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Sepy Dobronyi. |
Miami is famous for its characters, past
and present. It’s safe to say they don’t make them like Sepy
Dobronyi anymore. Baron Joseph De B. Dobronyi, a wizened
85-year-old with mischievous blue eyes and wispy white hair
retreating from a widow’s peak, is the last of Coconut Grove’s
international playboys.
If
you’ve heard of him at all, it is probably because his house is
where most of the filming for porn legend Deep Throat was done.
But that is probably the least interesting thing about Sepy, a
man who co-founded Miami’s premier joke-telling group, the
Society of Loquacious Verbosities.
His
unusual home, shaped like a charging bull, is in the charming
enclave of Ye Little Wood. Its jungle-like environs have been
the scene of nearly constant bacchanalia since 1961, when he
built the place after fleeing Cuba in his Chrysler convertible
(he brought it over on a boat).
Sepy
is Hungarian by birth and claims as many languages as he does
ex-wives — although he’s hard-pressed to name all seven or eight
(wives, that is). One of his sons thinks he’s been married
closer to five times, but as with much of Sepy’s life, legend
and fact are hopelessly intertwined.
For
instance, a Hungarian friend of Sepy’s, Peter Hargitai, who
teaches in the English department at Florida International
University, said Sepy claims he lost his virginity in a nunnery
while on vacation at age 15. Sepy told me his interest in women
developed much earlier, around age 6. Whatever the case, women
have proven to be an enduring obsession.
Hargitai describes him as a “playboy aristocrat,” who sculpted
his own legend in the same way he made his living as an artist.
“Time and time again I’ve been to his place, and beautiful women
are fawning over him.”
Sepy
was born into a noble family in
Hungary in 1922, a claim
some doubt, but one Hargitai says checks out. He was a military
pilot during World War II and then escaped the Russians by
traveling on foot to Austria, and eventually to Sweden. He took
with him only what he needed, including a tuxedo.
Once
in Sweden, Sepy charmed his way into royal society and became a
jeweler. But an untimely tryst in the back of a Rolls with a
certain member of the aristocracy made him persona non grata for
a bit, so he decided to go to Cuba. Cuba is where Sepy became
the international Lothario and artist.
He
hooked up with his first wife, the Cuban daughter of an American
businessman who ran a Chrysler dealership in Havana. Sepy says
he skin-dived the shipwrecks off the coast and used the gold he
found to make jewelry and gold-plated statues of visiting VIPs.
Cuba in the ’40s and ’50s was a swinging place, popular with movie stars,
writers and wealthy Americans.
Sometime in the early 1950s, Sepy met an unemployed Hugh Hefner
in Havana with a group of his buddies. Sepy showed them a good
time and Hefner later repaid the favor by featuring Sepy in the
August 1956 issue of Playboy, for his sculpture of Swedish
bombshell Anita Ekberg, whom he was dating. Later, in Miami,
Hefner encouraged Sepy to buy a couple of lots in Ye Little
Wood. He also offered him a 2.5 percent stake in Playboy, but
Sepy’s second wife discouraged the deal.
Hefner’s talk about an art center in
Haiti also inspired Sepy to start the
Cuban
Art Center in Havana, where
he encountered many of Cuba’s most famous artists, such as
Wilfredo Lam and Agustín Cárdenas. He also proved a draw for
visiting Americans and the ex-pats, like Ernest Hemingway and
swashbuckler Errol Flynn. He’s listed as production manager of a
terrible 1959 Flynn movie called Cuban Rebel Girls. That was a
few months shy of the famously alcoholic, womanizing Flynn
dropping dead of a heart attack.
What
was Hemingway like? “Sober or not sober?” Sepy asks. Either one.
“Well he was pretty mean when he was drunk,” he reflects.
With
prompting from friend Luis Chavez, he remembers a story about
the time Hemingway was too hung over to pick up a guest from the
airport. He rang Sepy instead. “Where are you, fucking
Hungarian?!” the writer roared.
“I am
sleeping next to my wife!” Sepy shouted back.
“I
need a favor,” Hemingway begged in a more conciliatory tone. “Go
pick someone up at the airport.”
“What
does he look like?” Sepy asked.
“You
will know him,” Hemingway replied. “He’s a big cowboy.”
So
Sepy drove to the airport and found that the big cowboy was John
Wayne.
Sepy
drove him back to Hemingway’s place, stopping off first at a
high-class brothel, Casa Marina, to offer Wayne a proper island
welcome.
Not
long after Castro’s revolution, Sepy left Cuba and made his home
in Miami. He married an IBM heiress and had two sons. After a
while, the charm faded and Sepy was on his own again. He married
a Swedish girl and, then at age 55, married 19-year-old Rita
Lino, a bunny from the Miami Playboy Club.
She
was hired to work a lavish party for then-Playboy executive (and
former Miami Herald executive) Derek J. Daniels. The party was
held at Sepy’s house. As Sepy told the Herald in 1977, Rita
“went from bunny to baroness in three easy lessons.” She
divorced him nine months later. “She was five years older than
me at the time,” recalls Sepy’s son Ferenc Dobronyi, who lives
in San Francisco and plays with surf music band Pollo del Mar.
“Talk about Oedipal.”
Sepy’s
house is a sight to behold. Picture Yambo’s in Little Havana,
except with a better class of decoration. It is filled to
bursting with artifacts, mostly Indonesian sculpture and
furniture, and some of his bronze statues of horses or sexy
women. Upstairs, in a bedroom overlooking the living room,
there’s a bed shaped like a Viking boat and covered in a fur
throw.
Down a
jungle pathway, a wine cellar features racks stuffed with
souvenirs of women’s underwear, wine and hotel keys from around
the world. Outside, next to a picnic table, huge baskets brim
with old corks, some still with the glass around them from where
patrons whacked open the bottles with a Gurkha knife.
Numerous photo albums offer proof of his fantastical tales. Sepy
appears in party shots with Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Rocky
Graziano, Anthony Quinn, Hemingway, Flynn, Hefner, Dean Martin,
Jimmy Durante, Debbie Reynolds, Oscar de la Renta, Nelson
Rockefeller and a pre-La Dolce Vita Ekberg, kissing Sepy at an
airport in Cuba. Other photo albums have more intimate portraits
of old girlfriends.
There
are reels of home movies he shot in
Cuba from 1949 to 1959. There are many pictures of Sepy in
Africa in the ’60s, with various big-game kills. There’s a weird shot of
Marilyn Monroe, exposed in a Britney Spears-like moment, and
another of an insouciant Frank Sinatra sitting on Sepy’s
fur-draped couch with a girl perched on a stool in front of him.
That was taken when Sinatra filmed part of 1967’s Tony Rome at
Sepy’s house. The movie was about a hard-boiled Miami P.I. who
lived on a houseboat. “He was very spoiled with women,” Sepy
recollects about the crooner.
Parts
of Lenny, starring Dustin Hoffman in a 1974 movie about comedian
Lenny Bruce, were also filmed at Sepy’s house. But what people
remember is Deep Throat, which features many scenes from Sepy’s
place. “The Deep Throat thing drives everybody nuts,” Sepy
scoffs. “It was nothing.”
Well,
nothing until the film’s star, Linda Lovelace, wrote a book
called Inside Linda Lovelace. Sepy took issue with a chapter in
which she described his well-honed lovemaking prowess. Publicist
Seth Gordon recalls that Sepy was so outraged by the fact she
named him without permission (or a payoff), that he wanted to
sue her.
He
went to his friend, lawyer and then-state Sen. Ken Meyers, and
asked him to sue Lovelace. Gordon (who was working for Meyers at
the time) remembers Meyers telling the distraught baron, “Most
guys would kill for this endorsement, Sepy.” Sepy eventually
dropped the suit.
Gordon
says, although he didn’t know Sepy well, he thought of him as
this fascinating Old World character who somehow always managed
to be surrounded by beautiful women. “It was this bacchanalia,”
he laughs. “It was purely force of personality.”
Miami
filmmaker Carl Kesser, who used to live in Ye Little Wood, says
he wasn’t in the inner circle that got invited to the orgy-type
parties Sepy sometimes threw (examples I heard about from others
include women in provocative outfits and handcuffs, with the
male guests receiving keys to match to the right woman, Eyes
Wide Shut-style). But he also remembers the constant stream of
beautiful women. “I just saw him in the grocery store with this
unbelievably beautiful young woman,” he says. “I don’t know how
he does it.”
Ferenc
Dobronyi remembers what it was like to grow up in Miami as the
son of the Deep Throat guy. “Miami in the ’70s was a party,” he
says. “It was a helluva experience. When I would go over to his
house, there were naked people everywhere — Playboy models,
movie stars. He knew how to charm the pants off anybody.”
The
younger Dobronyi doesn’t know the source of his father’s power.
“I always wondered how one person could have a seemingly
intimate relationship with so many people,” he muses. “Everybody
wanted to know him and have a piece of that magic, to become
part of the story. He has a huge personality.”
When I
ask Sepy about his success in his singular passion, he
attributes it to simply being nice to women and treating them
“like a fine instrument.”
Then
he turns the tables.
“How
many boyfriends you have?” he asks.
“Just
the one,” I say.
“How
many times you cheat on him?” he continues.
“So
far, so good,” I respond.
“Ha!”
he says, retrenching for his next move. |
