Tom Selleck on the future of “Blue Bloods”

It’s hard to beat the panorama from the tallest hill on Tom Selleck’s California ranch. It can be said that, at 79 years old, the actor knows the view from above well.

For the past 14 years, Selleck has starred on the hit CBS show “Blue Bloods” as head of the NYPD and head of a strong (and often stubborn) family. The show is scheduled to end this year, but there has been some resistance to this, mainly from Selleck himself.

Asked if “Blue Bloods” is ending, Selleck responded, “Well, that’s a good question. I’m going to keep thinking that CBS is going to come to its senses. We’re the third most scripted show in all of broadcasting. We’re winning the night. The whole cast wants to come back. And I can tell you one thing: we’re not falling off a cliff. We’re putting on good shows and still holding our own.”

This is not the first time that Selleck has clashed with the powerful, in a long and legendary career. In his most famous role in the 1980s, the character Thomas Magnum wore a Detroit Tigers baseball cap – a tribute to the city where 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, found work in advertising, selling products like Ban Basic and Safeguard Soap.

Smith asked, “You told yourself from the beginning, going into auditions and interviews, that you would literally say to yourself in the car, ‘You’re good enough, Tom.'”

“I would say, ‘You are enough,’ but – thank you – maybe that ‘good’ would have helped! But I didn’t think about it.”

“But, ‘You are enough, Tom,’ would you say that to yourself?”

“I did, I did.”

But little of what he did early in his career was enough: not the soap opera gig “The Young and the Restless,” nor the six TV pilots he made.

And then, he was hired to do “Magnum, PI.” And around the same time, Selleck was offered another role by Steven Spielberg. “Steven said, ‘Here’s the script, go read it. Tell me if you like it, because we want you in Indiana Jones,” Selleck recalled. “So I got to Page 8 of Steven’s office and just went, Oh, shit, that’s really good!

But in a story that has become legend, he was forced to turn down “Raiders of the Lost Ark” for “Magnum.”

In “You Never Know,” a highly anticipated memoir released this week, Selleck shares the details of what he calls “the worldwide series of disappointments” and how he quickly made peace with it. “You can either become a victim or just smile and say, ‘That’s really ironic,'” he said. “I had a good job coming up, a job I would have dreamed of, ‘Raiders’ or not.”

“Magnum, PI,” about a former Navy SEAL and Vietnam vet turned private investigator, premiered in 1980 on CBS. The studio wanted to lose the Vietnam elements (at that time the wounds of the war were still fresh), but Selleck and his producer fought hard to keep it, and the show was a success.

Among his biggest fans was Frank Sinatra, who once told his “Magnum” co-star Larry Manetti that he would like to be on the show.

“Larry comes to me and says, ‘Frank wants to do the show,’” Selleck said. “’But he wants to be invited, so you have to call him.’ And he wanted to do it right away. [to Sinatra], ‘Well, we’ll have to write to you. What do you want to do?’ He said, ‘Oh, I don’t care. Just make sure I hit someone.'”

Was this his condition? “Yes. Well, that’s Frank!”

The guest scene in “Magnum, PI” (in which he managed to beat someone up, quite decisively) was Sinatra’s last acting job.

But it was just the beginning of Selleck’s reign as an ’80s sex symbol. That smile! This arrogance! That mustache!

In private, however, Selleck became smitten with British actress Jillie Mack, whom he first saw when she was in the London production of “Cats.” He said: “I was vetted by a few cast members, never by Jillie. One of the cast members said to her at intermission, ‘Do you know who keeps looking at you? Tom Selleck.’ And – I don’t know how to clear this – she just said, ‘Who the hell is this?’ She didn’t know who I was since Adam, which to me was the best thing in the world!”

They married, in secret, in 1987, just before “Magnum” entered its final season. They have been together ever since.

At that time, Selleck says he was exhausted, but he knew he had created something that was more than just a TV show: “When ‘Magnum’ ended, we got a call from the Smithsonian: ‘We want to honor ‘Magnum.'” we need some artifacts. And they took my hat and the ring I was wearing – the Vietnam team ring – and my Hawaiian shirt, the red one. And we went back there and they read the quote. They gave us credit for being the first show that featured Vietnam veterans. in a positive way. So the fight was worth it.”

These days he spends most of his free time at his ranch, and it’s not hard to see why. “You know, I hope I keep working hard enough to keep the place.”

Smith asked, “Really, would that be a problem? If you stopped working?”

“That’s always a problem,” he said. “If I stopped working, yes. Am I prepared for life? Yes, but maybe not on a 63-acre ranch!”

Luckily he enjoys his work, and after 60 years in front of the camera, Tom Selleck knows… he is enough.

Asked what he sees in the future, he replied: “I hope it works. As an actor, you never lose – I don’t, anyway – that feeling that every time I finish a job, it’s my last job.”

Does it still have that meaning? “I like the fact that there are no excuses!” he laughed. “You just go to work and do the work. And I have a lot of reverence for what I call ‘work’ and I love it. And I’d like to keep doing that.”

READ AN EXCERPT: “Never know”

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Story produced by John D’Amelio. Editor: Steven Tyler.