Tao Porchon Lynch by Andrea Kurtz January 2005

This year Tao Porchon Lynch celebrated her 86th birthday in a very special way. Wearing a form-fitting red dress, four inch high heels and a red flower behind her ear, she and her 28-year-old partner won first prize in the Fred Astaire ballroom dancing contest for the Northeast area. Her win was just another example in a long chain of extraordinary experiences that characterize her life. “I believe that people should not impose limits on themselves,” she says. “They must believe they can do whatever they set out to do.”

Certainly Porchon Lynch’s life exemplifies the effectiveness of this philosophy. She resists easy categorization.
She has been a yoga teacher for the past 30 years. She currently teaches Monday and Wednesday evenings at the Mid-Westchester JCC in Scarsdale, Saturday mornings at the Equinox in Scarsdale, Tuesday mornings at the Yoga Center in Briarcliff, and Monday, Thursday and Sundays at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio in Hartsdale. In addition, she holds master classes at different venues in New York City and Westchester and trains and certifies new instructors. The national Yoga Teachers Alliance has designated her as a master teacher and given her its highest rating ever.

Over the past six years she’s been taking classes at the Astaire studio in ballroom dancing and entering championship dancing competitions for which she’s won a slew of first prizes with her two male partners, Alex Vasendin, her instructor at the studio and Roman Mocharsky, a 28 year old recent émigré who had his own dance studio in the Ukraine.

A wine expert for many decades, she’s a certified judge for the American Wine Society and Vice-President of the New York state chapter. She has taught wine appreciation courses at the college level and knows most of the estate owners from around the world. She leads travel groups on tours of international wineries and on meditative and yoga tours of her native India.

Her recent activities follow on the heels of an extraordinary earlier life. Her experiences include acting in plays and films in pre-World War II France, relocating French Jews to England as a member of the Resistance, performing cabaret in London during the war, marching for Indian independence with her uncle and Mahatma Ghandi, modeling for couturier designers in post-war Paris, acting in movies in France and Hollywood during the 50’s, writing scripts for film and TV in California and directing and producing documentaries internationally.

Her beginnings did not seem auspicious. She was born immediately after World War I, on a ship sailing from the French-speaking colony of Pondicherry, India. Her Indian mother died in childbirth while on her way to join her French husband to immigrate to Canada. Her father deposited his baby with his brother’s family in Pondicherry and left to live on a horse farm in Saskatchewan permanently. The young Tao saw her father only once, during World War II when she lived in France and learned that his Canadian regiment was in Paris. She searched for him for three weeks and then saw him for a brief, anti-climatic fifteen minutes. But true to her positive philosophy she says without a trace of self-pity or regret, “I was so lucky to have a wonderful aunt and uncle to raise me.”
The larger world beckoned and when a teen-ager, she moved to France. An aunt owned a winery in the Rhone valley and celebrated her niece’s arrival with an exquisite and expensive 75 year old bottle of wine. “Describe the taste to me,” she commanded. When young Tao could not use precise terms to capture its essence her aunt said, “You shall not have a wine like this again until you can properly describe it.” Porchon laughingly recounts this story to explain her passionate immersion into the culture of wine-tasting and the rapid development of her taste buds.
Having explored France’s wine country and mastered the techniques and vocabulary of connoisseurship, she set out for Paris. With a natural talent for acting, she quickly became part of the theater and film world. During the war, she made friends with luminaries such as Marlene Dietrich and the actor Jean Gabin. She tells the story of Dietrich, arriving in Paris to appear at the Olympia Theatre. She was wearing army fatigues, having just come from performing for the troops. Needing a dress for that evening and knowing that Porchon Lynch was her size and the model for the couturier Lanvin, Dietrich asked her to don all the designer’s gowns until she selected her choice. “The dress was transformed when Dietrich put it on,” Porchon Lynch says. “She made me see what star quality was.”
When World War II broke out, she met and married a handsome French fighter pilot who flew with the RAF. She joined the French Resistance and made frequent trips back to her family’s estate in the Rhone area from where she smuggled French Jews into England. She continued these rescue efforts until her male partner was captured and her safety was compromised. She relocated to London and performed in cabaret during the bombings of that city. She learned English from the maestro of the language, Noel Coward. “For a while all I could say were complicated phrases of sophisticated patter, but not much that was practical.”

After the war, she returned to Paris and modeled for famous designers, including Jean Desses, Marcel Rochas and Jean Patou. She had a perfectly proportioned figure and a 17 inch waist that the couturiers felt would show off their designs. Desses used her as the model on which to design the gown that Prince Phillip’s mother wore to her son’s wedding with Queen Elizabeth.

It was, however, her legs, which won her great fame. After some photos were taken of her at the beach, she won several titles for having the best legs in Paris. French models were all the rage in America and she was sent with eight others to tour the States. Their sponsors were NBC television and a hair product company. Her husband, changed by the carnage of the war, sought a calm place in the sun, and decided to relocate to Montevideo, Uruguay. She was eager to pursue a career in America and the two decided on an amicable divorce.

Some American producers expressed interest in Porchon Lynch when she appeared in French films such as “Dr.Knock,” and an English one, “Sailors Three,” with Michael Wilding. When she came to Hollywood, she was quickly signed to a contract with MGM. One of her first movies was a small role in “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” starring Van Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor (then Mrs. Michael Wilding). Because Wilding mentioned to his wife that he’d been in a movie with the curvy, green-eyed brunette, a jealous Taylor ordered the beautiful dress Porchon Lynch wore in her big scene changed to a plainer one and decreed that her back should face the camera in most of the shots.

Because her exotic good looks were a blending of East and West, producers cast her mostly in small, ethnic parts in B movies. She played an American squaw in “The Cisco Kid” and various similar roles. She appeared in “Sangaree,” with Fernando Lamos. in 3D for Paramount and in “Half a Hero” with Red Skelton. She was also featured on early TV with roles in “I Married Joan,” with Joan Davis, and “Highway Patrol,” with Broderick Crawford.

She soon grew restive and decided to write for the movies and television. Her big break was to be a movie, “Flight into Eternity” for which sets had been built and shooting was to begin in Iran. Then came the revolution and the Ayatollah Khomeni closed down the film. She wrote several teleplays for “Playhouse 90” and other series in the golden age of TV drama. She began making documentaries on subjects which moved her emotionally and excited her intellectually.

In the late l950’s, she was working for the Unitel Corporation to bring television into world markets. They put the first TV in Japan and Uganda and then planned to bring it to India. Her uncle was influential in the Indian government, having been a strong supporter of Ghandi and the independence movement. He helped her make contacts with the appropriate leaders so Unitel could bring television to the subcontinent.

In l960, while she was in Paris, busily engaged in Unitel’s work, she was phoned by an American actress, Mary Ellen Kaye, with whom she had worked at MGM. She had settled in Brewster, New York with her husband and they invited her to sing French songs at a tribute to the opening of a synagogue in Brewster. Accidentally, the timing coincided with her trip to America. At the tribute she met American insurance agency owner, Bill Lynch. He ardently pursued her to California, France and even India and persuaded her to marry him in 1962. They lived in New York City but when he obtained custody of his three children, they moved into a house in Hartsdale, New York.
Porchon Lynch focused mainly on a life of domesticity, raising her step-children. However, in 1972 when she decided to write and produce a documentary on the then 100 year-old, Welthy Fisher, a woman who was an international humanitarian, her husband helped provide the financial backing for the film.

About ten years into her marriage, Porchon Lynch took her daughter, then 15, to beginning yoga classes at the girl’s request. Although she hadn’t practiced yoga for many years, all her early training came back to her. The teacher marveled at her level of expertise and requested, she take over the class. Thus began Porchon Lynch’s teaching career in yoga.

Since her husband was passionately committed to the civic life of Hartsdale, she became active in the community as well. Lynch was instrumental in establishing the Hartsdale Rotary and became its first President. Today he is remembered for many local civic improvements. He died on the couple’s 20th anniversary.

After his death, Porchon Lynch concentrated on her wine-tasting career, leading select groups on various international tours. She also began to increase her efforts at improving and refining the teaching of yoga in our area. This left her little time for other interests until one fateful snowy night about six years ago.

Her yoga students didn’t show up for class at the Astaire Studio and neither did the pupils of Irina and Alex Vasendin, the ballroom dance instructors in the next studio. She shared a secret wish with the couple. She confided that she was 80 years old and didn’t want to die without ever having mastered the Argentine tango. “You won’t have to,” they assured her. That evening, she began the first of many lessons which led to her passionate new avocation, ballroom dancing.

Two years ago she had to have a hip replacement. As she recuperated. she found walking difficult, but she couldn’t bear not to be dancing. In the early stages of her recovery, she had to be carried onto the dance floor for competitions, but once out there, she performed flawlessly. After winning competitions, she had to be carried off the floor.

Once again her philosophy enabled her to pursue her passion despite her physical situation. “You must live in the moment,” she says. “When you’re doing something with your whole heart, you can breathe deeply and tap into your life force.” Her orthopedic surgeon was so impressed with her recovery, he hung a photo of her (in lotus position) in his office.

Her new CD, “The Rhythm of Silence” has just been released. John Guth, the composer who recently did the music for the Harry Potter audio books, created the transcendently beautiful music. The CD is a skillful combination of relaxation and meditation. Porchon-Lynch’s spirituality, energy and joie de vivre come through on each of the selections. The CD and Tao's teaching schedule are both available at www.johnguthmusic.com.
Like Welthy Fisher, (the centarian whose life she captured in her documentary), Porchon Lynch wants to share the gift of tapping into the positive forces within oneself and the universe with younger generations. She says, “There is nothing we cannot do. All we need is to let Nature be our encyclopedia.”