Selleck Is a Star Unlike the Others

You Never Know — A Memoir
By Tom Selleck with Ellis Henican
(DEYST, 343 pages, $30)

In which, happily, Tom Selleck does not tell all.

I know what you’re thinking. You Never Know is just another one of those first-person memoirs of the stars where the subject gilds his/her own lily, settles scores with others, drops names, virtue signals, and tells things that shouldn’t be told, whether or not they happen to be true. Well, mostly it isn’t. (READ MORE from Larry Thornberry: The Sleepy Dormouse at 1600 Grilled)

I want to make it clear right off that I don’t usually concern myself with the stars, temporal or celestial. But this is Tom Selleck. Not your off-the-rack Hollywood weenie by a long shot. Had the subject been George Clooney I would not have abused the reading time.      

Selleck being a true gent, and existing outside of the progressive freak bubble that Hollywood has become, does not kiss and tell. He never virtue signals. He’s generous in his praise of actors and other colleagues who’ve added value to his shows and movies, and is not that hard on those who haven’t. While there are names — Carol Burnett, Frank Sinatra, Mae West, Leonard Nimoy, just to cite four — these, and others, are people he’s worked with over the course of a long and successful career on both the small and large screens, and so don’t really count as name-dropping.

You Never Know is a well written account of this accidental career that began in the mid-1960s in the obscurity of an occasional television commercial and uncredited bit-parts in movies. By steps, “laying bricks” Selleck calls it, the career blossomed to include the long-running, hit TV shows Magnum  and Blue Bloods as well as a host of popular feature films. The steps were never assured, thus the book’s title. Author Ellis Henican tells the story in the first person and in the conversational, one-on-one tone that Selleck might use if he were talking to a friend. His rendering projects the same kind of humor, warmth, and generosity that Selleck projects on the screen.

Selleck Sans Politics

The book shows readers many of the nuts, bolts, and circuitry of Hollywood production, how TV shows and movies make it, or don’t make it from the pitch to the screen. Money, egos, and timing play at least as big a role as talent or story. Timing accounts for why Selleck had to turn down the role of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark when it was offered to him by Stephen Spielberg. Selleck was contractually committed to Magnum, P.I., the show which jump-started his career.

Ironically, it’s exactly in the area that accounts for Selleck’s claim to the attention of conservative TAS readers that the book disappoints. Selleck rarely talks politics publicly, of the electoral or cultural kind, and when he does he claims to be more libertarian than either Republican or Democrat. But the characters he plays tend to hold traditional values. We see this in Magnum, which centers on three Viet Nam vets, all dealing with their wartime experiences, but they’re clearly patriots. So is NYPD Commissioner Frank Reagan and his multi-generational clan of Reagan cops in the long-running and popular Blue Bloods, where dedication to duty and the importance of family are central. We also see American foundational values in some of Selleck’s excellent westerns, my favorite of which is Monte Walsh. (READ MORE: Yakima Canutt: The Little-Known but Great American Stuntman)

No revelation that this is not where the center of gravity of Hollywood is now, with woke actors, directors, and other Tinsel Town tinhorns preaching the latest progressive pieties to their ever dwindling audiences. Because he’s not one of the current in-crowd, Selleck chooses to avoid the Hollywood party circuit. He lives on an avacodo farm in Ventura County, 60 miles north of Los Angeles, with his wife of almost 40 years, actor and dancer Jilly Mack. (This last is no doubt a disappointment to millions of women who would love to book some time with him, handsome dog that he is even while looking down the barrel of 80.)

Reading the book I would have liked to have learned more about what it’s like to be the cultural odd-man-out in a one-industry town that polices the opinions of its own. Fortunately, Selleck became a bankable star before his distinctly non-leftish approach to life became grounds for career cancellation. He’s just too good for cash-flow to cast into outer darkness. I’m sure Selleck has some pear-shaped thoughts on this, and on how Hollywood has become a cultural force for the worse daffiness out of the cultural left. But we get none of this in You Never Know.

Nonetheless, Selleck’s story is entertaining and edifying. Those looking for a good weekend read, and perhaps a temporary escape from the catastrophe or our current politics, could do a lot worse than You Never Know. 

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