the times | Saturday October 17 2020 1GM 79
went calmly about their business until
the night of their performance. An hour
before the curtain was due to rise they
told officials at their hotel that they
were taking a short walk before head-
ing to the theatre. Dressed simply and
leaving behind their possessions, they
went to the nearest subway station. A
police officer checking identification
papers unknowingly waved them
through. The only thing that they were
required to produce was 20 pfennigs for
the fare.
After an agonising wait on the plat-
form they boarded a train, emerging a
short time later at Wittenbergplatz
station in the British zone. “That ten-
minute ride on the subway seemed to us
ten years,” Rabovsky, then 22, recalled.
Recognised as “Iron Curtain refugees”
before the word “defector” was in
common usage, they were flown to
Frankfurt and assured by the US high
commission in Germany that they
would be given “every help”. They were
among the first artists to escape from
the eastern bloc, paving the way for
Rudolf Nureyev’s high-profile defec-
tion in 1961.
In the days afterwards Rabovsky and
Kovach explained to the press that they
had been inspired to flee after listening
to broadcasts on Voice of America and
Radio Free Europe. They wanted to
escape the communist “straitjacket life”
and to “dance as we please” including
boogie-woogie, said Kovach, who did
most of the talking.
The pair, who were the first Soviet-
trained dancers to be seen in the West
since before the Second World War,
spent that summer as guests of the
Festival Ballet in London, including
dancing the pas de deux from Petipa’s
Don Quixote at the Royal Festival Hall.
“This unashamedly acrobatic piece
they performed in true virtuoso man-
ner,” observed a Times critic. “Their
execution is exceptionally brilliant,
their ensemble admirably precise, their
style forthright and vigorous, with an
apt touch of circus exhibitionism in the
sharply defined movements, with aflourish of the hand and a toss of the
head, that finish each step.”
In November they sailed to America,
receiving a warm welcome from both
the public and the authorities, who
were keen to maximise the publicity
over their defection. They appeared on
television on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the
Town and Judy Garland’s variety show,
danced with Roland Petit’s Ballets de
Paris at the Broadway Theatre, and
were the subject of a book, Leap
Through the Curtain by George Mikes,
published in 1956. Sol Hurok, their
impresario, wrote in the foreword:
“They have the talent to become great
stars also in the West, provided they go
on working with that relentless, almost
religious zeal and devotion which must
be the lot of every great dancer.”
Yet their adventures were not over: in
July 1956 they were returning to New
York from a tour of Italy when their
ship, the SS Andrea Doria, collided with
the MS Stockholm off the coast of
Nantucket, Massachusetts. Although
the Andrea Doria listed heavily to star-
board, incapacitating half her lifeboats,
she took 11 hours to sink and all but
46 of the 1,700 passengers and crew
were rescued, including Rabovsky and
Kovach.
He was born Istvan Rab in Szeged, in
the south of Hungary, in 1930, only
taking the name Rabovsky after his
defection. Compared with Nora’s
well-to-do background, his upbringing
was somewhat impoverished and as a
peasant child he “enjoyed herding
goats, geese and water buffalo”, his
daughter Lisa told The New York Times.
He left home at the age of ten, earning
a living as a messenger and newspaper
boy, but aspired to be a dancer
after watching a Fred Astaire film in
Budapest.
At 11 he successfully auditioned forThey described a country
full of spies where friends
distrusted one another
tar, where he was flown to London to
link up with De Gaulle’s Free French
Forces.
On December 9, 1941, he was
dropped by a Lysander aircraft near
Châteauroux, central France, and for
the next six months he worked with
the Resistance there. After a second
successful mission behind enemy lines
in November 1942, he was promoted to
lieutenant. The following year, while
serving with the Free French 4th Infan-
try Battalion based at Camberley, he
was sent to Upper Largo, Scotland, to
train with the 1st (Polish) Independent
Parachute Brigade. “The military train-
ing we received up there was extreme,”
he recalled after the war. “There was a
professionalism and esprit de corps
which drove me.”
By 1944 he was
part of the French
3rd Special Air
Service, wearing
the maroon beret
of the British SAS.
(The SAS at the
time were part of
the airborne forces
and wore their
maroon beret —
only later would
the regiment adopt
its sand-coloured
beret.)
On August 5 that
year, as the Allies
advanced across
northern France,
Tupët-Thomé was
part of a “stick” of 12 French paratroop-
ers who landed in Finistère, Brittany,
during Operation Derry, to protect
vital bridges and viaducts from
destruction by retreating Nazi forces.
The successful operation lasted ten
days, during which Tupët-Thomé and
his comrades liberated the commune of
Daoulas, driving into the town in a Ger-
man Mercedes K90 staff car that they
had procured after killing its occupants,
including a senior German officer. A
few miles to the north, his men also
liberated the town of Landerneau, with
civilians rushing from their homes to
greet them with French flags, confetti
and kisses.
After the war Tupët-Thomé held
various administrative and business
posts before emigrating to Canada in
1950 to run a farm. He returned to
France in 1955, studied to become an
engineer and worked first for the Singer
company and later the car manufactur-
er Panhard. He lived his latter years in
the picturesque fishing village and
beach resort of Binic in Brittany, the
native village of his wife, Geneviève
(née Allain), who died in 2018. They
had no children of their own, though
she had two from a previous marriage.
In June this year, Tupët-Thomé
was awarded an honorary MBE when
the president of France, Emmanuel
Macron, visited Boris Johnson in
London.Edgard Tupët-Thomé, French SAS fighter,
was born on April 19, 1920. He died of
complications from Alzheimer’s disease
on September 9, 2020, aged 100the Opera Ballet School. Of 300 boys,
only five were accepted. He was award-
ed a scholarship that covered his tuition
while he supported himself with casual
work. After five years he became a solo-
ist with the State Ballet and was soon
dating Kovach; they married in 1952
after he had slipped an engagement
ring on her finger during a performance
of Swan Lake. Their energetic dancing
so impressed Galina Ulanova, the great
Russian ballerina, during one of her
visits to Budapest that she persuaded
them to be among the first foreigners to
join the Mariinsky Ballet (then known
as the Kirov Ballet) in Leningrad while
Stalin was still in power.
They stayed for six months and on
their return to Hungary received a rap-
turous reception. “We had come from
Russia, we had been taught in Russia, so
we were wonderful and admirable,”
Rabovsky later noted wryly. “Had
we come from Paris or London and
danced ten times better... we should
have been deemed fifth rate, provincial
and inartistic.”
By the early 1950s the political
atmosphere had grown febrile. The
couple described a country full of spies
and where old friends grew to distrust
one another. Although they hated
being “people’s artists”, they were
nevertheless well treated and in spring
1953 won the Kossuth Prize, the highest
decoration for artists in communist
Hungary. Their subsequent defection
had consequences at home when
Miklos Schilling, the ministerial coun-
cillor in charge of theatre and brother-
in-law of Matyas Rakosi, the Hungari-
an leader, was arrested.
In America there was at first no
shortage of work. Yet interest began to
wane once Soviet companies such as
the Bolshoi Ballet became regular visi-
tors to the West. “[Rabovsky’s] extraor-
dinary talent was sucked under by the
petty jealousies and mean politics
which afflicted that era of ballet, and
those brightest hopes ahead of him
were never realised,” wrote one observ-
er in 1980. He can, however, be seen in
the Audrey Hepburn films Green Man-
sions (1959) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s
(1961). Meanwhile, Rabovsky and
Kovach, undeterred by their shipping
accident, remained regular visitors to
European dance festivals.
The couple divorced in 1962 but
continued to dance together, setting up
Ballets Bihari, later known as Ballet
Zigani, to fuse classical ballet with tradi-
tional Hungarian folk dances. Later
Rabovsky worked as a choreographer
for Dance Theatre of Harlem and
taught at a dance school on Long Island
run by his first wife, who died in 2009.
He is survived by his second wife, Can-
dace Itow, a former dancer with whom
he appeared in Swan Lake with Pitts-
burgh Ballet Theatre in 1970, and by
two daughters, Lisa, who leads a private
life, and Emese, who teaches ballroom
dancing.
The West was not always what
Rabovsky had imagined. He was dis-
appointed by the commercial focus of
the theatre in the US and was bitter
about some of the reviews that referred
to him as “an acrobat”. This rankled. “I
have no apologies to make,” he wrote. “I
belong to the Russian school and I can-
not change my views overnight — nor
do I intend to. I feel that no real dancer
can be reproached for being able to leap
like an athlete.”Istvan Rabovsky, dancer and defector,
was born on March 31, 1930. He died of a
gastric condition on August 18, 2020,
aged 90Edgard Tupët-Thomé
Hero of the ‘French SAS’ who won the MC
On August 27, 1944, Lieutenant Edgard
Tupët-Thomé and his small team of
men flew in an RAF Stirling towards
the Jura mountains on the Swiss bor-
der. They were members of the British-
trained “French SAS” and they were
on a mission to assist embattled
maquisards of the French Resistance.
Although injured during his parachute
jump, Tupët-Thomé joined his men in
attacking the heavily defended village
of Clerval. They killed 30 Germans and
destroyed a Panzer tank.
The following month he was
assigned to assist the US 7th Army as a
reconnaissance officer in the Alsace-
Lorraine region on the French-
German border where, on September
23, he dragged a wounded American
soldier to safety
under heavy enemy
mortar fire and
killed “several
scores of Germans”,
according to the
citation for the Mil-
itary Cross he was
later awarded by
the British. The
French awarded
him the Grand
Cross of the Legion
of Honour and
appointed him a
member of the
Order of the
Liberation.
Edgard Al-
phonse Tupët-
Thomé was born
in 1920, in Bourg-la-Reine, a southern
suburb of Paris. He grew up in Charle-
ville-Mézières in the Ardennes depart-
ment of northern France, where his
father was a farmer. After completing
what the French call le bac (the bacca-
lauréat), he enrolled in l’École Supéri-
eure de Théologie in Reims but quickly
found that the cloth was not for him.
In 1938 he enlisted in the French
army with the 8th (Infantry) Regiment
of Zouaves. A sergeant when the
Second World War broke out, he saw
action in Alsace-Lorraine in September
1939 and in Belgium in May 1940. His
unit helped to protect British forces
during the evacuation from Dunkirk
before he was captured by the Germans
on June 4. Six days later, at Rexpoëde,
nine miles southeast of Dunkirk, he
managed to escape.
On June 22, when Hitler announced
an “armistice” splitting the nation
between a German-occupied zone and
an area controlled by the collaborative
Vichy regime, Tupët-Thomé sought to
link up with the Free French Forces —
the Resistance headed by General
Charles de Gaulle from his base in exile
in London.
In Clermont-Ferrand in central
France in September that year he made
contact with the former French army
officer Roger Warin, codenamed
Wybot, and became part of the Resist-
ance network known as Le Réseau
Ronald. Their job was to find landing
spots for Allied aircraft dropping
agents and supplies behind German
lines. His Resistance nom due guerre
became “Tom”.
In August the following year he
managed to leave France, traverse
Spain and Portugal and reach Gibral-p
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th partofa“stick”of 12© MUSÉE DE L’ORDRE DE LA LIBÉRATIONMAURICE SEYMOUR/BRIDGEMAN IMAGESRabovsky and Nora Kovach in
Bayaderka in New York, 1959‘She is the bravest
person I know’
Marriages and engagements
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