Times Colonist from Victoria, British Columbia, Canada • 41

GRAY LIKE SIGHTSEEING City and LIVINGC10 5 Butchart Gardens Tours Daily 388-5248 Saturday, April 16, 1988 By Stephanie Mansfield The Washington Post Funny, sexy and guileless, Washington, D.C. OM SELLECK is made of suede. His shoes are suede, his face is suede, his mustache is suede. He's just a suede kind of a guv. Tom Selleck is The Great White Hunk a bigger, better Burt Reynolds I i i i i I "Sl Okay, we promise.

Any details on the last episode? "I don't want to tell people. I mean, in TV Guide, half the time they give away your plot twist." How does it feels to be a sex symbol? "I think it's real flattering as long as it's someone else's judgment," he says modestly. "I don't completely buy into it. Because those labels go away. If you buy into the hills, then you have to buy into the valleys.

I like to stay somewhere in between." He crosses his legs, begins to get animated. "One perception I'd like to correct, which I've seen bandied about because it's a good story, is that because of the success of Three Men and a Baby, people think I gave the network a short order. In November, before I even started doing publicity, I told CBS I was only going to commit to 13 shows. Three Men and a Baby hadn't even come out yet! I just want people to know that Magnum, while I'm doing it, is the most important thing to me A pause. "It's actually kind of nice to be able to cancel them instead ot them cancelling you." What about another series? "If I were going to do another series, it would be Magnum." Enough of the peripheral stuff: How's married life? Are he and Jillie planning babies? When? "We probably won't tell anybody," he smiles.

"I wanna have a kid. I've always wanted to have a kid. But having a kid while Magnum was going on, here I'd never see him, seemed unfair." His plans for the future? This summer, he'll be shooting a film in Australia with director Bruce Beresford Tender Mercies, Breaker Morant). Until then, he says, "I'm gonna hide out for three months and find out what it's like to get bored." i i IwPPiP Not Ultrasuede like Tom Cruise, not Nue-vosuede like Geraldo Rivera, not Euro-suede like Julio Iglesias or Babysuede like Harry Hamlin. Just suede.

The guy probably goes to a suede ranch, once a year, to get buffed. And like most men o' suede, Selleck a Cro-Magnum in Ray-Bans with a heart as big as his Hawaiian britches looks too good to be true. Funny, sexy, guileless, he is the Great White Hunk. A bigger, better Burt Reynolds. What does he think about Bruce Willis getting $5 million for his next movie? Hey, says the Suede One, "he obviously deserves it." How does he feel about leaving his hit series Magnum, P.I.

after 162 episodes? "It's the best job I've ever had." He greets the media with a heartfelt smile and inquires afterward, in the earnest, slightly squeaky voice of a high school civics teacher, "Did everybody get to ask a question?" How suede! And this to a snarling pack of two-legged pit bulls known as the press! The sueding of Tom Selleck started in 1980 when he went, almost overnight, from the Salem billboard man and Chaz cologne model to Thomas Magnum, a private eye with boy-scout banter, a Detroit Tigers baseball cap and a set of rippling thighs prominently featured each week beneath snug bermuda shorts. Women loved him. Men loved him. Movie moguls loved him, but the critics hated him. Selleck took a beating at the box office, fizzling out with three straight disappointments: High Road to China, Las-ster (dubbed Lassitudeby one rude critic) and Runaway.

Unfortunately, he turned down a quirky little script called Raidersof the Lost Ark a fact that will likely be inscribed on the poor guy's tombstone. But he was making decent money as a TV actor (by 1.985, he reportedly was earning $1.8 million US a year), enough to buy a house in Hawaii and an apartment in Beverly Hills, complete with duck decoys, pine wood panelling, faux huntsman prints, a western saddle and polo mallets for decoration only. The idea of Tom Selleck tall, successful, handsome loomed larger than his actual resume. "He's never had the right project." producer Frank Yablansonee told a reporter, "but he's been good even when the material wasn't worthy of him." Then came Three Men and a Baby (with Ted Danson and Steve Guttenberg). a remake of a French farce that earned Touchstone studios more than $152 million US since it opened last fall and gave Selleck a shot at the varsity.

Forget Indiana Jones. The sight of Seileck, backlit, cradling baby girl Mary in his strong, sure arms set hormones a-fluttering in every woman of child-bearing age. Okay, so the "doo-doov jokes were a bit much. But Selleck proved he could act! Even if his co-star was six months old, he was a leading man! kS NICE A guy as you'd want to i irmr In Three Men and a baby, Selleck (left) tries parenting 3fef meet, Selleck didn't exactly grow up in the sticks. His father was a real estate developer for Coldwell Banker who moved his family from Detroit to Sherman Oaks, when Tom was 4.

As a boy, he says, "I guess I was kind of nerdy." As a teenager, "I guess I looked okay, I was just so painfully shy I think a lot of people probably didn't notice me. I just blended into the woodwork." But he was alw ays interested in sports, and won a basketball scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he majored in business administration and left several credits shy of graduation. He went into a management training job with American Airlines, but dropped out. "My ambition was to be a professional athlete, a baseball player." But he had started acting The Dating Game-he didn't get the girl) and modelling (a commercial for Pepsi and the money was good. He met another model, Jacquelyn Ray, and they got married and Selleck adopted her son Kevin, and for years he did commercials and bit parts (Myra Breckinridge, Midway, Daughters of Satan) and waited for his big break.

It came in December 1980, six months after he had split from Jackie. Magnum, P.I. was an instant hit. Selleck likens the resulting stardom to climbing on "the roller coaslcr. Whether you like it or not, you get addicted." So what would Selleck be doing right now if he hadn't gotten the acting bug? "I'd be working with my hands.

I'd have a lot more kids." Tangible things. Things you can hold and finish. He has formed a real estate developing partnership, Selleck Properties, with his brother. "I'm on the periphery though. My brother has the brains." The PR woman returns.

They are waiting for Selleck on the set. "This is an intangible business," he says. He'd like to build "a little house or a big house or a piece of furniture or a sculpture or anything that isn't this thing in thin air. "The best thing about this business is if you accept who your are, and know who you are and don't try to be who you were five years ago, you can always work." And then, he's gone, having stood up, leaned over and planted a swift kiss on the interviewer's cheek. Fuzzy and warm.

Just like suede. WAS a cold, sunny day when Tom Selleck left the warmth of his tanning bed to come to Washington and shoot the last episode of Magnum, P.J., which will go off the air this May. The script of the two-hour CBS special has been kept very hush-hush. Will Thomas Magnum finally get married? Wear long pants? Get Hawaiian shirt poisoning and die? Selleck isn't saying. He's upstairs in his suite at the Willard, having just come back from a morning shoot at the Washington Monument.

It is almost 2 p.m. and Mrs. Tom Selleck Jillie Mack, the diminutive British-born dancer from Cats strides through the lobby with her parents-in-law, Bob and Martha Selleck. Kodak-clutching fans crowd into the carpeted Peacock Alley and stare, open-mouthed, open-shuttered, at the brass revolving door. Selleck is supposed to exit from a cab on the street and walk through the door.

Then he will pause, check the hotel activity board and turn left, past a gaggle of Marines. The plot takes Magnum back to the Naval Academy, and the The voice is purring, maybe not like a vibrating mattress, more like a Laz-E-Boy stuck on high. "I think it's time to get my life back in balance," he says, by way of explaining his exit from the series. "But it's also nice to leave when you want. Magnum's been so good to me, I'd rather leave than let it die the slow natural death that all shows do." He talks about having worked 12-, 16-hour days for eight years.

(All those shrugs! All those grins! All that bermuda-short burn!) The ending will be emotional, he says, "but it's our job as actors not to let that interfere. I don't want us to start crying, getting all sentimental. I don't want us to get maudlin and Willard is the scene of a reunion dance, that much we know. "Okay people, quiet please!" a man calls out as Selleck strides through the lobby to the sidewalk outside. He wears a leather trench coat and huge sunglasses, and his 6-foot-4 frame towers over even his bodyguard, a muscular fellow in tight pants that could stop a Tourmobile.

Selleck's aide de suede, who looks like a rock band roadie and uses phrases like "happening," talks into a walkie-talkie as Selleck runs through the scene: Exit cab, give a little wave, turn and walk toward the door. Cut. Exit cab, give a little wave, turn and walk toward the door. Cut. Exit cab, give a little wave, turn and walk toward the door.

"To the left, Tom," shouts another man. Selleck has actually made it through the door, and stares at the hotel activity board. Then he shrugs, grins a little grin and turns left. But what a shrug! And what a grin! He does it about six times, and he does it exactly the same every time! No variation, no improvising. It's awesome! "Tom is ready for the press conference now," says an aide.

The reporters have set up in a tiny room off the lobby. Selleck strides around the corner and" takes a seat. He wears a dark tailored suit, brown suede brogues and a neatly knotted tie. A handsome man. The kind of man your mother always wanted you to bring home.

For herself. 3 lttt fun! Math humor spunk Vfci 7A'V STAND AND DELIVER University Cinemas Warner Bros, realease. Directed by Ramon Menendez. Starring Edward James Olmos, Lou Diamond PhillipsandAndyGarcia. RATING- It isn't likely Stand and Deliver will win awards, but it's a disarm-; ing little picture that succeeds on its own terms.

This is due mainly to the spirited direction of Ramon Menendez, who also co-wrote the screenplay, and the good ensemble cast. Viewers accustomed to watching Olmos on Miami Vice will barely recognize him. Thin-haired and wearing glasses upon his pockmarked face, he is remarkably convincing as the hard-working teacher. The depth and enthusiasm he brings to the role is impressive. Also very good is Lou Diamond Phillips (La Bamba) as Angel, a sunglassed tough guy who wants to learn math but won't admit it.

tial arts and Richard Simmons to i flabby aerobicizers. Based on a true story, it's one of those "you can do it" movies, a little too manipulative and sappy at times, but graced with compensatory charm, spirit and commendable performances. "I don't need math I got a solar calculator with my dozen dough- nuts!" is one East Los Angeles high school student's smart-alecky re, sponse when Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos), the school's new math teacher, reports for class. Escalante, who thought he would be teaching computer science until he realized the rundown high school had no computers, soon endears himself to the class of mostly Hispanic wisecrackers and roughnecks. Escalante's teaching methods a re noth i i not offbeat.

He shows up for class wearing a chef's hat and attacks an apple with a meat cleaver to get a point across about fractions. To solve other math problems, he asks students to add and subtract a gigolo's girlfriends, for example. To his detractors, he says: "Tough guys don't do math, tough guys deep-fry chicken for a living." Not surprisingly, Escalante humors and threatens his unmotivated students to the point he gains (heir respect. Almost, miraculously, he also inspires them to take the National Advanced Placement Calculus Test. Although the film is fairly predictable, the testing sub-plot is involving and will make even the most somnolent viewer root for the underdogs.

By Michael D. Reid Times-Colonist staff review nn ATHEMATICS can be t3 forward eloquently and with an inspired sense of humor in Stand and Deliver, a surprisingly enjoyable movie that could as easily have been titled The Jov of Math. if Stand and Deliver, which opened Friday at the University Cinemas, is to mathematics what Rocky was to boxing. The Karate Kid to mar this movie has math ap- Yes, peal. COUNT ON Edward James Olmos; right, and Daniel Villarreal.