Tom Selleck has spent 38 years on the same stretch of Ventura County hills, and the place has a story almost as good as any he played. Parade revisited it this week, recalling that in 1988 the Magnum, P.I. star paid about $5 million for a 63-acre Hidden Valley ranch that Dean Martin once owned, and that its avocado trees nearly died in a drought but still give him a small crop.
The timing matters because Selleck, who was born in Detroit on January 29, 1945, and is now 81, is heading back to work. Deadline reported in August that he had signed on as a guest star in an untitled Apple TV comedy led by Elizabeth Banks, his first acting job since Blue Bloods ended, and he has been candid about what his paychecks protect. The answer sits about 50 miles from Hollywood, and it comes with a few surprises.
How Did The Star Of ‘Magnum’ End Up On Dean Martin’s Old Land?
Dean Martin had owned the property years before Selleck ever saw it. Martin sold it in 1969 to car dealer Fletcher Jones, according to Hello! and Entertainment Now, and by the time Selleck bought it the estate had a Spanish colonial main house, a pool, a tennis court and a golf green set among the oaks.
The purchase came at a turning point. Selleck had met Jillie Mack in London in 1983 while he was filming Lassiter, and he kept going back to the West End production of Cats, where she played Rumpleteazer. They married on August 7, 1987, in a Lake Tahoe chapel, and their daughter Hannah was born the following year, just as Magnum, P.I. wrapped its eighth and final season.
Jillie later explained the move better than anyone. “He knew he needed to buy back his anonymity, to replenish the soul,” she told AARP The Magazine in 2015. Selleck put it in working terms, calling the ranch “a great counterpoint to the acting business, which is an abstraction,” and that idea of real work on real land was about to be tested.
What Happened When The Rain Stopped Coming?
The ranch was once a working avocado farm, and California’s long droughts were brutal to it. Selleck told People in 2024 that the dry years had killed almost all of the avocado trees along with about 25 oaks that had stood for more than a century. “That just breaks your heart,” he said, though he added that “with the rain we’ve had, the sick ones are getting better, and they’re all sprouting a lot of healthy growth.”
The drought also brought the most uncomfortable headline of his career off camera. In July 2015 the Calleguas Municipal Water District sued Selleck and Jillie, alleging that a commercial water truck had filled up at a public hydrant and hauled the water to the ranch, and the district said it had spent about $21,685 on a private investigator to document the trips. The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department reviewed the claims and could not establish that a crime had been committed.
The case ended almost as fast as it started. The two sides reached a tentative deal within days, and CBS Los Angeles later reported that the district’s board had approved Selleck’s offer to pay $21,685.55, covering the investigator’s fees, and to follow the local ordinance against delivering district water outside its boundaries. The trees survived the scandal, but a bigger worry was coming from New York.
Why Did The End Of ‘Blue Bloods’ Put The Ranch At Risk?
For 14 seasons Selleck played Commissioner Frank Reagan on Blue Bloods, and the steady CBS paycheck helped keep the hills green. When the network announced the show would end, he told CBS Sunday Morning in 2024 that the ranch depended on him staying busy. “That’s always an issue. If I stopped working, yeah,” he said, as Fox News reported. “Am I set for life? Yeah, but maybe not on a 63-acre ranch!”
We covered that worry when he first raised it, in a story about how Selleck feared losing his California ranch after the cancellation. Blue Bloods aired its last episode on December 13, 2024, and Selleck went quiet for a while before the Apple TV news broke in August 2026.
That new job reunites him with his Three Men and a Baby co-star Ted Danson, who plays Banks’s father in the series from Liz Heldens and Matt Ward, according to TV Insider and 9to5Mac. The ranch is still home, and it is still where Hannah, who grew up riding there, built her life with horses before becoming a grand prix show jumper. You can read more about Hannah Selleck’s riding career here. Which brings us to the strangest detail about the whole operation.
Which Crop Does Selleck Want Nothing To Do With?
For a man who has fought droughts and lawsuits to keep an avocado ranch alive, Selleck has a funny confession. He doesn’t like avocados. He told People in 2012 that they “make me gag,” Wide Open Country and FreshPlaza have both noted, and he said he would rather sell his share of the harvest than eat it.
What he loves is the work itself, and the trees he cares about most are the oaks that the drought tried to take from him. “You dig a hole and plant an oak tree, and I’ve probably planted a thousand of them, it’s real,” he told AARP in the same 2015 interview, back when the grove was at its driest.
That may be the best way to understand why an 81-year-old with nothing left to prove is reporting to a set again. The avocados are just the crop. The real harvest, as he told AARP, is the peace of the place. “It’s a lot different from being famous,” Selleck said, “and it keeps me sane.”