Why Tom said YES to Diana ... but NO to Indiana Jones!
Damn, he’s prettier than Elizabeth Taylor!’ a fellow actor once said semi-jokingly of Tom Selleck, who was and remains a prime specimen of American maleness, complete with bushy moustache.
As tall sitting down as other people are when standing up, if Tom perched on a horse his legs dangled on the ground. Hearing that he was 6ft 7in, Mae West quipped, ‘Never mind the six feet. Let’s talk about the seven inches.’ Invited to a White House ball, Princess Diana told the Reagans the person she’d like as a dance partner, after John Travolta, was Tom Selleck. Her wish was granted.
As we learn from his genial memoir, Tom, now 79, is a genuine he-man. Throughout his life he has played basketball, baseball and volleyball to professional standard. He was a jock at the University of Southern California: ‘I was always sleeping through my early classes,’ after nights of general roistering.
In 1967, Tom underwent basic training with the U.S. Army – ‘The honest truth is that I excelled in the military’ – where he spent six years. He joined a unit deployed to sort out fires, floods, earthquakes and civil disturbances, enforcing curfews. He also attended a Tactical Air Command guards officer programme. ‘I was number one in my class,’ earning everybody’s respect, quickly being made up to sergeant. ‘I pulled my weight,’ he says proudly.
He left the services for what in retrospect is a comical reason. He didn’t want to keep his hair cropped. ‘I resigned. I was done. Because of a haircut.’ For the thing is, he’d already been hired to make commercials – Pepsi, beer, cars, toothpaste and cologne. ‘He smells just the way a man should smell,’ said the girl in the advert, played by Teri Garr. Tom appeared on reality dating shows, where he was popular with the audience, and posed for posters, draping towels over nude starlets: ‘Tom, could you give us another inch of right breast, please.’
Though he had ‘no real acting experience and no real desire to become an actor,’ he was recruited by Richard Zanuck of Twentieth Century Fox to join its New Talent scheme. ‘I got paid to flirt with Farrah Fawcett,’ he recalls. He joined dance, voice and movement classes, and was told he had the makings of a ‘good-looking leading man. At some level, you have to deliver that.’
It was years before Tom was able to do so. You Never Know recounts in detail his apprenticeship in dozens of unsold pilots, walk-ons in daytime soap operas and guest spots in Second World War buddy stories. He made horror pictures in the Philippines, which he pleads with us never to track down – Terminal Island, Daughters Of Satan and Superbeast: ‘Half-man, half-monster, ripping helpless victims to shreds!’
He was regularly ‘fourth or fifth banana’ in television productions, and had to endure the humiliation of reporters asking him on the red carpet: ‘Should I know who you are?’ He was eventually saved by a new agent, Bettye McCartt, who got him cast in a Western, The Sacketts, which starred Glenn Ford, a veteran who kept blowing his lines. Tom wore costumes once made for John Wayne: ‘I guess I was almost his size.’
The cowboy mini-series was noticed by Steven Spielberg, who offered Tom the role of Indiana Jones in Raiders Of The Lost Ark. By one of those flukes of fate, Tom had, only moments before, committed himself to Magnum, P.I., which was to be made in Hawaii. As it turned out, there was a strike in the television industry, so he would have been free to accept the film part after all. ‘I could have done both!’ he howls to this day.
There were to be 163 episodes of Magnum, P.I., which ran for eight solid years, beginning in 1980. Seventeen million viewers tuned in, rising to 50.7 million, until at last the series was knocked off the top spot by The Cosby Show.
Thomas Magnum, drawing on Tom’s knowledge of the military, was a former Navy SEAL and Vietnam veteran who drove a Ferrari, had stewardesses on each arm, and operated as a private investigator, or gumshoe, in Waikiki Beach. ‘There were also a couple of dobermans,’ patrolling the estate where Magnum lived in a guest house. There were dangerous stunts to undertake, in which Magnum was attacked by the dogs. The trainer said to Tom, ‘Here’s a piece of steak. Show the meat to the dog. Then conceal it in your fist… and the dog will come for you.’ Yikes.
There were funny feuds with the caretaker, Higgins, played with camp snootiness by John Hillerman, The Great Hildini. Magnum’s friends were helicopter pilot T.C. and a bar owner, Orville Wright, known as Rick, who joined him in his scrapes, eg being stuck in bank vaults or in a lift in a building about to be blown up.
Now and again there were flashbacks to Vietnam or to Magnum’s earlier days, to explicate his mood. As Tom says, Magnum, P.I. adopted a ‘cumulative narrative. One episode’s events can greatly affect later events, but they’re seldom directly tied together. Each week’s programme is distinct, yet each is grafted onto the body of the series, its characters’ pasts.’
Maybe. I simply enjoyed the explosions and gunfights.
The show was held in high enough regard for Carol Burnett and Frank Sinatra to appear as guest stars. Sinatra did it for expenses, which turned out to be in high six figures. He had a colostomy bag and it was his last acting appearance. His sole stipulation was that the scriptwriter should ensure ‘I get to beat somebody up.’
We don’t have much here about the private life – this is autobiography without any autobiography. Tom is pleased to say that when, in 1987, he married a dancer from Cats, ‘no one knew it’ – the press were kept in the dark.
He was introduced to Jillie Mack, his bride, by Brian Blessed, also in Cats, who refused to shut up about climbing Everest. ‘Brian started again. I kept nodding, so he wouldn’t know my head was asleep.’
When Magnum, P.I. came to an end, Tom was in Disney’s Three Men And A Baby, which grossed £188million worldwide. There have also been 283 episodes as a NYPD commissioner in Blue Bloods, about which Tom tells us little, and which I’ve never seen as it is on Sky Atlantic.
I spotted only one error. I don’t think Yugoslavia has an Asiatic Coast. Adriatic must be meant. Tom was in Zagreb making a foreign espionage caper, High Roads To China, with Brian Blessed, who was playing Suleman Khan, the heavy.
During the shoot Brian talked knowledgeably about crampons.