Character and charisma

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This article was published 06/07/2024 (697 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Tom Selleck recalls the time he was told by a fellow actor how a man in a white suit, seeing Selleck for the first time years ago, remarked: “Damn. He’s prettier than Elizabeth Taylor.”

Of course, that’s not how Selleck describes himself in You Never Know: A Memoir. Closer to the truth is that this superstar is like a proficient elevator: up to the job and down to earth.

Selleck drafted his book in longhand on yellow legal pads. It took him four years. The telling of his life, aided by Ellis Henican, is more comfort food than tell-all fodder. Contrary to what might be expected of someone his age writing about himself, there is no melancholy in this biography. If he has wounds, he doesn’t put words to them here.

Selleck’s parents were always supportive; his father provided sensible advice. He got into show business by accident. “I never had the slightest interest in acting,” Selleck writes.

However, in a chance meeting with an all-powerful Hollywood executive who had an avid interest in the college basketball he played, the 6’4” Selleck, not knowing who the man is, “ends up bullsh–ting with the president of 20th Century Fox and is promptly invited into the studio’s New Talent program.” That sounds like the moment meant to justify the title of his tale.

Good looks and luck jump-started Selleck’s career, but it was talent that carried him to the top as an actor, and still does at age 79. If there ever was a stout example of the Protestant ethic — that work is redeemable — Selleck has exemplified it in his working life every day since his showbiz beginnings. Early on he seemed headed to be a centerfold but ended up centre stage, and for some time now has been one of the highest-paid TV actors in the world and a friend of the famous, including Carol Burnett and the late Frank Sinatra.

At age 35, Selleck was the lead from the beginning of one of the most successful and money-making television series in history — the long-running Magnum, P.I., about an improbable sleuth in a red Ferrari keeping Hawaii safe. Today he’s the lifeblood of the hit TV series Blue Bloods, now in its 14th season. He plays New York’s police commissioner Frank Reagan with aplomb. (In Blue Bloods, Broadway star Len Cariou, born in St. Boniface, plays Reagan’s father.)

As Selleck recalls, all this attention has a discomforting downside — the loss of privacy and a perennial ache for family safety. But he knows and accepts it all as the price of celebrity.

At one point in You Never Know, Selleck recalls a freak car accident in Honolulu when he was helping his son, Kevin, learn to drive.

Kevin had a learner’s permit and wanted his dad to teach him how to use a stick shift. With Kevin behind the wheel, they ended up on the top of a three-story parking garage. His parking was perfect, and his father said so.

“Kevin let out the clutch. The Jeep lurched forward and over the concrete bumper stop to the steel-cable barrier, broke through, went over the edge, and we headed straight down toward the alley three stories below,” Selleck recalls.

“The Jeep had no roof, there were no seatbelts, and we were just wearing swim trunks and T-shirts,” he adds.

The Jeep was standing on its nose in the alley. Both were stunned but alive.

“Then I saw what had probably saved us from our three-story drop,” Selleck writes. They had landed on the empty trailer of an eight-man outrigger canoe. “I think that trailer and its heavy-duty suspension system absorbed a lot of the impact,” he notes.

You Never Know reveals Tom Selleck as a man who lives by the rules of character, and does it with luscious charm.

“So, for the people who make up s–t, there is nothing here for you.”

Barry Craig is a retired journalist.