From Magnum Pi to Blue Bloods and more,
actor Tom Selleck has ascended to heights he never imagined.
Now he's taking in the view with our Tracy Smith.
Watch your step, there's no hand for you.
It is a little stiff
on the highest hill at Tom Selleck's California ranch.
It's hard to beat the panorama.
I tell you. For a guy who values his privacy,
you couldn't pick a better spot than this.
Thank you. At 79, you could say the actor is
very familiar with
the view from the top.
Hey, come on, don't overthink this guy's.
You're as tough as they come.
For the past 14 years,
Selleck has starred in the hit CBS show Blue Bloods
as the head of the NYPD and the head of
a strong and often headstrong family.
I knew that you and Dad would be for that
rule,
even if it wasn't actually a rule.
But the rule does make enormous sense.
The show is set to end this year,
but there's been some pushback on that,
most notably from Selleck himself.
Is Blue Bloods ending well?
That's a good question. I
will continue to think that CBS will come to their
senses.
We're the third highest scripted show in all of broadcast.
We're winning the night. All the cast wants to come
back.
And I can tell you this,
we aren't sliding off down a Cliff.
We're doing good shows and still holding our place.
So I don't know. You tell me
It's not the first time Tom Selleck has been at
odds with the powers that be in a career that's
been long and legendary.
In his most famous role in the 80s,
the character Thomas Magnum wore a Detroit Tigers baseball cap.
That's a nod to the town in which Tom Selleck
himself was born.
Long before Magnum and the mustache,
he was an athlete at the University of Southern California,
and after a less than stellar academic career,
he found work in ads.
People are switching to ban basic selling products like Ban
Basic and bar soap.
Safeguard doesn't need heavy perfume to mask odor.
Good morning. Good morning.
He smells just the way a man should smell
clean. Yep, That's Terry Garr and Penny Marshall.
Back when they were all young and struggling,
you told yourself early on going to auditions and interviews,
you would literally say to yourself in the car,
you're good enough, Tom. I'd say you're enough,
but that's thank you.
Maybe that good would have helped.
But I didn't think of that.
But you're enough, Tom. You'd say that to yourself.
I did, I did. But little of what he did
in his early career was ever enough.
Not the soap opera gig I could use a little
transfusion this for me
or the six TV pilots he made.
And then he was signed to do Magnum Pi,
and around the same time,
Selleck was offered another role from Steven Spielberg.
Steven said, here's the script,
Go read it. Tell me if you like it,
because we want you from
Indiana Jones. So I got to about Page 8 in
Stevens office and I just went,
oh,
this is really good. But in a story that's become
legend,
he was forced to turn down Raiders of the Lost
Ark for Magnum.
In a long-awaited memoir out this week,
Selick shares the details of what he calls the World
Series of Disappointments and how he quickly made peace with
it.
You can make yourself a victim or just smile and
say that's really ironic and you chose to smile.
I had a good job coming up,
a job I would have dreamed of
Raiders or not. Magnum, Pi debuted in
1980 on CBS about a former Navy SEAL and Vietnam
vet turned private investigator.
The studio wanted to lose the Vietnam element.
Back then. The wounds of the war were still fresh,
but Selick and his producer fought hard to keep it
in.
And the show was a hit among its biggest fans,
Frank Sinatra, who once told Magnum Co star Larry Minetti
that he'd like to be on the show.
And Larry comes to me and says
Frank wants to do the show
and he said, but he wants to be asked,
so you have to call him.
And he wanted to do it right away.
So I said, well, we're going to have to write
it for you.
What? What do you want to do?
He said, oh, I don't care,
Just make sure I get to beat somebody up.
That was his condition.
Yeah,
that's Frank.
Go. Hey, Nick.
The Magnum Pi guest shot was
Sinatra's last acting job. We
got him, honey, but it was only the beginning of
Tom Selleck's reign as an 80 sex symbol.
That smile, that swagger, that mustache.
In private, however, Selleck was smitten by British actor Jilly
Mack,
whom he first spotted when she was in the London
production of Cats.
I got checked out by some of the cats,
never Jilly, one of the cast members,
told her. That half time,
he says. You know who keeps staring at you?
Tom Selleck and I don't know how to
clean this up. She just said who the is that?
She didn't know who I was from Adam,
which to me was the greatest thing in the world.
They married in secret in
1987, just before Magnum entered its final season.
They've been together ever since.
By that time, Selleck says,
he was burned out, but he knew he'd helped create
something that was more than just ATV show.
When Magnum ended, we got a call from the Smithsonian
and they said we want to honor Magnum.
We need some artifacts. And they took my hat and
my the ring.
I wore the team ring in Vietnam and
my Hawaiian shirt, the red one,
and we went back there and they read the citation.
They gave us credit for being the first show
that showed Vietnam Veterans in a positive light.
So the fight was worth it.
He said it was for him.
These days he spends most of his non working time
on his ranch and it's not hard to see why.
You know, hopefully I'll keep working enough to come hold
on to the place.
Seriously, that's an issue if you stopped working.
If I stop working, yeah.
Am I set for life?
Yeah, but maybe not on a
63 acre ranch. Happily, he likes his job,
and after 60 years in front of the camera,
Tom Selleck knows he's enough.
So, bigger picture, when you look down the road,
what do you see?
Hopefully work.
As an actor, you never lose.
I don't lose anyway in that sense that
every time I finish a job,
it's my last job. Do you still have that sense?
I like the fact that there's no excuses.
You just go to work
and you do the work.
And I have a a lot of reverence for what
I call the work,
and I love it and
I'd like to keep doing it.