spokesman. He has made minimal donations to candidates on either side of the aisle.
“He is honorable, honest, bright, caring and conservative,” Danson says. “I’ve always respected him hugely, even though we are a little on other ends of the spectrum politically.”
The closest Selleck will get to politics is ruminating on what’s “eating the country alive”: “Everybody’s looking for a chance to get angry, to be offended. It’s a choice. … And frankly, that’s not the American compact. The American compact is we agree to disagree.”
He’s even more private about his personal life, which made crafting a memoir challenging.
“I didn’t do the book to set the record straight,” Selleck says. “I didn’t do the book to settle scores. I didn’t at all want to make it a political book, and I didn’t want to talk about who I was dating.”
