Tom Selleck has worn his mustache for so long that a bare upper lip on him looks like a disguise. That is the fun of the old photos Hello! Magazine dug up this week, which show a young, clean-shaven Selleck who could pass for a college ballplayer. When his career began, he more or less was one.
Selleck, born in Detroit on January 29, 1945, is 81 now, and these days he lives on the California ranch that once belonged to Dean Martin. Before Magnum, P.I. made him a star in 1980, though, he spent about fifteen years as the handsome face nobody could quite place. He lost on a dating show and sold soda. He made pilot after pilot that went nowhere. And just as the break finally came, it cost him a role most actors would trade a decade for.
How Did a Dating Game Loser Land at 20th Century-Fox?
It started with a rumor at the fraternity house. Selleck was a business student at USC, where he played basketball, and in his 2024 memoir You Never Know he recalls that “word went around the Sigma Chi house that it was easy to get on The Dating Game.” He went on as Bachelor Number 2 in 1965 and came back for a second try in 1967. As Mental Floss put it, he lost both times. “I had lame answers, and I lost,” he wrote in the excerpt published by AARP, adding a line that reads funnier now than it did then: “It’s not like I had a mustache to cover it up.”
The losing turned out not to matter, because people in the business were watching. Commercial work followed, and over the next decade he sold soda, cigarettes and deodorant on camera. He was sure he had not won his Pepsi spot on talent. “Much more likely, it was my basketball ability,” he wrote in the memoir, before confessing that he “had always preferred Pepsi to Coke” anyway.
Then came a meeting with Fox studio chief Richard Zanuck. As both the AARP excerpt and Library Journal’s review of the book describe it, the kid with no acting experience talked his way into the studio’s New Talent program. Fox now had a contract player. What it did with him was another matter.
What Was the Future Magnum Doing in a Mae West Movie?
His first film role was about as unlikely as a debut gets. In the 1970 Gore Vidal adaptation Myra Breckinridge, Selleck played one of the young “studs” who catch the eye of Mae West’s character. Few people in Hollywood rattled him, but she did. “I probably got a little starstruck with Mae West,” he told Town & Country in 2024. “I didn’t get starstruck with [James] Garner, even though I just deeply respected his work, loved his work.”
The 1970s that followed were steady but never quite lucky. He took guest spots on series like The F.B.I. and Charlie’s Angels while the commercials kept paying the bills. More painfully, he shot six television pilots that were never sold, a number Fox News repeated in its coverage of his memoir. Through most of it his face stayed bare, because the work demanded it. “I just got used to it and used to have to shave it off for those early jobs,” he told People in 2024. “And then it was kind of okay.”
The part that finally pointed him toward stardom came from that same James Garner, on a detective show that was already a hit.
Who Was Lance White, and Why Did James Garner Matter?
If you watched The Rockford Files on Friday nights, you may remember Lance White, the private eye who was everything Jim Rockford was not. Lance was polished and trusting, and he was lucky to the point of absurdity, while Garner’s Rockford got beaten up and stiffed on his fee. Selleck played him in two episodes, “White on White and Nearly Perfect” in October 1978 and “Nice Guys Finish Dead” in November 1979.
Those two hours did more for him than any of the pilots. When CBS offered him a Hawaii detective show, Selleck pushed for a hero who was closer to the rumpled Rockford than to a slick James Bond type, as Mental Floss reported from his 2014 GQ interview. Garner stayed in his corner long after. When Garner died in 2014, Selleck said in a statement carried by the Associated Press, “Jim was a mentor to me and a friend, and I will miss him.”
By the time Magnum, P.I. came together, the mustache was finally staying put. The timing could hardly have been worse.
The Movie Role Tom Selleck Lost, And The Strike That Made It Sting
While Selleck waited to hear whether CBS would pick up the Magnum pilot, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas offered him the lead in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He told CBS Sunday Morning that Spielberg handed him the script, and “I got to about page 8 in Steven’s office and I just went ‘Oh —-, this is really good.'” He told TODAY, “I was offered the role and wanted it.” Spielberg and Lucas kept the offer open for weeks, but as he put it, “the more they wanted me, the more CBS said, ‘No, we don’t want to let him do it.'” The network refused to release him, and the part went to Harrison Ford.
Then came the twist. A strike in 1980 stalled production on Magnum for months, as Selleck recounts in the memoir and Mental Floss also reported. Selleck sat in Hawaii with nothing to shoot, and Raiders came to the islands to film while he waited. “I coulda done both,” he wrote, according to TVLine’s roundup of the book.
The mustache had one more brush with CBS. Years later, when he signed on as Commissioner Frank Reagan on Blue Bloods, Selleck offered to shave it, figuring a New York police boss would be clean-shaven. Producer Leonard Goldberg checked with the network. “And they said no,” Selleck told People. The same network that kept him from Indiana Jones would not let him lose the mustache either, and he has learned to laugh about the first one. “You can make yourself a victim,” he said on CBS Sunday Morning, “or just smile and say, ‘That’s really ironic.'”
