“It was just an adventure. I wouldn’t trade it,” Selleck tells PEOPLE
Tom Selleck’s wedding to Jillie Mack, cementing their decades-long marriage, almost didn’t happen.
The Blue Bloods star, 79, revealed in an exclusive conversation with PEOPLE that their Aug. 7, 1987 ceremony was almost derailed after they forgot their marriage license.
“She was in a little room off the little chapel, getting ready, and I think my mom was in there. Maybe Marty wasn’t there. She was pregnant,” recalls Selleck of the moments before seeing Mack, 66, walk down the aisle.
The actor says all he remembers is there suddenly being “this commotion.”
“Jillie can talk really fast and a lot and loudly, and I heard all this stuff and I think Dan went to check, and we had all forgotten the license,” he says.
The couple, who got married in a secret ceremony with only a handful of people in attendance at a wedding chapel near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, were only able to go through with it thanks to the reverend.
“That’s what I remember most about the wedding. And Reverend David saying I’ll sign the thing anyway,” explains Selleck. “And he went all the way into Reno himself so we could have dinner and brought it back. So yeah, it was just an adventure. I wouldn’t trade it.”
Of the wedding day decor, the Magnum P.I. alum says that the chapel had Astroturf, noting that the reverend and his wife “did everything they could to make it just right.”
Selleck credits Mack being a “very independent person” and having “her own life” as one reason behind their longstanding marriage.
“I don’t think the relationship would’ve survived with somebody who was basically eating, sleeping, and working. And Jillie’s a very active person, as you can see. And I remember the first time she stayed in Hawaii,” he says. “I mean, she’d visit the set maybe late in the day, but only after she made my friend, Dave Muntz, take her to the roller skating rink so she could practice roller skating because she was going to audition to Starlight Express.”
The couple welcomed a daughter, Hannah Margaret Selleck, on Dec. 16, 1988, nearly a year after their marriage. Selleck is also the father of a son named Kevin, whom he adopted with his first wife, Jacqueline Ray.