\n<\/p>\n
Rock Brynner, whose life as a road manager for the Band, bodyguard for Muhammad Ali, farmer, pilot, street performer, novelist and professor of constitutional history overshadowed what, for a lesser mortal, might be a more than sufficient laurel on which to rest \u2014 he was the son of the actor Yul Brynner \u2014 died on Oct. 13 in Salisbury, Conn. He was 76.<\/p>\n
Maria Cuomo Cole, a close friend, said the cause of his death, in a hospice, was complications of multiple myeloma.<\/p>\n
Like many children of the rich and famous, Mr. Brynner led a charmed life. His father, a Russian \u00e9migr\u00e9, was best known for his starring role in both the stage and screen versions of the musical \u201cThe King and I,\u201d and later played lead Hollywood roles as a gunfighter, a Russian general and, in \u201cThe Ten Commandments,\u201d Pharaoh Rameses II. A-list glamour encircled the son: Liza Minnelli was a lifelong friend from childhood; Elizabeth Taylor<\/a> came to all his parties. The French poet and playwright Jean Cocteau was his godfather.<\/p>\n But Rock Brynner did more with his silver spoon than most. A gifted student, he attended Yale, Trinity College Dublin and Columbia, where he received a doctorate in American history in 1993 before teaching for over a decade at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In between his stints on campus, he shifted in and out of various milieus and demimondes. He wrote a one-man play based on Cocteau\u2019s addiction memoir, \u201cOpium,\u201d which he performed briefly on Broadway in 1970. Afterward he traveled around Europe as a mime, a period in which he struggled with his own drug and alcohol problems \u2014 a theme that fueled his first novel, \u201cThe Ballad of Habit and Accident\u201d (1981).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Brynner had a penchant for falling into celebrity orbits. While still in Europe he joined the entourage of Muhammad Ali<\/a>, who was on something of a world tour after being stripped of his heavyweight championship title over his antiwar stance. Ali called him his \u201cbodyguard,\u201d even though Mr. Brynner was much shorter and slighter than the deposed champ.<\/p>\n \u201cWho\u2019d ever have thunk,\u201d Mr. Brynner recalled Ali joking, \u201cthat the son of the pharaoh of Egypt would be protecting a little Black boy from Louisville?\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Brynner was no mere hanger-on: He worked as Ali\u2019s press liaison, and it was in part thanks to him, and his connections in Dublin, that Ali was able to fight a high-profile bout<\/a> against Al \u201cBlue\u201d Lewis<\/a> in that city in 1972.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n After returning to the United States and largely sobering up, Mr. Brynner made friends with Robbie Robertson<\/a>, the guitarist and chief songwriter for the Band, and for a time drove the group\u2019s tour bus.<\/p>\n When Mr. Robertson expressed interest in making a rock documentary, Mr. Brynner, by his account, put him in touch with another friend, the director Martin Scorsese. The result, in 1978, was \u201cThe Last Waltz,<\/a>\u201d widely considered one of the best concert documentaries ever made.<\/p>\n Mr. Brynner rarely stayed in a single role for long. One day in the early 1970s he was hanging out at a London hotel bar when he met an entrepreneur named Isaac Tigrett, who had an idea for a rock \u2019n\u2019 roll-themed restaurant.<\/p>\n The two became close friends, and Mr. Brynner and his father became early investors in the Hard Rock Cafe<\/a>, founded by Mr. Tigrett and Peter Morton, whose father had started the Morton\u2019s steakhouse chain. When Mr. Tigrett expanded to New York in 1984, he hired Mr. Brynner as manager. The restaurant was, for a time, the place to see and be seen in Manhattan, and Mr. Brynner proved more than capable of handling all the boldfaced names angling for a table.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cHe grew up with celebrities, traveled with celebrities,\u201d Mr. Tigrett said in a phone interview. \u201cHe knew this scene well.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Brynner managed to stay at the Hard Rock Cafe for a year before becoming restless once more. He had always wanted to own a plane, he told Mr. Tigrett. He and his father used their profits from the restaurant to open a charter air service, based at a small airport<\/a> in Danbury, Conn., not far from the Westchester farm where Rock was now living in a guesthouse, free of charge in exchange for working its small field of vegetables.<\/p>\n By the mid-1980s, with his wild days behind him, Mr. Brynner returned to his intellectual pursuits. He wrote a biography of his father, \u201cYul: The Man Who Would Be King<\/a>\u201d (1989), while completing his doctorate in American history at Columbia, with a specialty in constitutional history.<\/p>\n The biography, which appeared four years after Yul Brynner\u2019s death<\/a> at 65, exploded certain myths that his father had told about himself (he did not, as he claimed, descend from Roma stock). But it also painted a portrait of a complicated man, whose immense ego sometimes got in the way of his genuine love for his only son \u2014 and of how that son struggled under the weight.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is a study of how a son models himself on his father,\u201d Rock Brynner said in a 1991 radio interview, \u201cand then must distance himself later in life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yul Brynner Jr. was born on Dec. 23, 1946, in Manhattan. His father, still a struggling actor, was away in California looking for stage work, while his mother, Virginia Gilmore<\/a> \u2014 who would also achieve cinematic fame \u2014 kept house in a small apartment on East 38th Street, above a dry cleaner\u2019s.<\/p>\n There was no question what the boy\u2019s first name would be: \u201cIn our family,\u201d Yul Brynner Sr. said, \u201cYul is not just a name. It is a title.\u201d But he also gave his son the nickname Rock, after the boxer Rocky Graziano, in a bid to toughen him up for the rough streets of New York.<\/p>\n Rock lived a wandering childhood, following his father\u2019s career from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles and, finally, to Switzerland, where he attended the International School of Geneva, a famed boarding school.<\/p>\n He enrolled at Yale, but after a year transferred to Trinity College Dublin \u2014 in part because, he later said, he was enthralled with the work of Samuel Beckett, whom he had met, and that of James Joyce, who might be one of the few 20th-century notables whom he did not.<\/p>\n He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1969 and received a master\u2019s in the same subject, also from Trinity, in 1972.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Brynner\u2019s marriage to Linda Ridgway, in 1973, ended in divorce. He married Elisabeth Coleman in 1978; they also later divorced. He is survived by his sisters, Victoria, Mia and Melody Brynner and Lark Bryner, who uses the original spelling of the family name.<\/p>\n After receiving his doctorate, Mr. Brynner taught at Marist and at Western Connecticut State University. He also continued to write. Along with another novel, \u201cThe Doomsday Report\u201d (1998), a prophetic satire about climate change, he wrote about the controversial drug thalidomide (\u201cDark Remedy: The Impact of Thalidomide and Its Revival as a Vital Medicine,\u201d 2001); his family\u2019s roots in eastern Russia (\u201cEmpire and Odyssey: The Brynners in Far East Russia and Beyond,\u201d 2006); and, with Andrew Cuomo, the brother of Maria Cuomo Cole, who was governor of New York at the time, state water policy (\u201cNatural Power: The New York Power Authority\u2019s Origins and Path to Clean Energ<\/a>y,\u201d 2016).<\/p>\n Thanks to his research on eastern Russia, the State Department sent Mr. Brynner on several lecture tours in the region. There he paid tribute to his family by helping open a Brynner museum and unveil a statue of his father in Vladivostok, where the elder Mr. Brynner was born.<\/p>\n \u201cYes, it\u2019s difficult for the children of iconic figures to establish independent identities,\u201d he told The New York Times in 2001<\/a>. \u201cBut with all the suffering in this world, I wouldn\u2019t shed too many tears for those who had privileged youths.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n