Debbie McGee has spoken in detail for the first time about her escape from Iran during the Revolution, describing how she ran across an airport tarmac with machine guns trained on her. The account appears in her new autobiography, A Magical Life.
She had gone to Iran to dance, but as protests against the Shah swept the country, she was forced to mount a daring escape. Only a short time earlier, she feared being locked up after being detained in an airport office scarcely bigger than a cupboard, with the flight to Zurich due to leave within the hour.
Dawn dash through Tehran
Debbie says: “I imagined my parents back in London, watching the news, seeing the last European flight out of Iran, discovering that I wasn’t on it. Would we end up in prison, at the mercy of the Ayatollah’s forces as they swept into the city? Would we survive another night?”
Her dash to the airport had begun at six that morning, taking her through Tehran as the sun rose. “I can see, even now, the silhouettes of their tanks lining up in the pink light of dawn,” she says.
Her escape came during the Iranian revolution of 1978–79, when she was still a young ballet dancer and yet to meet the man who would become her husband, magician Paul Daniels. Now 67, Debbie describes the dramatic scenes in her autobiography, revealing how a dream job abroad ended with her fearing she might never see her family again.
Life in Tehran's ballet company
She had been just 18 when she left the Royal Ballet School to join the Iranian National Ballet, having won a place at a London audition attended by hundreds of dancers. The company paid five times what her contemporaries at the Royal Ballet earned, and she hoped to save enough for a deposit on a flat. There were around 65 dancers, including 25 Iranians, with others recruited from across Europe and America. Among the newcomers was Julie Robinson, another Royal Ballet School student, who became her flatmate.
Their base was Tehran’s Roudaki Hall, where wealthy audiences dressed up for performances and the Shah himself sometimes attended. On those nights, guards stood in the wings and the dancers tucked identification cards into the bodices of their tutus, ready to be checked whenever they went on stage.
Debbie says: “I had arrived in Tehran on a high. I couldn’t believe how well my career plans were working out. I was only just 18 and I was already dancing in a huge company. My first contract was for a year but I planned to be there for much longer if I could.”
Growing unrest and a three-week siege
Away from rehearsals, friends took her to restaurants she could never have afforded in London. There were trips to the Caspian Sea, where an Iranian colleague’s family owned a villa. “Living in Tehran at that time was almost like living in New York,” she says. “It was such a vibrant, fast-moving place.”
But while in the country, anger against the Shah’s regime was growing. One day, the dancers heard a crowd outside and climbed onto a ledge to peer through the studio’s high windows. Students were marching through the streets, throwing stones and bottles. The company administrator assured them it would die down. Instead, the unrest spread and, after troops opened fire on students at Tehran University, Debbie and Julie sought help at the British Embassy.
She says: “Around every corner, we found more rioters, more fires in the street. We couldn’t believe the change in the city. Yet at the Embassy, the staff were dismissive. When we pressed them about the trouble in the streets and asked what we should do, they said, ‘Trouble? What trouble?’ “‘Look out of the window,’ we said.”
According to Debbie, staff took their names and addresses and sent them away. That very afternoon, the embassy was attacked. Performances stopped and the dancers were moved into an apartment block with other Europeans. The women stayed inside while the men ventured out at dawn to find food.
“We were pretty much living on flatbreads,” she says. “We lived like that for three weeks. A couple of times the boys got beaten up while they were out foraging. Sometimes they had to hide in the back of shops because the rioters were coming.”
Escape and reunion with family
Inside, the dancers kept practising, using kitchen counters and chair backs for their daily ballet exercises. They had no television or radio, and overseas telephone calls were no longer possible. Debbie could not even tell her parents she was safe. Eventually, a friend working at the Foreign Residence Bureau secured three tickets to Zurich for Debbie, Julie and her other friend Gavin. They cost more than ten times the usual fare and they were only allowed a single carry-on bag each.
At the airport, Julie and Gavin passed through passport control, but a guard stopped Debbie over her visa, which they thought she’d tampered with. “Gavin and I clung to one another, fearing the very worst,” Debbie says. “We were living in a nightmare.” Then a young guard entered the office who took pity on them.
“By this time, I was distraught. Big salty tears were rolling down my face as I tried to tell him our story. ‘We need to get on that plane to Zurich,’ I begged him. ‘We just want to go home. Please help us get out of here. Please…’”
For a few seconds, the guard looked from Debbie to Gavin before stamping both passports and opening the door. “Run,” he told them. “Run!” She says: “It felt like I held my breath until the plane left the runway. Even after we were in the air, it took a long time for my heart to stop pounding. Though I had never been so scared in my life, I was just too stunned to cry.”
In Zurich, Debbie found a hotel and finally telephoned home, reversing the charges. It was the first time in a month she had been able to call her parents. “Dad picked up. Hearing his familiar voice, I felt able to cry at last,” she says. It would be another couple of days before they could see their daughter for themselves.
“Of course, my parents were right there at the airport when I finally got back to London. I’ve never been hugged so hard. They were so glad to have me home.”
That Christmas, the family said little about what had happened. The Shah eventually fled Iran in January 1979, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile the following month. It was only decades later, when her father was in his late 70s, that he spoke about their own ordeal. “I can’t tell you the pain we were going through,” he told her. “We didn’t know whether you were dead or alive.”
The ordeal left an indelible mark on Debbie. “I would get flashbacks to that run across the tarmac towards the plane, with the guards’ machine guns trained upon us as we ran,” she says. She was also broke having spent all her savings getting out of the country. Looking for work back in Britain, she auditioned for a summer show in Great Yarmouth starring a magician she had never heard of: Paul Daniels.
“What Iran taught me was that I could survive. But I wasn’t meant to stay there. If I hadn’t been forced to come home, the rest of my life would have been very different indeed.”
A Magical Life by Debbie McGee is out on October 8 (Mirror Books).
