Sam Rubin ’82 became a fixture of the entertainment journalism landscape over his 33 years with KTLA—and his unexpected death in May resonated well beyond Hollywood's red carpets
Sam Rubin ’82 got his first taste of broadcasting at the tender age of 19. After his first year at , he spent the summer reporting the weather for the CBS affiliate in toasty El Centro, 212 miles southeast of Los Angeles and the nation’s 230th-largest TV market. Temperatures notwithstanding, Rubin simply sought to make audiences happy, roommate Mike Stoddard ’82 recalls. “Sammy was never self-reflective. He really just enjoyed life.”
More than a decade later, following a series of stints in journalism ranging from the tabloid press to cable TV, Rubin landed the role that would define his career: entertainment reporter for the KTLA Morning News in Los Angeles. Over his 33-year tenure, Rubin became a Hollywood institution—a trusted reporter who made friends wherever he went, from press junkets to red carpets, eschewing the trappings of the traditional Q&A while just being himself.
“If you had lunch or dinner with Sam, you’d be eating with the person you saw on TV,” says Jody Yoxsimer ’82, a good friend of Rubin’s dating back to their student days at .
“He was incredibly funny and self-deprecating, and he endeared himself to a lot of people,” adds Yoxsimer’s husband, retired cardiologist Mike Jorgensen ’81, who worked closely with Rubin as president of Associated Students of as a junior (Rubin oversaw social events for ASOC).
Some of the biggest names in showbiz regarded Rubin as more than just a reporter. “Out of all of the people that I’ve known throughout my career, he was one of the happiest for my success,” Jamie Lee Curtis wrote on Instagram on May 10 following Rubin’s unexpected death from a heart attack brought on by coronary artery disease. “He is a great example to us all and a reminder to suit up and show up with a smile and love in your heart.” Tom Hanks—who called Rubin “the Moses of Hollywood moguls” while doing press for Toy Story 4—likewise wrote on Instagram: “Sam Rubin, you will missed. A good guy, that Sam.”
The unflappable Rubin would be “astonished” by the reaction to news of his passing, says former KTLA Morning News anchor Carlos Amezcua, who developed a friendship with Rubin during the 16 years that they shared on the air. “The outpouring of love would have absolutely floored him. I don’t think he realized how impactful his life was to us.”
Before he was Sam Rubin, the ebullient face of entertainment journalism, he was Sammy Rubin, a zany American studies major who loved to travel—having flown to Sweden his junior year to “allegedly” do independent study on the cultural significance of the pop supergroup ABBA, Stoddard recalls. “God knows how he sold that, but he somehow managed to convince the professor that it was a worthwhile use of his time for the semester.”
The entertainment bug bit Rubin even before he got to Eagle Rock: As a senior at University High School in West Los Angeles, he hosted a Sunday night radio show on a local AM station in which he interviewed such musicians as Al Stewart and the Bay City Rollers.
When he arrived at , he was paired with Stoddard, an economics major from Boise, Idaho, and they shared a room at Stewart-Cleland Hall as freshmen. (Despite Rubin’s penchant for borrowing Stoddard’s toothbrush and socks without notice, they wound up living together for all four years.)
Stoddard recalls venturing out with his roommate in Rubin’s “crappy beat-up Vega” to explore the city’s iconic haunts, including the first Famous Amos cookie store in Hollywood. For Stoddard’s 19th birthday, Rubin presented his friend with a foil-wrapped russet potato jabbed with a candle—a nod to Stoddard’s Northwest roots—and enlisted the help of 19 coeds, who at random times throughout the day planted a kiss on the unwitting birthday boy.
By spring of Rubin’s senior year, he was still puzzling over how to get his career off the ground when an idea came to him: He’d become a flight attendant. A month before graduation, and several weeks into training for Northwest Orient Airlines, fate intervened. A reporting job at The National Enquirer in Lantana, Fla., “fell into his lap,” Stoddard says.
“He got the job based on his writing ability, which he cultivated at ,” adds Jorgensen, who lived with Rubin for two years while he was attending UCLA medical school. “Sam was fearless. He would write and research, and so many doors opened for him.”
One of Rubin’s first assignments with the Enquirer was to travel to Europe to look for dirt on Grace Kelly, Princess of Monaco, who died in a car accident in September 1982. An article in The Occidental two months later cheekily described Rubin’s ascension to the tabloid ranks thusly: “Rubin sells soul, joins Enquirer for fun and profit.” In the story, Rubin—who had covered entertainment for The Occidental—declined to disclose the tabloid’s methods, saying only, “There are eyes everywhere.”
Rubin’s colleague at The Occidental was Todd Gold ’81, himself a fixture in entertainment journalism. A 16-year veteran of People and former L.A. bureau chief for US magazine, Gold has ghost-written or co-written more than 50 memoirs with celebrities and newsmakers, including Seinfeld actor Michael Richards’ recently published Entrances and Exits, a New York Times best-seller.
“Sammy was an enthusiastic and openhearted guy, a little doofusy, in that he was so present and friendly and wide-eyed,” Gold says. “He wasn’t cutthroat. He was open and fun. He grew into his doofusness and made it work for him. Sam was impossible not to love.”
In an era when prime-time soaps Dallas and Dynasty held audiences in their thrall, viewers were hungry for spoilers—and with a wad of Enquirer cash in his glovebox, Rubin drove around backlots ready to pay sources to leak the series’ plot turns. “Sam treated it all with a lot of humor,” Gold says. “He was not going to spend his life working for the National Enquirer. He knew it was a stepping stone—he just didn’t know where he was stepping to yet.”
When the KTLA Morning News was launched in July 1991, it was one of the first regional programs of its kind in the country (Good Day New York premiered on the New York City Fox affiliate in 1988). In head-to-head local competition against ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s The Today Show, and CBS This Morning, KTLA quickly outrated them all, reaching an average of 220,000 households daily in the May 1992 sweeps period.
Rubin joined the show a month after it started, creating bonds with his viewers through his quick wit, his estimable entertainment knowledge, and his unstinting love of Los Angeles. “We started in a ragtag way, really, without any guidance,” says Amezcua, who left the program in 2007 and went on to found Beond TV, a digital streaming service. “We created an environment that allowed us to be ourselves, and Sammy was the very best at being himself.”
“To watch Sam was a master class,” Morning News co-anchor Jessica Holmes said at the 76th Los Angeles Area Emmy Awards ceremony in July, where Rubin was feted posthumously with the Governors Award for his “legacy of more than three decades of entertainment news reporting for KTLA.” (Rubin won an additional L.A. Area Emmy that night—his fifth overall—for his coverage of the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike.)
Holmes continued: “He knew how to connect. He was vulnerable. He wore his heart on his sleeve. And I'm telling you, he could ad-lib better than anyone. A script was merely a suggestion for Sam Rubin.”
Throughout his career, Rubin was nothing if not a dreamer. “No dream [was] too big or too out of reach,” Holmes noted—like the time he told Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, “What you need are live red-carpet shows, and I'm your guy,” or suggesting to American Idol host Ryan Seacrest that he’d make a good replacement for departing judge Katy Perry.
According to Amezcua, Rubin aspired to be a cultural force along the lines of Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, the Chicago film critics turned TV personalities who became staples of the late-night talk show circuit. Rubin became a fixture on awards show red carpets and press junkets and built an international following through his appearances on morning shows in Great Britain and Australia.
When Rubin took the job with the Enquirer, he had yet to fulfill the College’s foreign-language requirement, and he left Occidental one unit shy of his degree. He returned to many times over the years and was a regular presence at his class reunions. He also repeatedly worked with the Career Center to help students who were considering a career in entertainment.
“ set up a shadow day for me with Sam my senior year,” Michelle Phalen Runzler ’06 wrote on Occidental’s Facebook page following Rubin’s death. “After one day in the newsroom with him, I knew TV news was my calling. Because of him, I went on to grad school at USC and got a master’s in broadcast journalism. Sam was happy to give advice and talked fondly of his days!”
For her shadow day at KTLA in 2007, Stacie Roshon ’08 arrived at Rubin’s office at 5:30 a.m. and left about five hours later, having spent most of her time on the Morning News set or watching Rubin work behind the scenes preparing his entertainment reports. “Seeing Sam work, being in his element the way he was, and the way he seemed to completely enjoy what he did, definitely reinforced my interest in broadcasting,” she told Occidental magazine at the time.
Rubin was a father of four—to Perry, Rory, Darcy, and Colby—and Morning News viewers watched his children grow up on TV. “I expected at least 10 to 20 more years with my dad,” Colby, 16, said in accepting the Governors Award for his late father in July. “And while I don’t get that, I am so lucky because the time we did spend together was of quality. Above all else, he was an incredible father who showed up for me.”
“I remember asking my dad when he would retire,” added Darcy, 18, “and he said, ‘Oh, I hope never.’ He did not see his career as an obligation but rather a pleasure.”
In closing out the presentation, Rubin’s colleague for nearly 10 years, former Morning News co-anchor Michaela Pereira, said he taught her “about moments in television—that we should always be looking for those moments. ‘Producers will tell us to keep moving in time and whatever. But find those moments in television because that’s the good stuff.’
“I feel him here today—he would love this,” she added. “And he’d want us to do more. But the other thing I know about him is he’d say the show must go on. So, the show will go on.”
Top photo: Stacie Roshon ’08 with Sam Rubin '82 on the KTLA Morning News set in November 2007. Photo by Kirby Lee
