By Chris Kornelis
When Patricia Taylor picked up the phone in January 1980, she was surprised to hear the caller ask to speak to one of her houseguests, Joseph Stafford.
Taylor hosted a lot. In Tehran, where her husband, Ken Taylor, was Canada's ambassador to Iran, she often entertained diplomats, businesspeople, elected officials and other dignitaries at the Canadian Embassy. But the Taylors weren't advertising that Stafford and his wife, Kathleen, were on the guest list. Even their household staff didn't know who the Staffords were or why they didn't leave the house. When Peter Jennings of ABC News came over for dinner, the Staffords stayed out of sight.
But the phone call indicated that word was getting out: The Taylors had been hiding two American diplomats -- and the Canadians had four more in another home -- since the U.S. Embassy had been seized by militants on Nov. 4, 1979, sparking the hostage crisis.
Ken Taylor and the Canadian government worked with the CIA to shuttle the Americans out of the country under the guise of being Canadian filmmakers visiting Iran to scout shooting locations for a science-fiction movie, a gambit made famous by the Ben Affleck film "Argo" (2012). For her efforts in the caper, Pat was awarded the Order of Canada alongside her husband, and the pair became international celebrities.
By the time she was made famous in Tehran, Taylor, who died Sept. 9 at the age of 95, had already lived a life of adventure and accomplishment on multiple continents.
"They've called her a Renaissance woman," said Malcolm McKechnie, a friend and Canada's former ambassador to Spain. "I call her a woman of consequence."
Violin and ballet
Born Patricia Elsie Lee Hang Gong on on March 20, 1929, in the town of Ayr in Queensland, Australia, to a family of Chinese heritage, she was one of 11 children of Ernest and Mazie Lee Hang Gong. She took an early interest in the violin and ballet, and at 18, she traveled to Europe and hitchhiked across the continent as it was still rebuilding after World War II.
At the University of Queensland, she played violin in the university's orchestra while studying for her bachelor's degree and danced with a Queensland ballet company. While pursuing a Ph.D. in microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1960s, she played violin with the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra.
One morning at Berkeley, she met Ken Taylor at breakfast; he was on his way to the golf course and she was on her way to the lab. The couple's son, Douglas Taylor, calls the meeting a rather apt representation of his parents' complementary differences: His mother was meticulous, a planner who knew where the money went, while his father was "happy spending every last penny."
Taylor was unique among spouses of Canadian diplomats at the time in that she worked outside the embassy. At each of her husband's posts -- Ottawa, Guatemala, London, Detroit, among others -- she found work as a research scientist, publishing or contributing to more than 100 scientific papers throughout her career. At early stops, she played music and danced, too.
Nothing to see here
During the hostage crisis, while the American diplomats lived in their home, the Taylors kept up appearances as if nothing was different. In the morning, she went to work at the Iranian National Blood Transfusion Service and Pasteur Institute of Iran. Many evenings, she hosted receptions at the embassy. Over Christmas break, their son, Douglas, came home from boarding school in France. Kathleen Stafford said that Pat would send the cook home on Sundays and do the cooking herself so that they could all sit around the table, relax and speak freely.
"She just kept going to work and finishing her research and pretending life was normal," Stafford said. "I don't know many people who could pull that off with a smile for three months."
Her survivors include her son, Douglas, who spent years as a prominent investment banker in New York and was a partner at Lazard. Ken Taylor died in 2015.
In the 1980s, the couple settled in New York, where Ken Taylor became the Canadian consul general and Pat Taylor worked on AIDS-related research at the New York Blood Clinic. She was known to host more than 50 people for her husband's elaborate birthday parties in their Manhattan apartment, serving a full Chinese meal that she cooked herself.
In New York, the couple also became darlings on the party circuit. The New York Times reported that part of their appeal was their "friendly, down-to-earth manner." The Times pointed out that Taylor appeared at one cocktail party wearing a "long orange and beige Oriental-styled cotton dress" that she made herself out of a designer sheet that she bought at Macy's -- on sale for $3.50.
"And I have enough left over to make a blouse," Taylor said.
Write to Chris Kornelis at chris.kornelis@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
October 18, 2024 13:00 ET (17:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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