Obituary: ‘Da Vinci Code’ and John Grisham publisher Stephen Rubin dead at 81

Stephen Rubin, a longtime publishing executive with a keen eye for bestsellers and a passion for music and public life, helped John Grisham and others He launched his career and released blockbusters such as “The Da Vinci Code” and “Fire and Fury.” already dead. He is 81 years old.

Rubin died Friday at a Manhattan hospital after a “brief and sudden illness,” his nephew David Rotter said.

It’s hard to imagine the book publishing industry without the husky-voiced Rubin. Over the decades, Rubin, who wore tortoiseshell glasses and stylish suits and had friends and colleagues as diverse as Jacqueline Kennedy to Beverly Hills, was a powerful and colorful figure. exists. He hosted unforgettable parties in his spacious West End apartment and was a major source of gossip and the sometimes profane and sometimes loving comments of friends, colleagues and outsiders.

“He would come into a room and fill it immediately,” former HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman told The Associated Press via email. “He had very strong likes and dislikes, and he never changed his mind.”

A former New York Times reporter, Rubin got into publishing in the 1980s, rising to senior positions at Doubleday (where Kennedy was an editor) and Henry Holt and Company. Most recently, he served as a publishing consultant for Simon & Schuster.

Rubin’s many notable projects include Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard’s million-selling “The Killing” historical series, Laura Esquivel’s “Water Like Chocolate,” Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays with Morrie,” Hillary Mantel’s “Bringing the Body” and former President George W. Bush’s “Decision Point” were among the million-selling titles signed by Rubin when Bush Generally unpopular within and outside the publishing world.

Librarians dream of overseeing a phenomenon: Rubin scores at least three points.

He started at Doubleday in the early 1990s, when the publisher was preparing to release “The Firm,” a thriller by a little-known author, John Grisham. The novel made Grisham synonymous with courtroom drama and marked the beginning of a long friendship between him and Rubin, who admitted to taking advantage of the author’s good looks and featuring them in promotional ads (Grisham once rebelled , appeared in the photo shoot) without shaving).

“Steve Rubin is a great publisher,” Grisham said in a statement. “He loved books, especially the ones on the bestseller lists, and he knew how to get them there. He was a writer’s dream—loyal, generous, and never shy about expressing his opinions. He rarely made mistakes, But never doubted it.”

Ten years later, Doubleday took on a then-unknown author who had sold a few copies of Simon & Schuster but now had a strong portfolio of religious/arthouse thrillers set in Europe. Promising manuscript. Through a relentless promotional campaign, including sending thousands of advance copies to booksellers and other industry insiders, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code became an immediate and lasting sensation. Although some critics and other writers despised it and some religious officials considered it blasphemous, sales topped 70 million copies.

The book was so successful that Brown’s earlier novels “Angels and Demons” and “Digital Fortress” also became bestsellers.

“Steve’s infectious enthusiasm for my work is every writer’s dream,” Brown said in a statement. “Steve was a world-class wine connoisseur and he would often send me cases of luxurious Italian wines – a secret plot, he joked, to give me a refined palate so that I would never Couldn’t stop writing. I am forever grateful for his faith, his encouragement, and most of all, his friendship.”

In 2018, when Rubin was in his 70s, he experienced another remarkable ride. He is the publisher of “Holt” and the overseer of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury,” a signature book from the Trump presidency. Rubin agreed to take on the book after having cocktails with the veteran and often controversial journalist two years ago.

“Fire and Fury,” the first work to vividly capture the ongoing chaos in government, proved so unflattering that Trump threatened to block its publication and fired top aides who spoke to Wolff Steve Bannon. Rubin called the book “the craziest experience” of his career.

“For more than a month, it was impossible to miss Fire and Fury,” Rubin wrote in “Words and Music,” a memoir published earlier this year. “This is a win for both Michael and Holt. It’s also exciting and fun.”

A native New Yorker, Rubin’s first and enduring passion was music, especially opera. After graduating from New York University, he earned a master’s degree in journalism from Boston University. (He later wrote that it was a waste of money). He started at UPI and Vanity Fair, and ended up writing profiles on Luciano Pavarotti and Sears, among others, for The New York Times Magazine.

Rubin joined renowned paperback publisher Bantam Books in the mid-1980s and worked there for six years before moving to Doubleday. Throughout it all, he maintained his love of opera and classical music and proudly helped run the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with his wife, Cynthia, who died in 2010.

But he knew books would define his legacy, especially the ones that sold the most. In his memoirs, he made a succinct but incomplete prediction: “I think the title of my obituary will be ‘The publisher of The Da Vinci Code dies.'”

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