You Never Know by Tom Selleck review — demise of the 1980s beefcake

Tom Selleck could have written an interesting memoir, just as he could have had an interesting career. But he didn’t. He had more control over the former, but to the latter first. Selleck spent 15 years hacking it out in bit parts in roles with names like “Young Stud 4” and in adverts for toothpaste and Pepsi (“I guess you could say the advertising world considered me a beverage kind of guy,” he writes) before finally breaking through as the star of the successful 1980s TV cop show Magnum, PI. With masculine looks verging on parody and his signature moustache, Selleck was to the 1980s what Burt Reynolds had been to the 1970s, a beefcake who could tell a joke (although judging from his memoir he prefers comparisons to Cary Grant, which is such a stretch it cricks the neck).

One of the great Hollywood what-ifs is that Selleck was originally cast by Steven Spielberg and George Lucas as Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but CBS wouldn’t let him do it at the same time as Magnum. Such a missed opportunity would destroy some actors, but Selleck — according to this book — shrugged it off. At least he was able to console himself with Magnum’s success, and after that a starring role in the still deeply enjoyable 1987 mega-hit Three Men and a Baby. And then … what? Well, like many 1980s actors, he floundered in the 1990s. He was introduced to a new generation as Monica’s older boyfriend in Friends, and when Monica rejected macho Richard for younger, boyish Chandler, it felt like a reflection of Hollywood’s loss of interest in the manly looks it once celebrated. The pretty boy look was in ascendancy, epitomised by, in the 1990s, Brad Pitt and, today, Ryan Gosling. And Selleck was at the losing end there.

A luckier, or cannier, actor might have made a career out of satirising his former image, as Reynolds did in Boogie Nights. But that requires having a sense of humour about oneself, and judging from his memoir, You Never Know, that is not one of Selleck’s strengths. Instead he has spent the past 14 years in the po-faced police drama Blue Bloods. And that is that.

Despite Selleck’s not very interesting, beverage-kinda-guy career, he is an interesting anomaly in Hollywood. He came from an army family and excelled in the military. He served in the California National Guard during the Vietnam War and was dispatched to control the student anti-war riots. “It must have been fun for a bunch of college kids to burn down a building … That isn’t fair, but I don’t care. Their behaviour was a real problem for me and haunts me to this day,” he writes. Take that, namby-pamby liberals. He has also served as a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, taking over from Charlton Heston, and was on its board of directors. To describe this as putting him at odds with most of Hollywood would be like describing his moustache as merely part of his image.

And yet, he talks about none of this in his memoir (he doesn’t — unforgivably! — even mention the ’tache.) “Some day I’ll write a book about my time in the military, just not now,” he writes, as if he weren’t — at that very second — writing a book. But with a determination that verges on admirable, he refuses to write about anything potentially interesting.

Celebrity memoirs require at least one of two things: self-revelation and gossip. Selleck adamantly refuses to disclose either. The end of his first marriage, to Jacqueline Ray, is sprung on the reader. “A lot has been written about our marriage, almost none of it true. So for the people who make shit up, there is nothing here for you. I simply will not feed the machine,” he harrumphs. The machine or, in fact, the reader.

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Repeatedly, he writes that he won’t, or can’t, tell the reader something. “How did I feel? I don’t know. Feelings are hard to describe,” he writes about the success of Three Men and a Baby. Clearly. I can’t remember the last time I read a book in which the prose was so leaden, the writer so palpably reluctant to write. Princess Diana, we learn, was “very beautiful”, the musical Cats — where he spotted his second wife, Jillie Mack, when she was part of the cast — was, he exclusively reveals, “unique … the song Memory was, well, memorable.”

Selleck writes that his purpose with the book was “to share my private, personal emotions and feelings, primarily about my work”. And yet he writes absolutely nothing about Friends, next to nothing about Three Men and a Baby (unsurprisingly, he does not acknowledge what has always been obvious to me: that it is actually a movie about a gay thruple), and zilch about its successful but inferior sequel, Three Men and a Little Lady. You’d have thought a film in which Fiona Shaw, of all people, throws herself at him might merit a mention, but no.

However, if there exists a reader who has been longing for a book detailing all of Selleck’s early auditions, followed by 150 pages dissecting what feels like every Magnum episode, then happy news: your wait is over. Alas, I fear that reader may only be Selleck himself.
You Never Know: A Memoir by Tom Selleck (HarperCollins £22 pp320). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members