Stephen Rubin, a longtime publishing executive with an eye for bestsellers and a passion for music and public life who helped launch the career of John Grisham, among others, and published blockbusters such that “The Da Vinci Code” and “Fire and Fury”, is dead. He was 81 years old.
Rubin died Friday in a Manhattan hospital after “a brief and sudden illness,” according to his nephew, David Rotter.
It’s hard to imagine book publishing without the raspy-voiced Rubin, a powerful and colorful presence for decades with his tortoiseshell glasses, elegant suits and wide range of friends and colleagues, by Jacqueline Kennedy to Beverly Sills. He threw memorable parties in his spacious West Side apartment and was a major source of gossip and alternately profane and affectionate assessments of his friends, colleagues and the world at large.
“He would walk into a room and immediately fill it,” his close friend Jane Friedman, former CEO of HarperCollins Publishers, told The Associated Press by email. “He had very strong likes and dislikes and he NEVER changed his mind.”
Rubin was a former New York Times reporter who got into publishing in the 1980s and rose to senior positions at Doubleday, where Kennedy worked for a time as an editor, and at Henry Holt and Company. Most recently, he was a publishing consultant for Simon & Schuster.
Among Rubin’s many notable projects are Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s million-selling historical series “Killing,” Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water for Chocolate,” Mitch Albom’s “Tuesday With Morrie,” Hilary Mantel’s “Bring Up the Bodies” and President George W. Bush’s former million-dollar “Decision Points” that Rubin helped sign at a time when Bush was widely unpopular in the acting world publishing and beyond.
Book executives dream of overseeing even just one phenomenon: Rubin scored at least three times.
In the early 1990s, he started at Doubleday when the publisher was preparing to release a thriller by a little-known author, “The Firm” by John Grisham. The novel helped make Grisham a byword for courtroom drama and marked the start of a long friendship between him and Rubin, who would admit to taking advantage of the author’s good looks and featuring them in promotional advertisements (Grisham would rebel for a while by appearing during photo shoots). unshaven).
“Steve Rubin was a great editor,” Grisham said in a statement. “He loved books, especially those that were on the bestseller list, and he knew how to get them there. He was every writer’s dream: loyal, generous and never shy with his opinions. He was rarely wrong, but never doubted.
A decade later, Doubleday hired a then-obscure author who had sold few copies for Simon & Schuster but now had a promising manuscript for a religious/arts thriller set in Europe. Thanks to a relentless promotional campaign, including thousands of advance copies sent to booksellers and others in the industry, Dan Brown’s “The Da Vinci Code” became an immediate and lasting sensation. Sales exceeded 70 million copies, even as some critics and fellow authors despised it and some religious leaders considered it blasphemous.
The book was so successful that Brown’s previous novels, “Angels and Demons” and “Digital Fortress,” also became bestsellers.
“Steve’s infectious enthusiasm for my work was an author’s dream,” Brown said in a statement. “A world-class oenophile, Steve would send me cases of sumptuous Italian wines – a secret plot, he joked, to equip me with a refined palate so that I could never afford to stop writing . I am forever grateful for his trust, his encouragement and, above all, his friendship.
In 2018, when Rubin was around 75 years old, he had another extraordinary run. He was Holt’s editor and supervisor of a landmark book of the Trump presidency, Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” which Rubin agreed to take on after meeting for cocktails two years earlier with the veteran journalist and often controversial.
“Fire and Fury” was the first work to vividly capture the current chaos of the administration and proved so unflattering that Trump threatened to block its publication and fired one of his top aides, Steve Bannon, who had spoken with Wolff. Rubin would call the book the “craziest experience” of his career.
“For more than a month, it was humanly impossible to miss ‘Fire and Fury,’” Rubin wrote in his memoir “Words and Music,” published earlier this year. “It was a triumph for Michael and for Holt. It was also exhilarating and fun.
Rubin was a New York native whose initial and lasting passion was music, particularly opera. After graduating from New York University, he earned a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University. (A waste of money, he later wrote). He started at UPI and Vanity Fair and eventually wrote profiles of Luciano Pavarotti and Sills, among others, for the New York Times Magazine.
Rubin joined Bantam Books, a venerable paperback publisher, in the mid-1980s, and stayed there for six years before leaving for Doubleday. He retained his affinity for opera and classical music and, with his wife Cynthia, who died in 2010, helped lead the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, a great source of pride.
But he knew the books would define his legacy, especially the one that sold the most copies. In his memoir, he offered a succinct, if incomplete, prediction: “I suppose the headline of my obituary will read ‘Editor of ‘The Da Vinci Code’ Has Died.”