Jeffrey Rubin (1954–2021)
When I was 14 years old, my family went on one of many vacations to the Outer Banks. I had just been diagnosed with anorexia and been put on a strict diet, thickly padded with protein shakes to help me gain weight, which of course, I did not follow. I pushed food around on my plate and then tossed it out when no one was looking. I took protein shakes to the beach where I dumped them into the sand. I might have gotten away with it, except that I kept meticulous notes about all of the food I wasn’t eating in my journal. Suspecting as much, my Mom rifled through my things and found my little black notebook, which she promptly handed off to my father, who was charged with handling the situation. “You know, Steph,” my Dad said as he handed the journal back to me, “you’d be a decent writer if you could write about anything other than food.”
I remember feeling ashamed when he said that, because I knew he was onto something. My journal, riddled with notes about calories and cellulite rather than poems or reflections, was tangible proof of what I sacrificed by giving into my obsession with weight. But I was also flattered and somewhat surprised that he saw anything worth praising among my neurotic scribblings, because he was someone who knew a thing or two about what constitutes good writing.
A stage actor, screenwriter, and editor, my father was a probing and often searing critic. He made a habit of thoughtfully analyzing every book he read or movie he watched — a practice he shared with his children. After every family trip to the movies, we’d comb through the film for loopholes, in competition to see who could make the sharpest critique. My brother Joseph loathed this nitpicking. “Just enjoy the movie,” he’d beg. But skewering a box office hit is precisely what my father enjoyed about going to the movies.
Nothing was above his scrutiny — or below it — which meant that his favorite films spanned genres, from high-minded classics like The Godfather or A Man For All Seasons, to comedies like Groundhog Day and Galaxy Quest, to children’s movies like Toy Story and The Incredibles.
About the things that left him uninspired, he could be comically irreverent. Once, while visiting me in Madison, we popped into a used book store, where we found a collection of Morris Louis paintings compiled and annotated by the art critic and historian Michael Fried. “You know Michael Fried was my professor at Harvard,” he said carelessly, “I thought he was a total idiot.”
But don’t mistake his flippancy for superficiality. In an essay about his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, my Dad writes about the time, just after he graduated from Julliard, when he played Duke Vincentio in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. He was still an atheist at the time, but it bothered him that the director seemed intent to ignore the play’s spiritual themes and conform it to his own “fashionably cynical vision.” Unwilling to allow the play to be mangled so, my Dad accused the director of “dogmatic atheism” and sent him 60 pages of his own analysis on the matter. It is a testament to the depth and clarity of his insight that his effort paid off — the director acquiesced and the play was a “smashing success.”
That was his way with the things he loved — he perused them thoroughly, and then eagerly shared whatever joy or truth or beauty he found in them with others, especially his kids.
He was a conservative and religious man, and thus strictly monitored the entertainment we watched as children. But he made frequent and rather questionable exceptions for the movies he thought were really good. We weren’t allowed to read Harry Potter, or watch E.T. or Friends or any number of other movies and tv shows popular among our peers growing up, but I’d seen all of the Mad Max movies by the time I was eight, as well as many thrillers like Psycho, or The Exorcist. My sister Meghan has yet to recover from watching Deliverance at the tender age of eleven.
His enthusiasm for the things he thought worthy of time and attention was infectious. In second grade, my teacher asked the students in my class to name our favorite movies. Most of my classmates said Titanic, which I’d never seen, or Spice World, which I’d never even heard of, but I said “Gene Kelly movies” because I watched On The Town, or Brigadoon, or Singin’ in the Rain or That’s Entertainment! with my dad almost every night. It’s taken me years to disentangle my taste in films or books from his. To this day, I have a strange disdain for anything directed by James Cameron.
To be an object of his enthusiasm was thrilling. For many years, at the beginning of my still fledgling writing career, I sent him drafts of every single article I wrote, often minutes before I was due to file them. I did this partly because I knew that he’d drop everything and thoroughly copy edit them, in the urgent way he jumped to help his children. But also because I longed to know what he thought about my work. More than any editor or reader, he was the only critic I had any mind to impress.
Often he’d send them back with exaggerated praise. “Another excellent piece, Steph,” he’d say. “Fantastic.” The approbation he lavished on my meager offerings, so distinct from his typically ruthless scrutiny, betrayed his love for me.
Of course, he was his own harshest critic, often to humorous effect. He once brutally summed up his own career writing copy for a publishing company as “faking an orgasm for 15 years.” But his tendency to fixate on his flaws and failures — some real and others imagined — at the exclusion of everything else, worsened as he aged. If he had a tragic flaw, that was it.
My father spent the last decade of his life utterly ravaged by a debilitating mental illness. One that thrust the harsh light of his own scrutiny on him in merciless fashion and tortured him like an ant under a magnifying glass.
During those difficult years, I often found myself repeating versions of the advice he’d given me when I was fourteen and starving myself. If he could just zoom out beyond the narrow scope of his own shortcomings, he would find not only a much more forgiving portrait of himself, but also many other things in his life still worth relishing.
It is a comfort to me that, if there is such a thing as a Day of Reckoning, my father is not responsible for rendering his own final judgement. And that perhaps, in the perfect light of his Creator, he’ll be able to see himself more like I do.
-Stephanie Murray, 06/20/2021
