‘Can’t Wait to See You’: Remembering Stephen Rubin
I was having dinner in a New York restaurant called Lilies when I found out Steve was dead.
We were supposed to dine together the following evening. Increasingly worried that I had not heard from him, I Googled his name. The first headline that popped up wasted no time letting me know what had happened: Stephen Rubin Dead. A book publishing legend, the obits said, responsible for the mega-selling The Da Vinci Code (something he had predicted would happen when his obituary was written) had died suddenly at the age of 81.
This was Monday night. Steve had died the previous Friday.
Sitting in a noisy restaurant, surrounded by happily chatting patrons, discovering that the friend you’ve known for nearly half a century is abruptly gone, leaves you bewildered, numb, and choked with disbelief: how could this be?
A month before, another Stephen, Stephen Silverman, another New York friend whom I had not seen in years and had planned a lunch with, another instance of worrying that I had not heard from him, only to discover through the internet that he had died. The irony of the two Stephens dying so unexpectedly as I visited New York for the first time in many years, was unimaginable. It could not possibly have happened, I kept telling myself.
And yet it had.
Where to start with my feelings about Steve? Love? Frustration? Admiration? Envy? A little bit of all those things. Overwhelmingly, love and admiration, that’s for certain—with a lot of appreciation added.
When I met him in the late 1970s, Steve was a long way from a publishing legend. A former New York Times entertainment writer specializing in opera, his true love, he had created a syndicate called Writers Bloc. He had gathered together a seasoned group of New York writers to provide magazine pieces to the Sunday supplements for an impressive number of major newspapers, ranging from the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune to the Miami Herald, the Washington Post, New York Newsday, the Toronto Star, and the New York Post.
Thanks to Steve, I ended up writing for all those publications. Along the way, we became close. We talked almost daily on the phone, and every couple of weeks or so, I would arrive in New York to pursue the latest story Steve had cooked up. I stayed with Steve and his partner, Cynthia Robbins, in their small lower East Side apartment.
If one was in search of the poster boy for the archetypal sophisticated New Yorker, you needed to look no further than Steve Rubin. Well armed with an acerbic wit, opinionated, exuding a self-confidence that on occasion got awfully close to arrogance yet never quite crossed that line, always carefully turned out in a blazer and tie—a charmer, mostly irresistible, except on the occasions when something I had written fell short of his expectations. Then he could be the harsh, demanding editorial taskmaster.
Before I met her, Steve warned me that his partner, Cynthia, was older. That was no big deal, I said, my wife at the time was also older than me. “No,” Steve said, “I mean a lot older.”
And Cynthia was a lot older and quite a character. A tough-tough talking New York…dame, there is no other word for it. I’ve seldom met anyone as outspoken. But then she leavened her outspokenness with a winning smile and the admonition, “Try to remember I love you, puss.”
I wondered about them but then they got along so well—I never heard them trade a cross word—that nothing else mattered.
What a time I had with the two of them; the life, for a couple of years, as close to a New York writer as a kid from smalltown Canada could ever hope to get. I went everywhere it seemed and met, well, if not everyone, a lot of delightful people.
It couldn’t last—and it didn’t.
As newspapers across the country began to run into problems, their freelance budgets were cut and that spelled trouble for Writers Bloc. I was in New York with Steve when it came to an end. The enduring image I have as I left was of Steve working as usual at his tiny desk. As always, he was shaved, and wearing a tie. Undaunted, full of his trademark optimism. Still, I wondered what was to become of him. He didn’t seem to have any prospects at all.
I should have known better.
Within weeks, he had landed at Bantam Books. It seemed like no time at all before he was running the company. Moving to Doubleday, Steve truly began to shine, finding what he called the “big- ticket bestsellers” that inspired ‘legendary’ in front of the word publisher.
Steve discovered John Grisham, stick handled The Da Vinci Code into one of the bestselling novels of all time, and more recently at Henry Holt, published Bill O’Reilly and Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump Whitehouse.
By then, Steve had become a wealthy man (he said he received a million-dollar bonus for The Da Vinci Code), complete with a gorgeous Upper Westside apartment, a place in the Hamptons, and a chauffeur to get him there.
Would I have guessed that the friend I worked with so closely was capable of reaching such publishing heights—“the quintessential hitmaker of the book world,” according to the New York Times? Let’s say I would never have predicted it given the shape he was in when Writers Bloc fell apart. But knowing Steve, I must say, I am not surprised.
Keeping a friendship going post-Writers Bloc was not always easy. Although he published my first novel in New York, Steve could not be shaken from his belief that I was not a fiction writer. To him, my forte was nonfiction. He wanted me to do the as-told-to celebrity autobiographies he loved to publish. Through no fault of either of us, projects that would have involved the movie mogul Jerry Weintraub, the classic Hollywood producer, Ross Hunter, and the acting legend Robert Mitchum, never materialized. Just as well, as far as I was concerned.
In the following years, I wrote 24 novels, my way, I suppose, of trying to prove Steve wrong about me. I’m not sure I ever did, although when he published his autobiography, Words and Music: Confessions of an Optimist, he actually described me as a novelist, a tiny victory.
I called to congratulate him on his book in which, to say the least, he had taken no prisoners. “Well, no one is talking to me,” he said with typical offhandedness. “But that’s okay.”
Our conversation was a throwback to old times, Steve, as I always called him, and Rhone, as he always called me, pals again. We agreed to meet for dinner in New York. I said he sounded great and from what I could see from various photos, the years hadn’t changed him much at all.
“Don’t kid yourself,” he said ruefully. “Turning 81 is not easy.” I didn’t think much about that at the time. After the call, I wrote him a note saying how much Kathy and I were looking forward to seeing him. He wrote back, “Cannot wait to see you both…so happy and excited!”
Then…nothing…
Silence, except for the surrounding noise of a crowded restaurant, the fleeting look of concern on the face of a woman across the way, seeing a man in his mid-seventies, in shock, his wife gripping his hand as tears streamed down his face…
