You Never Know: A Memoir

by Tom Selleck

even after I recovered, there were no recriminations, no “You’re grounded for a year.” Nothing like that. They knew they didn’t have to push consequences because I would push them on myself. They knew by this time they had succeeded in passing on to me the gift of conscience.

when I did screw up, which was a fairly frequent occurrence for a seventeen-year-old, the severest consequence was knowing that I had disappointed my mom and dad.

The lessons you experience, not the ones you are simply told, are the ones you remember most clearly.

I was reminded of a phrase he used: “Risk is the price you pay for opportunity.”

Look, being offended is a choice; you have to make a choice to be offended. I chose not to be offended.

The way Ben told it, the larger-than-life director became like a father to him. “Now, somebody was always in the box with Ford, especially after he’d had a few,” Ben told us. “I guess it was inevitable my time would come.” One day at lunch, Ford was riding Ben pretty hard. That didn’t sit well. Ben walked away, and the two men never spoke again. “So now Ford’s dying in Palm Springs,” Ben said, picking up the story.

And Wayne says to me, ‘Pappy’s dying. Ben, I can’t see him like this.’ ” Ben swallowed hard and drove down to the hospital in Palm Springs. This was August 1973. The two men had not exchanged a word since their long-ago bust-up. “Ford wasn’t conscious, so I just sat there,” Ben said.

Ben must have been in the hospital room for a couple of hours when Ford opened his eye. “He looked over and saw me sitting there,” Ben said. With labored breath, Ford said, “Johnson, always stay real.” And John Ford died.

Actors, at least this actor at this point in time, can be prone to putting too much responsibility on their own shoulders for the success or failure of a project. I suppose that thinking began to creep in when I started doing leading roles. I had been laying bricks for over a decade and had never really stopped and reflected on the journey. It had been a long road, so the progress was hard to quantify. But the time had served me well. I was twelve years older and was growing into—Curt Conway’s favorite term—my instrument.

Universal is trying to make me do a pilot, and they have no right to do that.” “It’s not something you want to do?” Jim asked. “I hate it.” Jim said something about not wanting to give career advice to anyone, but then he said, “Look. You don’t have much power. But if you don’t want to do it and they want you, you will never have more power than you do right now. That’s all I’m gonna say.” That advice from Jim was like a floating spar in a shipwreck.

Jim had never ducked a fight. In 1960, Warner Bros. had suspended him because of a writers’ strike while Maverick was being filmed. That didn’t seem right to him. So he fought back, declared his contract void, sued the studio, and won his case at trial. That legal precedent benefited actors for decades. Later in his Rockford run, Jim would go to war with Universal. He’d end up accusing the studio of “creative accounting,” a phrase that actors and directors quickly rallied around. So when Jim told me not to overlook the power I had, I paid close attention.

My friend George Will, in his terrific book on baseball, Men at Work, wrote, “Luck is unpredictable but talent takes advantage of it. Thus the talented have, in effect, more of it.”

Don had written a terrific movie, and it truly was a movie. No happy scene at the end where the main characters prove how much they like each other and why you should tune in next week. It was a story about a career Naval Academy graduate who served as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam and decided to hit the pause button. No, not because of disillusionment or delayed stress, but because, as he put it, “One day I woke up at thirty-three and realized I’d never been twenty-three.” His name was Thomas Magnum.

The hard-earned lesson that all those years had taught me was that you can’t control the outcome, but you’re fully in control of the effort.

The voice sounded kinda like it came from Steve McGarrett—and why not? Jack Lord was standing next to me. Jack had reached out and offered to show me around Diamond Head Studios. To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect.

What I saw was a gracious, respectful, somewhat formal man who chose to be there when he could have been on the beach at the Kahala condos. Jack seemed very polite by nature and, when you do 281 episodes as the lead in a series, any grandness may very well have been in the eyes of the beholder. And anyway, in show business, it was his island. That he was speaking to me as a peer was, well, fortifying.

Jack talked about the challenge of combining the crew from the mainland with the local crew. He said a film company on a weekly television series should be like a family. Jack looked right at me and said, “You are in a unique position to make that happen.” Jack in his own polite way was reminding me of a responsibility I like to think I already knew would be squarely on my shoulders this go-round.

He stopped in front of a bungalow. “That’s my office. Space is at a premium here. So, I want you to have it.” “Well, thank you, Jack. You know I’ve never had an office.” “Well, I think you’re gonna need it,” he said with a smile. What a kind thing to do! Jack could easily have kept that space, and nobody would have said a word. But he was passing the torch. And at that moment, I knew it. And I think he knew it. That was so important to me. But you know, it seemed to be even more important to him.

“One of the first sentences I learned from my mother in my childhood was from this Holy Scripture: ‘Aloha ke akua’—in other words, ‘God is aloha.’ Aloha is the power of God seeking to unite what is separated in the world—the power that unites heart with heart, soul with soul, life with life, culture with culture, race with race, nation with nation.”

Fame is a vapor. Popularity is an accident. Money takes wing. The only thing that endures is character.

Kyle was in his bed, propped up by pillows. He was very weak. His head was resting on his chest. We put on our smiles when we said hello, though we weren’t sure he could hear us. I didn’t know what I could say to him. I looked at Larry, who was also at a loss for words. But in the next moment, he reached down and took off the team ring our three characters wore and put it in Kyle’s hand. After a moment, Kyle’s eyes opened wide. He clutched the ring and slowly looked up at us with a very big smile on his face. Leave it to my friend Larry. In a letter, Kyle’s mom and dad told us their boy was buried with that ring. I will always remember Kyle Schumacher.

You have to choose to be offended. That was something I had told myself many times. In today’s world, it might be: Think a second time before you push send. I settled on: File it away, keep laying bricks, make the show better, do good work.

First days are hard. And this one was no different. I was going to be the guy in this movie, but inside, I was just a kid from Sherman Oaks. While my driver brought me out to the location, I had alternated between overrehearsing my lines (which I knew cold) and telling myself, You’re enough. Which, for some reason, was always a comfort.

A lot is said, but when it’s time for goodbye, Jack says, “And one more thing, O’Malley.” It appears he is giving in to the sentiment when he says, “Always remember . . . the oxen are slow, but the earth is patient. ” And he gives me a big hug. My friend Jack ad-libbed that line. It stayed in the movie.

After we finished, Louis L’Amour gave me a leather-bound edition of The Shadow Riders. He signed it: “To Tom Selleck. You make my people live. What more can I say? Louis.” What a great ride we all had.

Leads, particularly the kind of leads I was being asked to do, should look easy. They’re not. But since you’re kind of the audience’s representative in the story, you don’t want them to see the work. And if the viewer says, “Oh, he’s just playing himself,” well, that’s the goal. Because you’re not. And that my fellow actors recognized it meant so much.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. —RAYMOND CHANDLER

Back when I was doing The Young and the Restless at CBS Studios in Hollywood, I would go across the hallway to the stage on the other side, sneak in, and watch Carol Burnett and her talented cast rehearsing for their weekly show. I was a huge fan of The Carol Burnett Show. It was required stay-at-home viewing, along with The Rockford Files, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and Newhart.

“Don’t worry, we’ll just do five minutes of stand-up.” Just five minutes of stand-up with Bob Hope. Oh-kay! In both cases, what he wanted me to do was pretty scary. Inside, I was still the kid at Grant High School who was afraid to get up in front of everybody in speech class. But when Bob Hope is on the other end of the phone line, how do you say no?

There were a couple things I knew I should not do. Don’t look at the cigar when you light it; instead, be checking out the room. And don’t look down at the stairs; instead, be checking out the crowd in the casino below. Either one would detract from the audience’s sense of a kind of bigger-than-life quality this character needed. So I lit the cigar, check. I started down the stairs as if I owned the place, check. And I tripped and fell in a less-than-bigger-than-life way.

I got up much more embarrassed than bruised, which was greeted by applause from the entire company. I laughed and applauded with them. I wonder if Cary Grant ever fell down the stairs. The fall was not in the picture.

Like Thomas Magnum, I had never been to the Wall. I went into the memorial, down the walk, looking at the names beside me. A walk all Americans should try to make. I stopped short when I saw it. 2LT Ronald M. Montapert. I can’t even try to describe the emotions, the memories, that flashed through my mind. Ron was my Sigma Chi fraternity brother. He was one of the seven of us who went through our fraternity’s Hell Week initiation together. Ron was a self-described surfer dude whose favorite word was radical. He was gung ho about everything in life.

On April 15, 1969, in Kiên Giang Province, he stepped on an anti-personnel mine, and we lost him. Ron was twenty-five years old. He was a good guy.

If you are able, save them a place inside you and save one backward glance when you are leaving for the places they can no longer go. Be not ashamed to say you loved them, though you may or may not have always. Take what they have left and what they have taught you with their dying and keep it with your own. And in that time when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane, take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes you left behind. MAJOR MICHAEL DAVIS O’DONNELL DAK TO, VIETNAM JANUARY 1, 1970

There was a moment in the service when everything stopped. We all sat in the quiet for some time, alone with our thoughts. And then the church was filled with Frank singing. He was singing, “Put your dreams away for another day, and I will take their place in your heart.” We were all the better for having known him. We were lucky to have him. My friend was one of a kind.

Magnum was the first to portray Vietnam veterans in a positive way at a time when the nation was still dealing with the wounds of the Vietnam War and its impact on American popular culture. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized the real gravity of why the Smithsonian was honoring Magnum. They got it, just like Professor Horace Newcomb got it. It was vindication for me of a hard-fought victory over the objections of the studio and the network.

I love my work. I love the craft of acting. How fortunate that the somewhat aimless path I was on was altered simply by serendipity. How fortunate that one single accidental opportunity would open my eyes to the possible.

That’s what we’ve become on Blue Bloods, a family. Not just a bunch of actors playing family members, but a bunch of actors who have become a family themselves. And time has graced us all with the opportunity to embrace that. With gratitude, Blue Bloods will be starting its fourteenth season. And the show is still bringing it. It continues to be one of the top three scripted shows in all of broadcast television. And it’s remained the number one show on Friday nights since its premiere in 2010.

there’s no education in the second kick of a mule.

serendipity played no part in this. This came from experience and knowledge that developed out of hard knocks and disappointments and the willingness to take a risk or else be stuck in a show that would never be what it could and should be.

Kevin’s reply was that the police commissioner was not a cop. He was more like a CEO. But in this case, his employees were people who put their lives on the line every day.

It’s been a long, bumpy road. A lot of singles, doubles, quite a few home runs, and a whole lot of strikeouts. A lot of miles, some pretty good ones too. And the best thing is, when I look down the road, I can’t see the end.