What a great story.

It is? I put it in the book, so I hope it is. Yeah.

Welcome back to where Everybody knows your name. Today, I'm talking to an acting legend whose talent and effortless charisma spans generations. I mean, who else could have worked with May West and Start on Bluebloods. I'm talking about the great Tom Selleck, and I'm honored to call him my friend. This was his first ever podcast recording, and I'm so tickled that it was on this show. We got into a lot working on Magnum PI, his experience with May West, even our time together on the three men in a baby movies. We also talked about the process of writing his new memoir, which came out after we recorded this. It's called You Never Know, and I can't wait to dig into it. Anyway, here's somebody we've all loved watching forever, one of the great gentlemen in this business, Tom Selleck. I can't tell you how excited I am. I get to sit with you for an hour and chew the fat.

Yeah, what we used to do there.

Not for a full hour. No, I mean, and not for a long time. It's so funny that I have moments with that marked maybe your career a little bit, too, but definitely my career with Magnum and Three Men Unabandoned.

I know them well. You remember your Magnum episode?

Yes, completely. Literally, I do.

It was monumental for us.

I remember. First off, it was also the day you got picked up for season 2.

That's exactly right because we had done 13 in our first season, and we were doing pretty good, but you never know. That was the day we found out. But it was also monumental because I could spot you because you were smart enough. You were playing the bad guy. Right. Who wasn't supposed to be the bad guy, but often- A wimpy husband.

Let's tell the truth. Often- murderous wimpy husband.

But often at episodic TV level, you got an and just they have to prove they're going to be the bad guy, and you wouldn't do that. But here was the monumental thing for the show.

I remember, we're on a boat.

Yeah, we're on the boat. You have to get stupid, which you did. You had a gun. So, of course, you got stupid enough to let me kick it out of your hand. And then we fight. And you go over to the boat and pull out a big grappling hook.

Grappling hook, yeah.

Andrea Marcovici, playing your wife, your girlfriend, was behind me. You're acting up a storm. You're acting your little brains out with this grappling hook, and I go, Wait a minute, stop.

Stop shooting.

Stop. Yeah, we need. I said, I can't do this. Look, I had done so many clichés by then, and we were going to get into that. I said, He's got a grappling hook, and she's back here. I got the keys to the boat. Why don't I just grab her, dive in the water, and run away? That's what you did. They really freaked out. Oh, no, because we weren't allowed to change anything because the riders were back in LA.

Dawn, right?

Dawn.

Yeah.

Three hours ahead or it was hard to get them on the phone. Why three hours behind? So they were getting later. And I just said, I can't do it. And it was a seminal moment for us. I ended up diving in the water. Then I wasn't worried about you. I think you dove in the water another way and you're run over by a boat.

Yes, I get mine.

You got yours. But But you weren't- It was so much change in the show and commenting on those clichés that helped us make our mark, I think. It was that show I didn't know whether you'd remember the. No, totally. Well, I think we had about two hours where we sat around and talked. Anyway, and I think within a year, you were doing cheers.

Yeah, about a year, I think. Yeah.

I was amazing. I know that guy.

God, I remember it happened fast for you, the mega stardomeness of being Magnum. I remember you had a bus. It wasn't like a trailer. You had a bus that they could drive you.

It was the big motor home. I didn't graduate to the rock and roll bus. No.

But, man, I remember when they would call you to come to the set, they had to bring you through throngs of people who wanted to hang out with you.

Yeah. You don't go to school for that.

No.

It was strange. We did get a lot of people. What I think was a blessing for me was we didn't have a lot of press. There wasn't any entertainment show at that point, not even Entertainment Tonight. And the media couldn't afford to send people over. So I was spared that end of it. But the crowds, we did about five or six shows, and they said, We can't shoot in Waikiki anymore. It's crazy, especially at night.

Because tourists who had watched you in the States would all flock to come see you. That's true. Yeah.

But it was a good dig. You got to stay at the Colony Surf Hotel.

But now see, I forgot. I was searching my brain right now because it was an amazing hotel. All the little shutters. It was an amazing-Yeah, and you were looked out over the water. Yeah, it was a nice... You're right, it was a nice gig.

And you overcame most of the clichés written for bad guys.

Here's my memory of this. Not all of them. Most of them, maybe. Here's my memory of it. And this sounds like I'm making this up. I think I didn't get cast in this particular film I'm going to mention because I just wasn't good enough or whatever. But Spielberg, Steven Spielberg, was casting Poltergeist. We had a meeting, and he was very interested in me. And this is what I was told. Then he saw the episode that you and I shot, and he saw this week weak, namby-pamby husband getting the shit kicked out of him by rather tall, handsome Tom Selleck. And there was an overhead shot that I was not... This was when I discovered, Oh, I'm balding. I have an actual full-on bald spot.

I don't tell that part of the story, but you told me that. That's when I discovered I had a bald spot back then.

Big old bald spot. Well, you with no bald spot were kicking the shit out of me. I think Mr. Spielberg went, No. He told me this later, or somebody told me this, that I actually did lose that part, which we both lost parts to him, didn't we?

We all lost a lot of parts. When was the dance in DA in that chronology?

Before.

It was before that? Yeah, the first thing- But I hadn't seen it yet. I would have been picking your brain because That was really good. Nice work.

Larry Caston. Yeah. No, I'd done, I think, the Onion Field, and then I did a bunch of episodics, and that's how I met you.

Yes.

And then, eight years later, we did it again. But let me stay with Magnum for a second. Yeah, please. First off, I saw you and took note of you on Rockford. I loved James Garner, and I loved Rockford Yeah. I thought, Oh, I don't know if this is going to work. Then you just stole the show. That was a huge part for you.

It was a very big deal. Steve Cantel became a really good friend. He cast me in two pilots, both with James Whitmore Jr. Jimmy Whitmore. They were the first two pilots that Steve ever wrote that didn't sell because he sold everything he wrote. And he felt really bad. And he called me up and he said, I wrote this thing on Rockford. I think it's okay. Let me send it to you. And it was a spoof on the same clichés that the grappling hook was. The perfect specimen of a human being, perfect detective, the opposite of James Garner. Lance White, white on white, nearly perfect. And to work with Garner, I mean... It was really... I was to the point where I was getting bigger jobs and figured, well, maybe I'll get a shot. And to work with him on his set, I understood that doing a lead involves leadership. Because that's what he did. I mean, he was always hurting from something. His knees hurt, his backs hurt. But he'd put on a happy face. I thought of it and thought of Jim many times when I started Magnum because...

You are the host.

Yeah. I told a friend whose husband was a really good actor, Danny Jansen, and David had died. But I said, I got this pilot, and it's really neat. I got this narration. And Danny says, Well, you know what that means, don't you? You're going to be in every shot. And I said, Oh, great. That's fantastic. And then you get to about episode 5 and you're dying. And I realized what it was. But actually, everybody's taken their mood really off of you when you show up. If you put on a happy face, it not only helps them, it helps you.

The crew is there 15 hours a day, and you are the family. You are a family together. If it's a bad place to come work, that's horrible.

Well, I'm happy to say that, Magnum and Bluebloods. I hope I had something to do with it. We're good places to work. There was no pot stirring nonsense that I'm sure you came across and I came across, guesting on a lot of shows. Yeah.

I remember Benson. I walked to do a guest spot on Benson, which was a half-hour sitcom and good, and everyone was great. But on the mirror in my little cubby hole, guest star cubby hole was someone had written with a magic marker, one day left of this place, and I'm out. And it was like, oh, shoot.

It's absolutely miserable. Yeah. I did... It Myra Breckin range. I was in it for a cup of coffee, but I got to work with Mae West. But that picture was in horrible trouble. And all we did was sit around, and Mae West is writing her own stuff, and Raquel Welsh is writing her own stuff, and it was just... The only good part of it was I was on a day player's salary, and it was about two weeks before I ever worked. Right. Had they known, they would have put me on a weekly, and I would have made less money.

Now, one of the notes about that particular film was you got it because of Mae West's encouragement or something. Is there a story there, Tom, you want to tell us?

Yeah. Well, it was really funny. I mean, I'm under contract to Fox in the New Talent program. My friend Sam and I were both under contract, and they disbanded the talent program. And after two years there, they just let us... When our options ran out, we had six-month options. They just fired us. So now I get fired, and I get two jobs right away at Fox. At Fox. I hadn't worked at Fox my whole time there. One was a show called Lancer, which everybody remembers now because of DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, because that's a TV show he was doing. And the other was to go see Mae West. So I knew my agent secretary very well. Actually, she was more available than he was for me. She says, You have an appointment for Myer Breckenridge with Mae West at 8:00 PM in her dressing. You could hear her eyebrows raise. She kidding me a lot. I didn't know what to expect as Mae West, for God's sakes. Well, it just turned out she doesn't get up till about noon. She's up, so I go in and meet her. That was about it. And then I thought I was done.

There was about 800 guys there, all auditioning for one of seven parts, all titled Young Stud, Young Stud number one, Young Stud number two. And then I get a call from my agent secretary. She says, You have an appointment with May West at her apartment at 08:00 PM. I don't know what to expect, and it just turned out it was...

Above board.

Above board, yeah. Everything in her apartment was white. She was wearing white. The piano was white. There was a big piano in there. Anyway, long story short, she said, Would you read with me? And I said, Yeah. And so I read with her. But as soon as... May didn't talk like May West. She was more Brooklyn. And then I started to read and she became Mae West. And it freaked me out and I started laughing and apologized. And it turned out she wrote that scene and she thought I was laughing at the material. And then she said, and this is what got me the part, she's leaning on the piano. She said, Come here. I come over to her and she says, Put your hands on my waist. So I did that. And she says, Now, spread your legs. So I did. And then she looked over at my shoulder, her her assistant on the cot, said, This is going to work. She was concerned that I was too tall, but she liked me.

We should say that May West in the what? '30s, '40s was one of the biggest body, sex symbols, WC feels.

Yeah, and she got away with murder. Yeah. I mean, she could get away with stuff. You always felt you were watching something you weren't allowed to see. Yeah.

The double entendre. Everything. But she was at that time, I don't know, 65.

Yeah, but she wanted to appear bigger than she was. She was a tiny woman. So once I spread my legs, I got the part. I made that up just now.

The last thing, but not to spread. She did make you stand that way, though.

Yeah, I was standing like this. It made me shorter. Yeah, I love that.

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I really think there was a period, there was a big actor strike that lasted four or five months. So we were already supposed to start. So I had this melancholy period in Hawaii, knowing I knew enough about work and stuff to know that if the show was a failure, millions of people were going to see it. My life was going to be different. So it wasn't from interviews or anything else. It was really knowing that. And then, like I said, by the time we were third show into Waikiki, where we liked to shoot and all.

You got mobbed.

And then I didn't realize until I went back and somebody said, You are huge. Yeah. I went back...

To an awards show, maybe?

Yeah. I think the First People's Choice Awards where I was the newcomer.

Right.

I think that I went, oh, holy shit.

Because you were arguably one of the biggest stars in the world. No, it was huge. That was absolutely huge. But it sat on you well, or was it hard to walk around being... You can't duck and hide at 6:00, 4:00.

I didn't like it.

Why?

Mainly because of family and a sense of privacy and I started getting to ask questions in interviews that I didn't want to say, give an answer to. I was trying to, I said, You better find a way and find a line about what you're going to talk about. I didn't always succeed, but it just grew. I still can't quite describe it, but I wasn't going through it every day. I had a lovely house in Hawaii. It was a tiny little house, one bedroom house. I rented it. I later bought it. It's the first house I could ever afford. I belong to a place called the Outrigger Canoe Club, and that was local people. They knew I was an actor, but that time, while the actors were on strike and we couldn't start the show, start shooting was great. I actually was living Magnum's life.

Yeah.

Minus the Ferrari. At the beach and stuff. So it was really, I don't know, a lot to adjust to, I think. I don't know how people... Say the same show was in LA, and it got the same heat. I don't know how people do that. I had this huge buffer, and it was a blessing.

But you would go home. Did you work the first hiatus, the first summer? You made a film. Do you remember?

I made a film, High Road to China.

Right. This is where Mary Steenbergen comes in, my wife. Really? Because she sat down Well, first off, everyone claims a little story, I'm sure.

But this being Mary, I'm sure. I'm a huge fan, as you know. I know.

But you said in some interview article or something, somebody asked a silly question like, if you were stranded on a desert island, who would you want it to be with? And you said Mary Steenberg, which got her attention. It did get her attention. So then when she sat down with you, this This was her interpretation at some bunch or something. She said, It felt like you look at her and she's a very nervous, very shy person that sometimes gets interpreted as, I don't know, cold, judgmental. So these are her words, not mine. And so she thought, Oh, I blew it. That's her story, Tom Selleck's story.

I don't think she blew it. I can't remember the movie movie that she had done.

I think it was The High Road to China.

No, her movie.

Oh, her movie.

She had just burst on the scene. I think she got nominated.

She got an Oscar for... Sorry, somebody in Howard. Go ahead. Help me. Oh, my God. This is horrible.

You should keep- You're like me with names.

No, she keep this in so she can tell me what an idiot I am.

I had seen that and I was a big fan. Yeah. I did High Road with Bess Armstrong, who I saw in Four Seasons before that with my friend, Carol Burnet and Jack Weston, who was in High Road, was in Four Seasons also. Anyway, that's inside baseball.

Let me back up. This is my impression of you. No, I'm not going to I have an impression, but my impression of you has always been that you are in the best old-fashioned sense of the word, a gentleman. Thank you. Yeah, you are. You're an old-fashioned gentleman. Where did that come from? Is my question. What was your mom and dad? I met your dad once, I think. But where did that come from? Where did your moral center?

I think it came from my family. I was lucky. I could go into analysis for 20 years and not blame my parents for anything. And they were great. I've been working on a book, so I've been thinking about a lot of that stuff. And I remember early on, my dad, it was just important to be accountable for your acts. He held us accountable. I wouldn't say he was strict, but he was... Whatever they did, I felt when I screwed up, which I did lots. I'd probably get punished, but I didn't care about that. I cared about letting them down. I remember I was seven or something, and I was playing baseball on the street. We lived on a little residential block, and we weren't supposed to, but we did anyway. I got a hold of one, and I broke a window down the street. Everybody scattered, and we all ran into our house and everything. I told my mom, and she said, Well, thank you for telling me, but we'll see what happens when your dad gets home. I I said, Are you going to tell him? She said, No, you are.

Oh, good one. Good one, mom.

So my dad, I told him. He said, Thanks for telling me. I'll see you in the morning. It was a Saturday, and we got up and he took me down to the house and said, Tell him. Knocked on their door, and they opened the door. I said, I'm the guy who broke your window. I don't want to cry. But after we did that, he said, No, come on. And he put me in the car and we went to the hardware store. First, he showed me how to measure the window, and we brought some glass and glazer points and window putty, and he went down and fixed the window with me because he was very handy. He worked as a carpenter before he got realistic. That, to me, feels like the most perfect parenting example you could come up with. The other one I remember was my brother Bob, who was 19 months older than me. We were very young. We were like eight or something, but getting full of ourselves. My dad said, I want you to come down to City Hall with me. I got a tour. So we go down to City Hall in Van High's, little city hall and gives me the tour.

It gives me the tour of the police Department. He says, Yes, sir, no, sir. So we did that. He says, Can I take him downstairs? And the cop said, Sure. So the guy goes down with my dad to the jail cells. And he says, Can they go in and just see what it's like being in a cell? And the cop says, Sure. And he had a little smile on his face, the cop. So we go in the cell and my dad says, Okay, lock them up. And they shut that door and left for a while. I mean, for five minutes, you go, Okay, he's coming back now. So it could be about 20 minutes and it was Finally, we heard footsteps coming down, and I think my dad said, I don't think I have to say anything.

Wow, that's amazing.

Yeah.

What a great story.

It is? I put it in the book, so I hope it is. It's called You Never Know.

You Never Know. Why that?

An accidental career. I was studying business at SC, I ended up through just pure serendipity, signing a contract with a studio. I'd never thought about acting or wanted to or anything else.

Someone the A lot of you doing what?

I did the dating game.

That's right. That's a famous clip.

Yeah, but you know what they do with all this stuff? You get it. It's suddenly I was an all-American basketball player at SC and was discovered on the dating game and then got Magnum. That's not the path.

That's not the story. But they inflate all this stuff.

Number one, I rode the pine at SC and only had a scholarship for one semester. So it just gets crazy. I'm trying to straighten all that out. What are we talking about?

But stick with sports for a second. Back then. Volleyball. Were you a big-time volleyball player then? Because I know you were.

I played volleyball on the beach at Will Rogers State Park in LA before Magnum days.

After USA? I wasn't very good.

But, huh?

After college, you did this?

Well, I played basketball at SC. I also played volleyball. We had to raise money because it wasn't an NC2A sport and borrow old uniforms from the basketball team. But I played for SC for two years and we started the sport there. So that was indoor, though. Indoor, six man. Then I played two man at the beach, but I wasn't really that good. I was very good indoors because I could jump. You could spike. Tell Woody, I could jump. I saw his movie. So basically, I started playing at Outrigger in the sand. They have two sand courts above their parking garage. That was one of my saviors, just playing. We got pretty good at Outrigger in the men's seniors. We won two national championships.

That's good. That's good.

Well, I've never played for all the marbles till then. It was the men's seniors. It was just 35 and over. But I was playing with ex-Olympians and all-American players and stuff. So it was really fun.

Yeah, I basketball was going to be my life, which was very silly because I fell in love with basketball in high school. It was a prep school. There were 300 boys. So any run-of-the-mill high school could have just kicked our ass. But it was my life. I loved it. I just dreamt that. I had no other sport. Went to Stanford. My friend and I, who was a good athlete, went, All right, let's go try out for freshman ball. This was the same year Lou Alcender was a freshman at UCLA. I stepped to the court and I looked around and I just went, Oh, shoot. Turned around, walked out, and that was the end of my dream.

Well, Basketball was my... I mean, I had played baseball forever, Little League and everything else, and burned out a little bit on it and started doing really well in high school in basketball. So that was my sport, but I was I was a 6'4 forward at that time in the Pac-8.

Oh, that's a big deal, by the way, Pac-8.

It is a big deal, but I just realized now the guys I'm playing against are 6'7, 6'8, 6'9. That's my brush with greatness, though.

Tell me.

Well, Al Cinder, Kareem, was at UCLA, and When we were preparing for the team we were going to play the next week, the guys who weren't going to play a lot, me and a bunch of other guys, would learn basically the UCLA offense as much as we could, and we'd run it against our first team. None of them were very big. So when we prepared for UCLA, I was Mr. Skyhook.

Lou Alcinder. I've told him I got to know Kareem. He laughs. But yeah, that was my job.

Did you develop a skyhook or not?

Well, it was a tough job Because we had a seven-footer. He wasn't quite as agile as Lou Alcinder, but his elbows were right about head height for me.

Boom.

Yeah. A lot of booms.

Well, okay. Okay, let's skip ahead a little bit. Three Men and a Baby.

Yeah.

That was a big deal. I don't know if it was a big deal for you. It was a big deal movie.

It was a huge deal for me. Yeah.

I mean, it was $150 plus million back then.

Yeah, 2010 worldwide. Oh, wow. And the number one movie in the world.

Yes. That's a big deal for you, too. How did that come about for you? Because I know there was a mishmash of directors, and it all fell apart and came together.

I got a call from my dear friend and agent, Betty McCarthy, and she said, Jeffrey Katzenberg wants to come to Hawaii. And I said, Jeffrey Katzenberg? Wants to come to Hawaii? He says, Yeah, he wants to talk to you about a project. I thought it was about development and stuff, but I was impressed. I said, Sure. So after work, I went to a meeting. They had just gotten off a plane, and it was him and Coleen Sereo, who directed the original Three Men in a Cradle. And we just sat down, and Jeffrey I wish I could do every movie for Jeffrey because he executive produces every movie. And work was very good for me when I was working for Jeffrey, and I appreciate that. So he's talking, he's very convincing. And I thought, well, I said, so I know you want to think about this, but I'm interested. But Colleen Sareau is very quiet, very serious, very French. And he says, No, I want you to do it. I said, Okay, who are you going to get for the other two bachelors? And you may not know this. I don't know this. He said, Ted Danson is Steve Gutberg.

And there's something about Jeffrey where I knew that's who he'd get.

Because he had- You didn't even know. No, you were They had to get you.

I guess. I don't know. But that was his dream team. It's nice you were on it.

Really nice. Yeah.

I said, It's okay with me. And they left, and they got on a plane.

Wow.

Colleen Sareau was very serious. And there is a danger in somebody making the same movie twice. Eventually, it I wasn't in on any of this. I'm doing Magnum. But from what I heard, it was getting a little... It wasn't going to be a Jeffrey-like movie. And as he explained to me later, she had this concept that she wanted to turn their apartment. It should represent a female womb. She was getting really serious about it.

Sure wasn't how it ended up. No.

Anyway, and I said, So what are you going to do? I think he called me and he said, Well, I got a new director very excited about it, Leonard Nemoy. And I didn't know Leonard. I just knew he was Spock. But I think he didn't have a lot of prep. And I think Leonard saved that movie. He really knew his chops. He knew his stuff. And the His concept of how to use the babies. I've worked with babies in a few scenes and everything else before that in much sense. But you use a rehearse with a doll and pretend the baby's there when they're shooting your coverage. But our babies were there. There. And it created... They were there all the time. I remember rehearsing, blocking a scene with a But from then on, they were in the scene, and I think that was the key to the movie.

No matter what the business was, whether you were holding up your hand to catch a bottle that was being thrown to you while you're holding the baby or making phone calls. You must get this a lot.

I get it a little. But the ghost thing just got crazy. Have you been asked that everywhere you go?

It used to be, yeah. And I have to admit, when you go back and you look at it, you get chills.

It's a little spooky. It's a little spooky. Well, you were playing, as I recall, a vain actor. I don't know where they got that concept for an actor. I don't know either.

I think it was...

That's all I could do. You had posters of yourself all over the room. Cutouts.

Yeah. So life-size cutouts or short cutouts of me in my commercials. And there was one that was about six, seven-year-old boy size. It was funny.

It's very scary. I guess it was great for... Maybe Jeffrey thought of that.

Somebody I did because the rentals back in the VCR days, the rentals went through the roof. I also remember going out with you and Steve. I think it was before we went out with Leonard and out to dinner in Toronto. We shot in Toronto, which is another reason why some kid didn't die in this building in New York because we shot it.

Because it was on a sound stage. Sound stage.

Yeah. But you were... I think this was right when you shot your final episode of Magnum and then came- The first year and came right there. Came right there. So you were huge, and we'd go out, and Steve and I would giggle over how invisible we became around you. Then we went out to dinner with Leonard, the three of us, and all three of us disappeared. Appeared into the backdrop. He was so popular.

Leonard is such a good guy. People got this Spock impression, and he's a fine actor and a fine director.

And an amazing photographer.

Yeah. Was it your suite? Yes. Where we had the parties? Yeah. I don't know why everybody was up in Toronto. Was there a strike?

22 production. Yeah, maybe there was.

It was either a strike or it had gotten so cheap, they I wouldn't go anywhere else. But it was wonderful.

We'd have every actor in town come to these parties every Saturday because I had this huge, massive living room.

Yes, you did.

The Sutton, I think it was the Sutton place. Sutton place. Yeah. Back then in the glory days, had a butler.

Yes. Werner? Our floor is Werner. Werner. It's Werner.

Yeah.

Spelled with a W. The top floors had the butler.

It was very rock and roll. It really was.

I think that's where I really met Woody. Yeah, he came to visit. Because he came up a couple of times.

Jeffrey Katzenberg story. I remember He was famous for his, or still is, his 60-second phone calls. He would check in with everybody. He'd check in with me. But it was a 60-second phone call. Packed, very sweet, and he was gone. But when we did Three Men and a Lady, two or three years later, we were sitting and we'd shot it. It felt really good. It felt like a really... And it was. It was a good movie. We were sitting in a commissary, and it was about to come out. I was saying, So how's it looking? We said, Oh, we're the 100-pound guerrilla in the room. It's looking really good. There's something Home I think is the name of this movie coming, but we're not worried about it.

Robert Cork, who produced both movies, was a warrior, and he was just going home. Home alone, that's all I'm going to say. I mean, this is before it ever came. Wow.

Cleaned our clocks.

Yeah. No, Jeffrey called me a bunch of times. He'd call me with grosses every week, but quickly.

Yes. Yeah, he did that for me, too, but not on the second movie.

Well, they didn't want to talk about the grosses on this. The second movie did okay, but he thought they had another blockbuster. I think they took it for granted, too.

Okay, I'm going to jump now. I want to jump. I mean, you were born to be in a saddle. You were born to be a Western hero. You weren't. Really? Was that riding horseback? Was that an acquired skill for you?

Well, other than going to the ponies at Griffith Park where they strap you into a pony and... Yeah. I mean, I think I did a couple of commercials, but in a commercial, if you sit on a horse, they only need two, three seconds. So that isn't a big deal. But then I got cast in the sackets with Sam, my pal, and I was going to be working with Ben Johnson, Academy Award winner, and Glenn Ford. It was a big deal, but I learned from the ground up. I had some days before we started. A woman named Donna Hall, a wrangler. Her husband was a chief wrangler on the show. She just started me out and said, first of all, she taught me how to get on and get off. And then for a couple of days, it was all about sitting a horse, how to do it. And I said, When do I get to gallop? She said, 95% of what you do in a movie is riding to a mark, stopping. Controlling your horse and doing dialog and getting on and getting off. When you can do that right, maybe I'll let you do that.

That was smart.

Well, Bob Totton, our director, he had done like 19 Gunsmokes. I mean, he was going to ask us to do the real stuff. He didn't like stunt doubles. It was really... And I was hooked forever.

Yeah. I grew up on horseback because lived in Arizona. My friends were Hopey and Novie, kids who lived in the museum property that I was growing up in because of my father. But my friends were also ranchers, sons and daughters. So we had horses, and my father wouldn't let me ride by myself with a saddle. If I was going to ride by myself, I had to ride bareback. That way, if I got thrown, I'd break a bone maybe, but not get dragged.

But you wouldn't get caught in the stir.

Yeah, I didn't get dragged. So I grew up with that. And I had one little movie for television called Cowboy, where I got ride like the wind, and it just made me so happy, so happy. But you, Quigly Down Under, is truly one of those movies that I've watched, and not just because I know you and love you. It's a brilliant movie, and you were just the stem. Really good Western.

Thank you. I'm very proud of that movie. It's funny. I think it had been across a few desks. It had. Sean Connery, maybe Steve McQueen, I don't know.

And many directors.

Yes. I was proud that they sent it to me and I said, I got to do this. It was like a fifth year of Magnum when I first saw the script by John Hill. But it's interesting. I said, boy, almost every part I've had like that one, they're iconic characters. You go, well, Jimmy Stewart could have done this way better than I could. Or in this case, it was John Wayne. And I said, Can I find my own way to do this, playing an admittedly iconic character? And well, then you just do it and see what happens. But it was intimidating. A lot of parts have been when I've got some of those bigger, iconic guys. I didn't think Magnum as iconic. I guess he ended up that way.

That was a brilliant... Where did you shoot that?

In Australia? About four months in the outback of Australia.

With Alan Reckman, who's one of the best bad guys And a Prince of a guy.

So sad he's gone. And he told me that movie changed his life. He just loved it out there. Loved horses. The Outback, there's nothing going on. It's 17,000 people, I think, in Alice Springs, in the dead center of the country. And then just miles and miles of desert. The rest of the, I don't know, 20 million people in Australia all live on the Coast.

Where did you stay? Where did they put you?

Is there a town? A Sheridan there, but there was an airline strike. So we didn't even have groups of tourists coming in and out. But it was great. Really hard work. They called it bull dust. The soil in Australia is very old. It's some of the oldest land on Earth. And this powdery red dust that would just get all over you. So you'd come in at night after long rides. We'd ride for two hours to get to these unbelievable locations, and then two hours home. So a cold beer was really...

Yeah.

A couple of cold beers in the bar were just a treat. And And guess who you're in the bar with? Your crew.

Yeah.

But they were a great group of guys.

What was the rifle? I remember being like...

It was a Sharpe's rifle. I had done a lot of research, and I'd seen a lot of Westerns where they were using the wrong stuff. There's a movie I love called Veracruz, Gary Cooper and Bert Lancaster. Well, that's the, I think, 1860s, and they're using 1892 Winchester's and 1873 Colts, and it just ain't right. And the Sharps was the right gun, and it was legendary, the Sharps in those days.

Because of the distance.

Because of the distance. It was famous. It's one of the reasons we almost lost all our Buffalo. I just started watching them. The documentary on that because it was so accurate. But they'd never seen anything like it over there. And I talked to Simon Winsor, our director, who...

Did a great job.

Great guy and did a great job. And we decided to not unveil it. It was in the sheath when he gets off the boat for quite a while. And Simon really got it. We got nominated for an academy the word for Sound, actually, because he was shooting at such long distances.

Yes.

Simon realized that the person who gets hit with a bullet hasn't heard the rifle yet. God, that's amazing. So you got the rifle impact, you got the bullet impact on the guy, and then you hear the gun go off. He just did great stuff. But Laura was great. Laura Sanchecola. Laura, amazing. Alan, he'd done Die Hard. That's where I said, You got to get that guy because he made a heavy intelligent.

And highly entertaining.

Yeah, always entertaining because he was really ask in quickly. I mean, it's really a good film, and he's brilliant in it, but he was doing the same scene over and over and over again, to prove he's bad. But he did it with such relish.

Yeah.

Did you work with Alan?

For a day on something I can't even remember. But he was so open and available to tell stories and just a sweet man.

Yeah. So it was It was a wonderful experience. My daughter got two first birthdays. Hannah. Well, because when we left to go home, it was her first birthday. But by the time we got to LA, you save a day. All right. She had two first birthdays.

Was that first? She was one when you were down there?

Yeah. Wow. It was a big deal, and it was a big Western. There was a guy, there was a reviewer, Gary Franklin. Yeah. Or he said, On my scale, 10 being best. Well, he had beat me up all my life, and he gave it a 10.

That's good.

Yeah.

It's funny how that happens. It didn't get a very good release.

It competed with us. Really? A Three Men, the Little Lady. And it competed Heated with Dances with Wolves. Oh, wow. They should have realized. They didn't expect it to be as good as it was. But it's become... When video rentals were the deal, you could never get it in the store. It just was always out.

Yeah. No, I mean it. I've watched it.

Thank you.

Maybe a dozen times.

So have I.

Yeah. That's funny. Okay, so Bluebloods, who knew? Did you know this was going to... Are you about to do a 14th season?

I didn't know much of anything. When Leonard, not Leonard, Nemoy. Leonard Goldberg.

Goldberg.

I get called in, and they want me to do this part. There were two issues. One, I said, Where are you going to shoot this? Because I liked the script. It had a procedural element, but it was really about character. Because I don't want to do a procedural. And I said, Where are you going to shoot this? It should be shot in New York because the city has got to be... It's like a Western. The land is a central character in the show, and so it's New York. He said, New York, but I think I have a way to make that work because I said, I don't want to do that to my family. So I've done it to my family for 13 years, but they worked it out. We do eight-day shows. I do, say, the last four or one and the first four or the next, and then I commute, which I've done for- But you'll have 10 days or so at home? Yeah. But yeah, I thought it had potential. There was always a push at the network to keep turning it more like the rest of their shows. There were some pretty good fights on that.

When I say fights, I mean ethical fights, where you go back and forth and you say no and politely. We ended up winning out and doing the show we thought. I always kidded Leonard because I was When I did a Charlie's Angels, where I was going to be Jackie Smith's boyfriend, and I was very enthused because besides working with Jackie Smith, It was going to recur because they were going to get them involved with personal lives. After the first one, they said, They're not going to use you again. Leonard Goldberg.

Not crazy about you.

No. Leonard fired me from that one. Now my boss Leonard's gone now, but he was really on top of the He was one of the gentlemen in our business.

He cast me in something about Amelia, which was the Incess.

I know the movie well. Congratulations. I think there was an Emmy there.

Yeah, no, something. A Golden Globe. It was a Golden Globe. But who remembers that? Other than the fact that it's right in front of our TV. We put our awards in our little private TV room thing, right? To the point where we can't quite... And I have my Emmys and Golden Globes over here surrounding her Oscar that she won. And it just doesn't work. There's something about an Oscar, man. It just cuts through all the other ones.

Yeah, that's the real deal. Yeah.

But I had so much respect for Leonard, and I do miss him.

I was hosting the Emmies when you at least came up on stage for something about him. At the same year, I I think. Carol Burnet called me, and she was sick. She had some virus, and she said, There are starting rumors that I'm dying. She said, I'm not dying, but it was like I I can't remember. Some of the viruses that were going around, those that lasted a while. And she said, So you got to host the show for me.

Oh, wow. At last minute.

Yes. Well, It wouldn't have mattered if I had a year to prepare. That's a tough thing. It's not my bag. I was scared to death, and I just talked as fast as I could. But that was the year I won Miami.

Oh, really?

Nice. Maybe I should have posted. I was backstage waiting to come out again. The nice thing is John and Larry and Roger were backstage with me because they were going to come out and present. You're co-stars. Magnificent. They said, If you win, I said, Oh, come on. I've done this three or four times. I'm not going to win. So don't worry about it. They said, Well, just know you get your army on one side of the stage, you have to run to the other side. I said, Okay. And I won. I've never got to do the walk. Where you're in your chair, You got that awful camera right in your face, pretending they aren't there. Then you're so happy, somebody else won.

People grab your hand as you walk by.

Yeah, well. I never got to do the walk because I was backstage. I don't remember a lot of it. I didn't really have any speech whatsoever. I didn't really get to take in the But maybe you never do.

I got nominated a bunch of times. A bunch of times. 14 times, I think, altogether. But nine in a row for cheers. The and didn't win. And then when I won, people kept saying, Oh, but you have eight of these, right? People don't. Everybody in an award show is so into their own head and nervousness and fear that they don't really take in anything. People thought I won all the time.

I thought, why couldn't you just sit there, relax for a minute, and just look at the people applauding? All I could think of your hosting. And they said, you got to run to the other side of the stage to introduce the next award.

Tommy Lee Jones had the best. It was just, thank you for the work. And and turned around.

I heard William Holden said, thank you.

That's very cool.

Instead of thanking your agent and everybody who could give you a job.

Looking back at Old Time '40s, '50s movie stars. Who are Jimmy Stewart. You mentioned Jimmy. He was one of my all-time favorites.

Jimmy Stuart. Old-time favorites. John Wayne.

O'gard?

Oh, yeah. Then I always felt, if you can ask what actress is your favorite actress, who would you like to work with most? I said, You can't answer that question. But Lillian Gish.

I can't count. Mary got to work with Lillian.

Just fell in love. I would have killed to work with Lillian Gish. Barbara Stanwick. Jean Thierny. Jean Thierny. Barbara Stanwick. Jean Arthur.

Jean Arthur. Oh, my gosh.

I mean, they were amazing. And Irene Dunn.

Unbelievable. I love Mariel Leave the room and the news is on and I click immediately to T-C-M. Me, too. And she comes back in and goes, I see you're watching some black and white films again. They're so comforting to me.

They are. I'm just old now or older or whatever you want to say. But I look at previews, the movies coming on, and it's just a bunch of gimmicks and effects. And, oh, my God, that person can fly, and the wings come out of nowhere. I'm just sick of that. And they really were good stories. Be they funny? Most of the really good comedies can do both. Even today, make you laugh or cry at the same time. You guys could do that. And cheers. And Friends could do that.

Friends. That was a hoot for you. How many shows did you do of Friends?

Nine.

Who was that your first stepping out in front of a live audience?

I had done Taxi.

What'd you play in Taxi? I haven't seen that.

I played It was memories of cabs, such and such, whatever the number was, because the cab just got total and everybody told stories. I was with Mary Lou Henner driving and I was in the back seat, and it freaked me out because the audience was right there because the way it was set up, and I got flop sweat and I mean, really bad. When you say, Don't sweat, don't sweat, it gets worse. So that was my last experience. Jimmy Burrows.

Did Jimmy Burrows direct that one? Do you remember?

No, Jimmy didn't direct it. I wish he did. Good guy. Michael Lembert directed the first one. And he said, Now, when you come into the set, we're not going to introduce you. When you come into the set, everybody's going to go nuts. I said, Oh, come on. He said, Just be prepared. Don't let her throw you. And the audience went nuts and all. The hardest thing I had to deal with was the waiting. Well, you say something that is funny.

Oh, the waiting. Yes, got you.

It isn't real.

Yeah.

I've got to find the comedy and tragedy and the tragedy and comedy. That's the only... I can't do shtick. Oh, your show, The Good Place? Yeah. I got the title right, which wasn't such a good play?

No, it turned out not to be.

I love that show.

Yeah, it was good. Thanks. I used to, on Cheers, make sure that I had a piece of business, whatever it was that I Because if the joke was really good and people laughed, you still, like you said, didn't want to sit there waiting. You wanted to have something more important to do. And if the joke sucked, you wanted to really have something more important to go back to. I remember on chairs, because it was the bar and all of that. So it was like theater. Everybody on the set, which was large, had to be active. They had to be acting at all times. So if you had a good joke, you would all of a sudden notice that Woody or somebody would be... All of a sudden, there'd be people crossing right behind you, right at the good joke. And if you had a suck-o joke, you'd turn around and they were all alone. They were ducking down, disappearing.

I used chairs a lot as an example. We'd get these guest directors, and they would... A lot of my scenes are in my office as the police commissioner in Blueblood. So they would constantly have somebody come in the office, walk and sit down, and they wouldn't cover the entrance with all the subtext at all. And I said, The scene doesn't start when they sit at my desk. The scene started at the door. And I just hammered them with that. And I said, In Cheers, the scene starts when they come in the room, not when they sit down at the bar. And I used that over and over again. And I think I've got him trained now.

He loves cheers. Just do what he says. All right. You're writing a book.

I've written a book. Oh. I actually finished.

Now, you wrote it?

I wrote it. I have a collaborator, but I realized very early on, basically, the way we work, and I couldn't do it without him, is I write something I go to him, we go over it, and I bounce it off of him, and that's it. So yes, I wrote it. Because I didn't want to... The audience is on, the reader is on to readers' audiences. They're on to all this stuff where, Oh, I wrote a book. Actually, it's a series of books. Yes, some other guy helped me write it. And a ghostwriter wrote the whole thing, and I just didn't want to do that. I I got to give him credit, Ellis Hennecan, real good writer anyway. I don't think I could have done it without bouncing off of him. I never really considered writing a book. I didn't become a heroine addict and lose my career for 10 years and have a great story. It just worked.

There is time. Tom in his 80s turned to heroine. Yeah. How long that take, that book?

Well, because of COVID, I envisioned sitting down with the collaborator in my dressing room. Sometimes if I finish early, he's in New York, I'm in New York. We had protocols. She couldn't get near our set or anything. It was COVID and a bunch of stuff. And the last year was very difficult because there were some pretty serious negotiations, which are still going on in some ways. But so it took me about four years Did you enjoy it? No. I'm proud of it.

Yes.

Somebody told me who knows something about writing, they said, Autobiographies are hard because you At least for me, it was because you have to relive a lot of stuff. All those things to make them come alive, especially, like I say, I wasn't shooting up heroine or something. I just had a drama at work. If they don't get inside your head, you don't really have a book that's worth reading. It involved a lot It was a lot of emotional investment. I'd write for a couple hours a day when I was behaving myself, and I'd be exhausted. Real brain dead exhaustion. It was very tears sometimes. I'd read everything to Jilly. I'd come back. It was about dinner time, and I'd read the pages that I did. I just couldn't get through some of them, a lot of them, actually. Just that or that story I told you about my dad. I couldn't read it to Jilly. I could never get, I couldn't finish the sentence. You just choke up. Yeah, I'm very proud of it. But I don't know whether I liked it or not. I didn't like the deadlines and stuff.

Let's jump back for a second with Jilly. You met how and when.

Well, I met Jilly. Was it before? I saw Jilly. I didn't meet her. I went to... John Hillermann told me on Magnum, he said, When you go to London, because I was going to do a picture over there called Lasser.

Right.

He said, When you go to London, you must see cats. It's unique. So I put it on my list. And one night, I had some time. And one of my really good friends, my makeup man, Alon Bentley, who lived down the street from me.

Alon. Please say hi to Lon for me.

I will say hi to Alon.

Go on.

Great guy, as you know.Yes. And he lived down the street from me in Hawaii. So I said, Come on with me, and I'll buy dinner afterwards. So we went. I noticed, how big do you want to make this story? Because it's complicated.

You married her instead of married for a long... It's a big story.

I love the show. But I found that one particular cat on stage, I would notice. She looked really good in a leotard, but they all did. And a guy named Brian Blesset, good actor, was in a movie, the first movie I did, High Road to China, and he was old Deuteronomy and cats. So I went backstage to talk to Brian. And I was single, and High Road was very difficult, so I didn't have any free time. So it wouldn't hurt to meet somebody. So I go back and Brian starts And he loved mountain climbing, passionate about it. And he gets into mountain climbing and Everest and all. So he says, Look, when you get to the the carabieners and the things, and it's now like a half an hour. And I finally just said to him in the program, I said, Who is that? Because I noticed this cat, a real personality. You could see it through all the whiskers and stuff. He says, Oh, that's Jilly Mac. She's probably crazy about you. As a matter of fact, all the girls are, but I know you get a lot of that, so I told them all to go away.

It was déserted. Anyway, long story short, I went back a couple of times.

Wow. Without seeing her, without her whisker.

Well, I love the show.

Yeah.

I think it got a bad rap when they made it bigger and bigger. It was very intimate in London. I really enjoyed the show. Lana and I go back. Jilly was always highly professional, but she's on stage, and at the very end, they're singing out to the audience, and I'd been watching her. In In fact, somebody had said to her, one of the other dancers, one of the guys that she danced with, Do you know who's staring at you? And she told me this story later. She said, Who? And and he said, Tom Selleck. She said, Who the fuck's that? She didn't know, which was a big plus at that point. Anyway, at the very end, this goes on because I went to eight shows. But at the very end of the show, at a certain point, she's singing and she just goes like this.

Right into your eyes.

Nailed it. But no, not a long look, just a checkout. I said, Lawn, did she just look at me? He said, She sure did. Anyway.

You dragged poor lawn to all eight of them?

No, I dragged lawn to probably four of them. But I actually only saw seven and a half because I had to work late.

Wait, now, so give me the actual meet.

The meet was after I knew the theater manager by then because he'd get me in the back way and said, Is it okay to call someone? He said, Yeah, I'll give you the backstage number. So I called her up from Wales. My best friend from high school now had a farm in Wales. I called from there and was very nervous. She finally said, I'm about to go on. Would you like to take me out for a cocktail? Because I was hemming and hawing. I'm not good at that. I don't know whether you are, but I'm not very smooth and I'm pretty shy. Anyway, we went out and Lan came along. I said, Come on, Lonne, you got to go with me. I don't know who this person is. She showed up and she had purple hair. She called her Black Tulip and ate like a horse. She was hungry. And boy, that show was wonderful. Have you been together How long now? Thirty-eight? Thirty-eight years. No, maybe a little longer. Jilly can count. I can't. Yeah.

Please say hi to her.

I will. I'll see her whenever we're done. Yeah.

Hey, cannot thank you enough for doing this. Seriously, we have never, ever... I mean, this is the one thing I know that I like about podcast because I'm finding my way and I keep going, Is this a podcast? I'm not sure. It's a privilege to sit down with people uninterrupted and talk to them for an hour and a half or so. It really is. And this was a privilege. I've always admired you. We both share the same Annette Wolf, who is our publicist, is one of the most gracious, wonderful people in our business. Absolutely. But she keeps me posted on what you're doing and how you are, but it's really nice.

Well, likewise, she does.

So it's It's really nice to sit down with you.

It's great to sit down with you. I've never got to do it, really. Usually, you're on a talk show, and most of the hosts are looking over at the shoulder for the next question or the next joke. You can't finish a story.

No, you're performing. You're not chatting. Anyway, I adore you, my friend.

Great to see you.

You as well. Let's stay upright for another 15, 20 years.

Got to keep moving. Keep moving forward.

That's Tom Selleck, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much, Tom, for making us your first ever podcast stop. I was truly honored to spend this time with you. I loved you for many years. So be sure to grab Tom's book, You Never Know, A at a Bookseller Near You. That's our show for this week. Thanks for listening. Hello to Woody. I miss you. And special thanks to our friends at Team Coco. If you like today's episode, be sure and tell a friend and subscribe on your podcast app of choice to get new episodes as soon as they drop. Do us a favor. Leave us a great rating and a review on Apple podcast. If you're in the mood, it makes a difference. Thank you so much. More for you next time. Where Everybody Knows Your Name.

You've been listening to Where Everybody Knows Your Name with Ted Danson, Woody Harrelson, Sometimes.

The show is produced by me, nick Liao. Executive producers are Adam Sacks, Colin Anderson, Jeff Ross, and myself. Sarah Federovich is our supervising producer. Our senior producer is Matt Apodaka. Engineering and mixing by Joanna Samuel with support from Eduardo Perez. Research by Alyssa Graal. Talent Booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista. Our theme music is by Woody Harrelson, Anthony Genn, Mary Steembergen, and John Osmond. Special thanks to Willy Navarree. We'll have more for you next time for Everybody Knows Your Name. Consumer Cellular offers the same fast, reliable nationwide coverage without the big wireless cost. Freedom calls. Sign up with consumercellular@consumercellular. Com/ted50 and use promo code, Ted50, to save $50. Terms and conditions apply.