Hand Signed Bunny Yeager 1950s Contact Sheet Photograph 12 Frames Playboys Home
Item History & Price
Colorful Coconut Grove Baron Sepy has died
June 7, 2010 | By Elinor J. Brecher, Miami Herald
The party's over: Sepy is dead.
Sepy was "Baron'' Joseph de Bicske Dobronyi, the globetrotting Coconut Grove bon vivant who claimed Hungarian nobility and movie-star girlfriends, -- and hosted epic bacchanals at his one-of-a-kind bachelor pad.
Any recounting of his history must carry a disclaimer: The only person who could separate fact from fiction in his colorful life died of li...ver cancer just after midnight May 29 at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach.
Not even his sons, Joseph, of Larchmont, N.Y., and Ferenc, of San Francisco, can confidently deconstruct the mystique.
"He was a great believer in the more you tell the lie, the more it's true, " said Ferenc, a musician and producer.
He said he was born April 20, 1922, which made him 88 -- an age that friends doubt, given that World War II refugees without papers often reinvented themselves.
A charter member of the Society of Loquacious Verbosities -- a jokesters' fraternity -- he was among Coconut Grove's most identifiable eccentrics, in snakeskin vests and boots, Hungarian accent intact.
He was one of the last living links to the Grove's untamed swingers-and-hippies past.
An unrepentant playboy who led comely conquests to a Viking-ship bed, he was Miami's Hugh Hefner, ascots, silk smoking jackets and all.
"I am always fantastic, " he once declared to The Miami Herald.
He boasted of romantic liaisons with Raquel Welch, Eva Gabor, Ava Gardner, Brigitte Bardot, Debbie Reynolds and Anita Eckberg -- whose actor husband, Anthony Steel, punched him out publicly in 1957, after Sepy, with his nude sculpture of Eckberg, showed up in Playboy magazine.
Dobronyi also claimed combat-veteran status with the tiny Royal Hungarian Air Force during World War II, complete with scary flaming parachute mishap; a death-defying post-war escape from the communists, and five wives.
Radiating Continental charm, "he'd meet a rich, married woman on a ski slope and convince her to leave her husband and marry him, " said lawyer Thorn McDaniel, who rents a cottage on Dobronyi's 2-acre estate.
Dobronyi was photographed atop Mount Kilimanjaro -- and with myriad celebrities, including Joan Crawford, George Hamilton, Carmen Miranda, Frank Sinatra, Bjorn Borg, and Barry Goldwater, who once attended a Republican Party fundraiser at Dobronyi's home.
"You never knew when you walked into the place whether you'd meet a porn star or the president of a foreign country, " said plastic surgeon Brad Herman, once a tenant.
Oozing a type of Euro-suave that certain young women found irresistible, Sepy enjoyed their attentions even as he acquired a pacemaker, fought diabetes and grew frail.
Sometimes he'd don exotic tribal robes or Hungarian folk costumes to entertain at his home -- compared, variously, to a charging bull, a ski slope, and a wave -- where wild beasts' heads lined the walls.
Whether Sepy the big-game hunter dispatched them personally or Sepy the raconteur made it up didn't matter in his champagne-fueled orbit; the stories were part of the show.
Located in the Grove's exclusive Ye Little Wood section, in its heyday the house featured animal-skin rugs, Dobronyi's artwork, world-travel artifacts, and a dubious yet ubiquitously displayed family crest.
In the driveway: luxury cars like the rare French Facel Vega, a Rolls Royce Corniche, an Excalibur -- and a Cadillac convertible with a nude female torso painted on the front passenger-side door.
Dobronyi hosted Hungarian goulash parties where "they sat around and told jokes for hours, " said Richard Booth, whose late father, Richard "Bootsie'' Booth, was Dobronyi's best friend; a succession of European lovelies; celebrities like Errol Flynn and Lena Horne; topless-barmaid Christmas parties, and the cast of Deep Throat.
Certain scenes in the 1972 porn classic were filmed there.
Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace apparently returned for interactions of a more personal nature, so noted in her 1973 autobiography.
As the Herald reported, Lovelace "extolled his physical properties'' after "a brief, but somewhat ecstatic encounter with Sepy in his bedroom."
Sepy was shocked -- shocked! -- at Lovelace's indiscretion, and promised to provide ''better names for references."
"I just don't like this low-class way of talking about sex, " he groused. "It destroys the whole illusion; whether it's a secretary or a duchess, there must be illusion. If I don't get that, there's nothing."
In later years, Ferenc interviewed his father and thinks he heard some of the truth.
Joseph de Bicske Dobronyi was born in the Hungarian town of Bicske, where the family had once been landholders, entitling his father to call himself "Baron, " Ferenc said.
In 1980, thieves helped themselves to some of Sepy's collection, including 120-pound ivory elephant tusks, two Nepalese temple lion statues, six Tibetan yak-wool rugs, and brass-plated nude sculptures of Bardot and Welch.
He offered an unusual reward for their return: a round-the-world trip with "guaranteed fun at every stop."
No one, apparently, collected.
Friends plan to gather at noon on Sunday to celebrate Sepy Dobronyi's life. Champagne will be served. Stories will be told. And sometime in the future, his ashes will be sent to places dear to his heart.
From Queen of Miami to The World’s Greatest Pinup Photographer: The Biography of Bunny Yeager
In the late 1940s, a teenager named Linnea Eleanor Yeager rechristened herself Bunny, after a character played by the femme fatale Lana Turner. The choice was one of the first indications Yeager had her pulse on what was considered the height of female glamour, and her decades long career as a model and pin up photographer would see her join Turner as one of those who defined American female beauty in the 20th century.
Statuesque and with a beaming smile, Yeager began entering beauty contests shortly after moving to Florida at 17. She enrolled in modeling school, and signed to Coronet Modeling Agency upon receiving positive attention during her six-week training. She won many of the pageants she entered, and was crowned Miss Trailer Coach, Sports Queen, and--most fittingly--Queen of Miami. The colorful titles suited her, and her early modeling work shows her vivacious personality, and ideal 1950s curves.
Not visible in the images though, was Yeager’s relentless drive and creativity. Rather than paying photographers for the many prints she needed to get her name in front of scouts to book jobs, she decided to take darkroom photography to develop her own pictures, and began learning how to use a camera.
On assignment for this class, she took the Marilyn Monroe look-a-like Maria Stinger to a local wildlife park (where she would later return to shoot one of the most enduring pin up images of Bettie Page, flanked by cheetahs), and ended up selling the work for use as the March 1954 cover of the girlie magazine Eye.
It was clear Bunny Yeager had found her path.
1954 would prove to be a transformative year for Yeager and pin-up photography as an art form.
She was approached by Bettie Page—at that time known primarily to the fetish community as the whip wielding dominatrix who enthralled Irving Klaw—but was eager to break through to more traditional figure and pin up modeling. Page was on vacation in Miami and approached Yeager as one of a few photographers she thought might be able to capture a different side of her.
The first photos Yeager took of Page showed the model nude in Yeager’s family home beneath a Christmas tree in Santa cap. The shoot established a working relationship between the pair that defined both women’s careers, and raised their profiles significantly.
Yeager sent the photos to Hugh Hefner, who offered her $100.00 for the image. “Nobody had heard of Hugh Hefner” she told an interviewer. “But I figured because they were new they might pay attention to an amateur, and that’s what happened…If I hadn’t have made that early connection when he was just starting out, maybe I wouldn’t have got such a big push, but immediately I became employable.”
The first issue of Playboy hit the stands in December 1953, and it the bar for artistry and naturalism in nude photography magazines. Yeager and Hefner would go on to work together off and on for much of her career.
Her association with Playboy opened doors for Yeager and she became a celebrity and curiosity during the 1950s. US Camera dubbed her “The World’s Prettiest Photographer” and she appeared as a guest on shows like “What’s My Line” and “The Tonight Show.”
Not only was she a female pin-up photographer, by the end of the 1950s she was a mother of two, married to Arthur “Bud” Irwin who she met at “The Tip Toppers Club: a social gathering for the vertically blessed.”
She was also starting to be recognized for her incredible mastery of technique. Yeager’s command of fill flash technique, her pioneering use of the outdoor settings that abounded in Miami, and the innovative techniques she developed to create her many self-portraits all reverberated through the world of glamour and fine art photography, and her influence can be seen in the work of luminaries like Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura.
Famously, Diane Arbus once called Yeager “the world’s greatest pinup photographer, ” and the more than 30 books published about her work testify to that assessment.
Yeager became so influential through her commitment to her artistry and to detail. "I always looked at my work as an art form and not a job, ” Yeager once said, and she seemingly was never satisfied unless she was pushing up against the boundaries of what was considered possible for her as a woman, a working mother, and an artist.
She designed and sewed many of the outfits worn by her models, tried her hand at acting and filmmaking, and remained a relevant and talented photographer throughout her over 50 year career.
Though when she first picked up a camera in the early 1950s, cheesecake photography was considered taboo and prurient, she lived to see her work shown in fine art galleries worldwide.
The first major museum exhibition of Yeager’s work was held in 2010 at the Andy Warhol Museum.
Bunny Yeager died in 2014 but her popularity only continues to grow.
Currently, two documentaries about Yeager are slated for release in 2020 and a scripted TV-show based on her life is in the works.
00499
June 7, 2010 | By Elinor J. Brecher, Miami Herald
The party's over: Sepy is dead.
Sepy was "Baron'' Joseph de Bicske Dobronyi, the globetrotting Coconut Grove bon vivant who claimed Hungarian nobility and movie-star girlfriends, -- and hosted epic bacchanals at his one-of-a-kind bachelor pad.
Any recounting of his history must carry a disclaimer: The only person who could separate fact from fiction in his colorful life died of li...ver cancer just after midnight May 29 at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach.
Not even his sons, Joseph, of Larchmont, N.Y., and Ferenc, of San Francisco, can confidently deconstruct the mystique.
"He was a great believer in the more you tell the lie, the more it's true, " said Ferenc, a musician and producer.
He said he was born April 20, 1922, which made him 88 -- an age that friends doubt, given that World War II refugees without papers often reinvented themselves.
A charter member of the Society of Loquacious Verbosities -- a jokesters' fraternity -- he was among Coconut Grove's most identifiable eccentrics, in snakeskin vests and boots, Hungarian accent intact.
He was one of the last living links to the Grove's untamed swingers-and-hippies past.
An unrepentant playboy who led comely conquests to a Viking-ship bed, he was Miami's Hugh Hefner, ascots, silk smoking jackets and all.
"I am always fantastic, " he once declared to The Miami Herald.
He boasted of romantic liaisons with Raquel Welch, Eva Gabor, Ava Gardner, Brigitte Bardot, Debbie Reynolds and Anita Eckberg -- whose actor husband, Anthony Steel, punched him out publicly in 1957, after Sepy, with his nude sculpture of Eckberg, showed up in Playboy magazine.
Dobronyi also claimed combat-veteran status with the tiny Royal Hungarian Air Force during World War II, complete with scary flaming parachute mishap; a death-defying post-war escape from the communists, and five wives.
Radiating Continental charm, "he'd meet a rich, married woman on a ski slope and convince her to leave her husband and marry him, " said lawyer Thorn McDaniel, who rents a cottage on Dobronyi's 2-acre estate.
Dobronyi was photographed atop Mount Kilimanjaro -- and with myriad celebrities, including Joan Crawford, George Hamilton, Carmen Miranda, Frank Sinatra, Bjorn Borg, and Barry Goldwater, who once attended a Republican Party fundraiser at Dobronyi's home.
"You never knew when you walked into the place whether you'd meet a porn star or the president of a foreign country, " said plastic surgeon Brad Herman, once a tenant.
Oozing a type of Euro-suave that certain young women found irresistible, Sepy enjoyed their attentions even as he acquired a pacemaker, fought diabetes and grew frail.
Sometimes he'd don exotic tribal robes or Hungarian folk costumes to entertain at his home -- compared, variously, to a charging bull, a ski slope, and a wave -- where wild beasts' heads lined the walls.
Whether Sepy the big-game hunter dispatched them personally or Sepy the raconteur made it up didn't matter in his champagne-fueled orbit; the stories were part of the show.
Located in the Grove's exclusive Ye Little Wood section, in its heyday the house featured animal-skin rugs, Dobronyi's artwork, world-travel artifacts, and a dubious yet ubiquitously displayed family crest.
In the driveway: luxury cars like the rare French Facel Vega, a Rolls Royce Corniche, an Excalibur -- and a Cadillac convertible with a nude female torso painted on the front passenger-side door.
Dobronyi hosted Hungarian goulash parties where "they sat around and told jokes for hours, " said Richard Booth, whose late father, Richard "Bootsie'' Booth, was Dobronyi's best friend; a succession of European lovelies; celebrities like Errol Flynn and Lena Horne; topless-barmaid Christmas parties, and the cast of Deep Throat.
Certain scenes in the 1972 porn classic were filmed there.
Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace apparently returned for interactions of a more personal nature, so noted in her 1973 autobiography.
As the Herald reported, Lovelace "extolled his physical properties'' after "a brief, but somewhat ecstatic encounter with Sepy in his bedroom."
Sepy was shocked -- shocked! -- at Lovelace's indiscretion, and promised to provide ''better names for references."
"I just don't like this low-class way of talking about sex, " he groused. "It destroys the whole illusion; whether it's a secretary or a duchess, there must be illusion. If I don't get that, there's nothing."
In later years, Ferenc interviewed his father and thinks he heard some of the truth.
Joseph de Bicske Dobronyi was born in the Hungarian town of Bicske, where the family had once been landholders, entitling his father to call himself "Baron, " Ferenc said.
In 1980, thieves helped themselves to some of Sepy's collection, including 120-pound ivory elephant tusks, two Nepalese temple lion statues, six Tibetan yak-wool rugs, and brass-plated nude sculptures of Bardot and Welch.
He offered an unusual reward for their return: a round-the-world trip with "guaranteed fun at every stop."
No one, apparently, collected.
Friends plan to gather at noon on Sunday to celebrate Sepy Dobronyi's life. Champagne will be served. Stories will be told. And sometime in the future, his ashes will be sent to places dear to his heart.
From Queen of Miami to The World’s Greatest Pinup Photographer: The Biography of Bunny Yeager
In the late 1940s, a teenager named Linnea Eleanor Yeager rechristened herself Bunny, after a character played by the femme fatale Lana Turner. The choice was one of the first indications Yeager had her pulse on what was considered the height of female glamour, and her decades long career as a model and pin up photographer would see her join Turner as one of those who defined American female beauty in the 20th century.
Statuesque and with a beaming smile, Yeager began entering beauty contests shortly after moving to Florida at 17. She enrolled in modeling school, and signed to Coronet Modeling Agency upon receiving positive attention during her six-week training. She won many of the pageants she entered, and was crowned Miss Trailer Coach, Sports Queen, and--most fittingly--Queen of Miami. The colorful titles suited her, and her early modeling work shows her vivacious personality, and ideal 1950s curves.
Not visible in the images though, was Yeager’s relentless drive and creativity. Rather than paying photographers for the many prints she needed to get her name in front of scouts to book jobs, she decided to take darkroom photography to develop her own pictures, and began learning how to use a camera.
On assignment for this class, she took the Marilyn Monroe look-a-like Maria Stinger to a local wildlife park (where she would later return to shoot one of the most enduring pin up images of Bettie Page, flanked by cheetahs), and ended up selling the work for use as the March 1954 cover of the girlie magazine Eye.
It was clear Bunny Yeager had found her path.
1954 would prove to be a transformative year for Yeager and pin-up photography as an art form.
She was approached by Bettie Page—at that time known primarily to the fetish community as the whip wielding dominatrix who enthralled Irving Klaw—but was eager to break through to more traditional figure and pin up modeling. Page was on vacation in Miami and approached Yeager as one of a few photographers she thought might be able to capture a different side of her.
The first photos Yeager took of Page showed the model nude in Yeager’s family home beneath a Christmas tree in Santa cap. The shoot established a working relationship between the pair that defined both women’s careers, and raised their profiles significantly.
Yeager sent the photos to Hugh Hefner, who offered her $100.00 for the image. “Nobody had heard of Hugh Hefner” she told an interviewer. “But I figured because they were new they might pay attention to an amateur, and that’s what happened…If I hadn’t have made that early connection when he was just starting out, maybe I wouldn’t have got such a big push, but immediately I became employable.”
The first issue of Playboy hit the stands in December 1953, and it the bar for artistry and naturalism in nude photography magazines. Yeager and Hefner would go on to work together off and on for much of her career.
Her association with Playboy opened doors for Yeager and she became a celebrity and curiosity during the 1950s. US Camera dubbed her “The World’s Prettiest Photographer” and she appeared as a guest on shows like “What’s My Line” and “The Tonight Show.”
Not only was she a female pin-up photographer, by the end of the 1950s she was a mother of two, married to Arthur “Bud” Irwin who she met at “The Tip Toppers Club: a social gathering for the vertically blessed.”
She was also starting to be recognized for her incredible mastery of technique. Yeager’s command of fill flash technique, her pioneering use of the outdoor settings that abounded in Miami, and the innovative techniques she developed to create her many self-portraits all reverberated through the world of glamour and fine art photography, and her influence can be seen in the work of luminaries like Cindy Sherman and Yasumasa Morimura.
Famously, Diane Arbus once called Yeager “the world’s greatest pinup photographer, ” and the more than 30 books published about her work testify to that assessment.
Yeager became so influential through her commitment to her artistry and to detail. "I always looked at my work as an art form and not a job, ” Yeager once said, and she seemingly was never satisfied unless she was pushing up against the boundaries of what was considered possible for her as a woman, a working mother, and an artist.
She designed and sewed many of the outfits worn by her models, tried her hand at acting and filmmaking, and remained a relevant and talented photographer throughout her over 50 year career.
Though when she first picked up a camera in the early 1950s, cheesecake photography was considered taboo and prurient, she lived to see her work shown in fine art galleries worldwide.
The first major museum exhibition of Yeager’s work was held in 2010 at the Andy Warhol Museum.
Bunny Yeager died in 2014 but her popularity only continues to grow.
Currently, two documentaries about Yeager are slated for release in 2020 and a scripted TV-show based on her life is in the works.
00499
