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.
“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.”
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