Monti Rock III, an entertainer of murky talents who regularly appeared on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” in the 1960s and ’70s, invariably dressed outrageously and working a shtick as a star clinging to celebrity by his fingertips, died on Feb. 23 at his home in Las Vegas. He was 86.
His death was confirmed by Lucille Thaler, a friend. She said he had been in home hospice care since breaking a hip.
Mr. Rock was born Joseph Montanez Jr. in the Bronx and was known as Mr. Monti when he worked as a hair stylist at Saks Fifth Avenue in the early 1960s. Perpetually craving the limelight, he launched a career as a nightclub singer in Manhattan and had a pair of dance hits in the 1970s fronting a group called Disco Tex and His Sex-O-Lettes.
But his closest brush with fame was as a recurring guest with Mr. Carson, who played up — or perhaps invented — Mr. Rock’s persona: the D-list celebrity who entertainingly recounts his failures in show business.
It was clear that Mr. Rock had few actual skills. He could not sing, dance or tell funny stories, as he was the first to admit. “I was a failure for 11 years on TV,” he said in a 1976 profile in The Province, a newspaper in Vancouver, British Columbia.
His act was a bit in the vein of Andy Kaufman, the comic who, a decade later, uncomfortably blurred the line between his own life and his alter ego, an obnoxious lounge singer named Tony Clifton.
Mr. Rock, though, was not putting anyone on. He sincerely believed in himself.
“Every time I would come on,” he said of his “Tonight Show” appearances, in an interview with The Las Vegas Sun in 2005, “it was like, ‘I failed in this show, but I’m in a new show.’ Or, ‘I’m in a bad movie. I’m in a western.’”
Mr. Carson, he added, would say, “‘How did you get a western?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but I can ride a horse.’ He would break up.”
His earnest ramblings about his misadventures charmed many viewers, including an adolescent Howard Stern, who later called him one of the greatest talk show guests of all time.
Mr. Rock was a flamboyant dresser with shoulder-length hair and a single hoop earing — a transparently gay man in the subversive style known as camp in the mid-1960s. His clothes, an entertainment writer for the Copley News Service wrote in 1966, “make Liberace, by contrast, look like the man in the gray flannel suit.”
The details that Mr. Rock gave about his biography and career could not always be trusted. He claimed he was a guest of Mr. Carson’s 84 times, though the IMDb entertainment database says he was on 43 times. He also appeared on the talk shows of Merv Griffin, Joey Bishop and Mike Douglas. A 1966 singing performance on “The Merv Griffin Show,” available online, shows him in his flower.
By the early ’70s, Mr. Rock had moved to Miami and was working as a host at a restaurant — or perhaps as a hairdresser again, depending on which interview of his one believed.
This much was correct: He indeed fronted Disco-Tex and His Sex-O-Lettes, at the invitation of the songwriter and producer Bob Crewe. The group had a pair of hits, “Get Dancin’” in 1974 and “I Wanna Dance Wit’ Choo (Doo Dat Dance)” in 1975. Both reached the top 25 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.
Mr. Rock, shouting the lyrics over the singing of four female Sex-O-Lettes, took that tongue-in-cheek act on the road. Not everyone got the joke.
“Not only does Monti Rock III have no discernible talent whatsoever,” an entertainment writer for The Fort Lauderdale News wrote in a 1975 review, “he also has a filthy mouth.”
Two years later, Mr. Rock had a cameo role, playing a DJ named Beautiful Monti, in the disco-era blockbuster movie “Saturday Night Fever,” with John Travolta.
He moved to Las Vegas in 1996 — one might ask what took him so long — and became a character on the city’s entertainment fringes. He appeared in cabaret shows with a stuffed cat and drove a car wrapped in leopard print with his name emblazoned on it in large letters. He wrote a gossip column for Gaming Today magazine.
“Life has a way of, you either sink or swim,” he told The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2017. “And I’ve been able to sink more times than swim. I’m the world’s most successful failure.”
Joseph Moses Montanez Jr. was born on May 29, 1939, the youngest of six children of Rose and Joseph Moses Montanez, who had moved to New York from Puerto Rico in the 1920s. His father was a laborer, and his mother was a seamstress in a garment factory.
Mr. Rock left no immediate survivors. A longtime partner, Bruce Moshman, died in 2016.
Though he was never quite a show business success, Mr. Rock never stopped trying, and he seemed pleased, not bitter, about his modest place in the entertainment industry.
“I’m not a good actor, but I did film,” he said in 2017. “I’m not a good singer, but I did records. I’m a columnist who can’t type. My one genius was hair. I could do hair. But doing hair for 30 years was not exactly something I had in mind.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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