Johnny Legend, a polymath of the perverse who became something of a cult hero as — among other outré personas — a punk-rock wrestling impresario, an accomplice to the comedian Andy Kaufman, a B-movie archivist and erotic film auteur, and, with his flowing beard, a recording curiosity known as the Rockabilly Rasputin, died on Jan. 2 in South Beach, Ore. He was 77.
His death, at the home of his sister, Lynne Margulies Osgood, with whom he was living, was caused by complications of a stroke and heart failure, Ms. Margulies Osgood said.
Mr. Legend, whose real name was Martin Margulies, grew up in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California, a suburban idyll not so many miles from the glamour of Hollywood, and he ended up taking on the entertainment industry from seemingly every possible angle.
But his off-kilter career choices seemed almost designed to thwart conventional stardom. Instead, he settled into his own subset of celebrity as, he once put it, “the most famous person you’ve never heard of.”
“The wild-eyed, weird-bearded, longhaired dynamo,” the alternative newspaper LA Weekly observed in a 2003 profile, was a “manic force, one you can find at just about every unsavory corner of the Hollywood underground.” A 2012 story in the East Bay Express of Oakland, Calif., described Mr. Legend as “a living nexus of pop culture.”
He had occasional intersections with the mainstream, including a 1994 appearance on the short-lived MTV program “The Jon Stewart Show,” in which the future host of “The Daily Show” introduced Mr. Legend as one of his many incarnations: “America’s leading archivist of incredibly strange films.”
Acting anything but mainstream, Mr. Legend bounded onto the set wearing a clown-sized yellow suit and speaking at the pace of a 33 ⅓-r.p.m. LP played at 45. He then gushed with his fellow guest Quentin Tarantino over “Spider Baby,” a 1967 schlock-horror groaner that Mr. Legend had exhumed for a round of theatrical screenings.
Mr. Legend’s own cinematic exploits included co-directing, under his real name, a 1977 X-rated erotic comedy called “Young, Hot ’n Nasty Teen-Age Cruisers,” a sleaze classic that featured a switchblade-wielding ventriloquist dummy along with the standard adult-film hydraulics.
He also delved into music. A self-proclaimed “rockabilly bastard,” Mr. Legend predated the Stray Cats as a revivalist in that genre, but came nowhere close to the platinum success they achieved in the 1980s.
As frontman for a variety of bands, he recorded a handful of minor-label albums. But he really made his presence known onstage. Touring the United States and Europe over the years, Mr. Legend became a lightning-rod figure on the Brylcreem-pompadour circuit for his unhinged performances — including one at a prison in Chino, Calif. — and his transgressive tendencies. One favorite costume was a Confederate general’s uniform.
His best-known musical accomplishment was writing the 1977 novelty song “Pencil Neck Geek,” recorded by the former professional wrestler Freddie Blassie, which became a staple of Dr. Demento’s long-running syndicated radio show.
In the 1990s, Mr. Legend cemented his status as a ringmaster of the bizarre by founding Incredibly Strange Wrestling, an unholy blend of Mexican lucha libre (one marquee act called itself the Ku Klux Klowns) and live performances by punk bands like the Dickies. The amalgam became an underground sensation and was featured as a sideshow attraction on the Lollapalooza rock tour in 1995.
As an actor, Mr. Legend accumulated more than two dozen credits. He played a drug-addled hippie luring a clean-cut youth toward marijuana in the 1972 antidrug film “Pot! Parents! Police!,” and was cast in bit parts like the “skinny corpse” in “Bride of Re-Animator” (1990) and a “derelict man” in “Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest” (1995).
His star turn, of sorts, came in “Man on the Moon,” the 1999 Kaufman biopic starring Jim Carrey, in which Mr. Legend played a New Age guru trying to rid Mr. Kaufman of the lung cancer that ultimately claimed his life in 1984.
Mr. Legend and Mr. Kaufman — a legend himself, for his surreal mix of standup and performance art — were real-life friends and kindred spirits in weirdness. In 1983, Mr. Kaufman starred in “My Breakfast With Blassie,” an outlandish parody — co-directed and co-produced by Mr. Legend — of Louis Malle’s 1981 art-house hit “My Dinner With André.”
Exceedingly highbrow, “André” depicted the theater director André Gregory and the playwright and actor Wallace Shawn trading pensées about art and life at a posh Manhattan restaurant.
“Blassie,” by contrast, was set in a Los Angeles hash house. The film featured Mr. Kaufman, wearing a neck brace from a much-publicized wrestling injury, squabbling with other diners while turning stomachs by wearing fake plastic boogers. Across the table, Mr. Blassie — the former pro wrestler and “Pencil Neck Geek” singer whose entertainment career Mr. Legend had come to manage — wore his male chauvinism like a Halloween costume, making comically inappropriate comments to the waitress.
Martin Jon Margulies was born on Oct. 3, 1948, in San Fernando, Calif., the eldest of three children of Bernard Margulies, an eye, ear, nose and throat doctor, and Elizabeth (Richards) Margulies, a nurse.
Martin’s father was not exactly supportive of the turns his son’s career took. “When you become a success later on,” Mr. Legend recalled Dr. Margulies telling him, “don’t tell people I supported you from the beginning, because I didn’t.”
After graduating from Sylmar High School in 1966, Mr. Legend hit the Sunset Strip club circuit with a folk-rock band called the Seeds of Time. “I’ve been kind of a half-assed rock ‘n’ roll star since ’66,” Mr. Legend told the East Bay Express. In the early 1970s, he took the name Johnny Legend after seeing it on an old record.
In addition to his sister, an artist and filmmaker who had a long relationship with Mr. Kaufman — she was played by Courtney Love in “Man on the Moon” — Mr. Legend is survived by a daughter, Daniele De Leone. His wife, Linda Burdick, died in 2022.
While he never hit the big time, he at least shared a name with someone who did. When a singer and songwriter named John Roger Stephens assumed the stage name John Legend in the 2000s, the future platinum seller hammered out a legal agreement with his wild-man counterpart allowing each his own professional sphere.
“He wouldn’t try to get into the soul music business pretending to be John Legend,” Mr. Legend — the one who was actually famous — recalled in a recent interview with People magazine. “And I’m happy to make clear that I kept my side of the agreement. I didn’t produce any porn, didn’t make any rockabilly music pretending to be Johnny Legend.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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