Q&A: Rock Brynner

By Margaret Heilbrun -- Library Journal, 3/1/2006

Rock Brynner is actor Yul Brynner’s only son and the fourth generation Brynner formally to bear the name Yul. A historian, he was propelled by a 2003 lecture tour to Russia’s Far East to embark on his own odyssey of research and exploration about the lives of his forbears as they journeyed to, settled in, and departed from Russia’s eastern frontiers. Their adventures are captured in his latest book, Empire & Odyssey.

You have published novels, historical studies, and biographical memoirs. Has your writing style changed from one genre to another?

With this book, more than my earlier works, the historian, novelist, and raconteur have come together; and some documents of real significance to Russian history were unearthed for this research only because it is my family. For anyone who has endured [writing] a novel, perhaps the greatest joy of turning to history is that you don’t have to worry about plausibility. Had I concocted a family saga that involved, say, the emperor of Korea, Tsar Nicholas II, a vast shipping and mining empire, pirates, tiger hunters, the Trans-Siberian Railroad, acrobats, Gypsies, opium dens, KGB and SMERSH agents, Hollywood legends and rock'n’roll stars, Samuel Beckett, Sam Giancana, and Muhammad Ali—I could never have made this true story plausible. These are all elements of our saga, and since they are documented in the endnotes, I don’t have the job of making this incredible epic seem credible.

The four men you portray, including yourself, share an intrepid nature and a hunger not only for experience but also mastery. What set each of you apart from others reckoning with similar circumstances?

It is entirely possible that what set these men apart was the women in their lives: their mothers, sisters, lovers, wives, and daughters. But I truly tried to leave such overviews to the reader to arrive at. There are patterns that emerge from these four lives, decade upon decade from 1855 to 2005, but I don’t believe we four share more than a few characteristics, and those, I believe, have been handed down culturally, not genetically.

Which qualities did you admire most and least in your father, grandfather, and great-grandfather?

My father, Yul Brynner, combined creative imagination with fanatical perfectionism, and all the evidence suggests that, in different arenas, this was true of my grandfather, Boris, and my great-grandfather, Jules. These two virtues could, in excess, become vices.

What was the most surprising discovery you made in your research?

That Yul’s grandfather, Jules, played a central role in triggering the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, which led directly to the revolution of 1905 that ended the tsar’s absolute autocracy. Modern Russian historians, including Solzhenitsyn, have all written about the Yalu Timber Concession in northern Korea, which Jules personally sold to Tsar Nicholas II, provoking the war, but without evidence of his identity or motives, they generally cast Jules in the role of agent provocateur; the documents that came to me show otherwise. I made other significant historical discoveries as well, including my grandfather Boris’s negotiations with Lenin’s government. I also reveal for the first time that the phrase Iron Curtain was actually in use more than 20 years before Churchill was credited with coining it.

As a true Renaissance man yourself, which avocation have you found the most rewarding, or is it the mixture that matters?

I learned a while back, as we all do, that the rewards that matter can only come from within. One of the least happy experiences I had was starring in a one-man show on Broadway; one of the happiest was working as a short-order chef, thereby overcoming my fear and ignorance of functioning in the day-to-day world of ordinary people, instead of hovering above the fray of real life like most Hollywood brats. My restless curiosity has led me to become a writer, a musician, a computer programmer, a farmer, a pilot, a road manager for the Band, a bodyguard to Muhammad Ali, and finally a professor of history. All these perspectives, combined with the remarkable artists I’ve known (Cocteau, Chaplin, Dietrich, Sinatra, Beckett, Lennon, Dylan), are only now beginning to resolve themselves into a kind of worldview of my own.