Out of Tune Page 19

  Dr. David Leonard, the director of psychiatry at Frankston Hospital in Victoria, Australia, is an expert on this disorder. He explains: “People with schizo-affective disorder will have both the symptoms of schizophrenia, and also the symptoms of bipolar disorder (manic depression). They may have manic episodes when they become extremely overactive, experience feelings of elation, and develop grandiose views of themselves. At other times the reverse may be the case and they will suffer severe depression. They will be profoundly unhappy, slowed up in their movements and unable to act … At other times they may believe themselves persecuted victims of complex conspiracies, a belief that may be confirmed by the presence of tormenting auditory hallucinations. These presentations are called paranoid and may be consistent with a capacity to continue to function reasonably in some spheres of their lives despite their delusions.”

  Yet the stigmas attached to mental illness are still largely rooted in society. Members of a patient’s family can easily feel in some way to blame, or guilty about finding it hard to cope. These myths are put across with so much energy and power in Shine that almost without exception the critics got it wrong, blaming my brother’s illness on my father’s alleged brutality. And in doing so, since they were under the impression that Shine was essentially based on fact, they naturally made no distinction between the fictional Helfgotts and the real Helfgotts.

  I had the pleasure of reading in various newspapers in the United States and elsewhere that David’s mind “snapped because of intense performance pressure from his demanding, overprotective father”; that his “emotional torment under a domineering father led to schizophrenia”; that “after the way Peter Helfgott treats his son, it’s no wonder David ended up as a nervous wreck … with mental problems.” Yes, here he was, the “Holocaust Survivor … [who] relentlessly pushed his talented pianist son to the brink of insanity.” The speculation about Peter Helfgott’s ability to cause chemical imbalances in the brain was occasionally so preposterous as to be laughable. One newspaper in Scotland didn’t just blame the “stress which clearly existed between Peter and his son” for “David’s mental illness” but even suggested that my father was “a hardline Stalinist” and this might have something to do with it.

  Some papers got it spectacularly wrong. For example, the London Sunday Times said: “Despite the formidable task of being about two subjects—mental illness and music—that the cinema gets wrong on an almost annual basis, Shine gets both right.” It was when the publicity surrounding Shine started spreading beyond Australia that many medical organizations felt the need to speak out in an attempt to counteract its harmful myth-making.

  Dr. Margaret Leggatt, president of the World Schizophrenia Fellowship, and Barbara Hocking, executive director of SANE (the Schizophrenic Association of Australia), together began writing letters to newspapers; SANE urged its sister organizations, NAMI (the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill) in the United States and SANE in the United Kingdom, to do likewise.

  “It is time that the myth of bad parenting or family arguments causing mental illness is put to rest,” they wrote in letters published in November 1996 in The Australian and in The (Melbourne) Age (which had written that David “was battered psychologically by his father to the point of breakdown”). Leggatt and Hocking continued: “David Helfgott’s story has made public the plight of 180,000 families where someone will have a schizophrenic illness. What a pity that the filmmakers chose to make David’s father the villain of the piece…. If family members are portrayed by filmmakers in cruel and fictitious scenarios, the blame will continue. Fictionalization in films such as Shine which are perceived by the community as true does matter. It is inaccurate and unjust.” (Much to the amazement of Margaret Leggatt and Barbara Hocking, Gillian went on a well-known Australian radio program, Family Matters, and said they had no right to write to newspapers about her husband’s illness and this was none of their concern.)

  Shines actors have also, perhaps unwittingly, perpetuated the myth of the film they had starred in. Geoffrey Rush—who won the Oscar for Best Actor for his role as David—told journalists: “This film is about how easily you can f**Uk up your kids.” Armin Mueller-Stahl—whose role as my father also won him an Oscar nomination—said: “Peter pushes his son to be a great pianist. Because he’s a very strong person, a true survivor, he pushes far too hard, which ultimately destroys David.”

  SANE became so perturbed by the way these myths were being spread by the hype surrounding Shine that it issued a special briefing on the movie: “The film’s portrayal of David’s father had rekindled the untrue, inaccurate, and destructive myth that parental and family behaviour caused psychotic mental illnesses such as schizo-affective disorder.”

  Barbara Hocking said: “This concerns us very much in the mental health field as irresponsible comments by public figures [such as Rush and Mueller-Stahl] further reinforce the preexisting misconceptions. Scientific opinion accepts that psychotic illness does not develop unless there is an underlying biological predisposition.

  “Scenes in Shine,’ she continued, “such as the one in David’s London apartment, implying that the father’s alleged rejection of David by returning his letters led him to overdose on medication, and the one in which it is stated that David’s character is not really ill but is in hospital because he has nowhere to go, make our work much harder. It is irresponsible to suggest that someone would have been hospitalized and medicated just because he had nowhere else to go.”

  The medical inaccuracies in Shine have created such a stir that psychiatrists have even written papers in order to set the record straight. Under the title “Schizophrenia, Schizo-affective Disorders and Shine,’ Dr. David Leonard of the Frankston Hospital wrote:

  “A film, of course, is never reality. But Geoffrey Rush’s presentation of David Helfgott in Shine looks a lot like a disorganized presentation of schizophrenia. The character in the film has the typical jumbled thoughts, wildly inappropriate emotional responses, and lack of social judgment characteristic of the disorder. Fortunately for him, it all translates into a lovable zaniness that everyone finds appealing … It is a pity that the film chooses to seek out a villain in David Helfgott’s father as the cause of the disorder. We do not know what causes schizophrenia, or similar disorders, but it seems quite clear that it is not a result of faulty upbringing. To blame a family for the illness is to double their pain. Not only must they bear the loss of their often promising and delightful children to this merciless illness, but they stand accused by others and by themselves of being the cause of the catastrophe. Families who have been touched by schizophrenia stand in need of our utmost kindness, support, and compassion, instead of such cruelty.”

  There was growing disquiet on the other side of the world, too. On January 11, 1997, the prestigious British Medical Journal published an article by Dr. Simon Wessely, from the department of psychology at King’s College School of Medicine in London, entirely devoted to Shine. Under the title “Medicine and the Media—Mental Illness as Metaphor, Yet Again,” Dr. Wessely wrote: “Shine repeats the error … that mental illness must have both a meaning and a cause. The roots of David’s breakdown are laid firmly at the door of his father. The script comes straight out of those 1960s books on the schizophrenogenic family, replete with double binds, harsh discipline, overprotection, excessive love, and impossible expectations … a version of reality that is both inaccurate and patronizing.”

  American medical experts were also coming forward in an attempt to expose the myth. Patricia Backlar, senior scholar at the Center for Ethics in Health Care at Oregon Health Sciences University and author of the book The Family Face of Schizophrenia, wrote an opinion piece on Shine for the Oregonian of Portland, Oregon, on March 29, 1997. She said that if she had not known better, she “would believe that [Helfgott’s] father had caused his son to become seriously mentally disordered.” She felt that inherent within this film was “the evil implication that the father was powerful enough to caus
e his son to become seriously mentally disordered.”

  In a lengthy letter to the New York Times published on March 15, 1997, and entitled “Shine Depicts False View of Mental Illness,” Dr. Kenneth Paul Rosenberg wrote: “… the most egregious misinformation in the film is the attribution of David’s nervous breakdown to the cruelty of his father. Since cinema began, mental illness has been attributed to heartless parents. Most such films were produced during the middle of the century, when the idea was advanced by mental health professionals, particularly by psychoanalysts who saw the ‘schizophrenogenic mother’ as the evil root of all mental illness. Today we recognize that such theories added outrageous insult to severe injury.”

  He continues: “I worry about the impact of the film on the millions of individuals and families dealing with major mental illness. Shine. seems to continue a tradition of blaming parents for mental illnesses that rob their children of meaningful lives—illness that, to the best of our understanding, defies the logic of searching for human villains.”

  Another letter about Shine to the New York Times (March 30, 1997), printed under the headline “An Illness Rooted in Biology, Not Abuse,” by Dr. Jonathan Segal of California, stated: “It is not appropriate to link David Helfgott’s illness directly to … Peter Helfgott’s terror … schizophrenia has strong biological roots … Most schizophrenics don’t come from abusive homes, and most children in abusive homes don’t develop schizophrenia.” At least the message about schizophrenia was getting through, even if not the truth about my gentle father.

  This is not just an issue for the Helfgott family. Honest discussion of mental illness remains taboo in many circles, and many people may not realize the extent to which it affects society. In Australia, around 20 percent of the population (3.5 million people) are affected by some form of mental illness at some time during their lives. In Britain, an estimated seven million people suffer from mental illness. According to the Schizophrenia Society of Canada, 250,000 Canadians will suffer from schizophrenia at some point in their lives. In the United States, too, about 1 percent of the population suffers from schizophrenia (according to research at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore).

  Nor is David alone among pianists. The celebrated British pianist John Ogden was engaged in a lifelong struggle against mental imbalance. Vladimir Horowitz—to whom David had been compared by his professor in London, Cyril Smith—was unable to perform for twelve years after suffering a nervous breakdown in 1953, at the age of forty-eight. Afterward, Horowitz, one of this century’s greatest pianists, did resume his career but at a greatly diminished pace. And the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould had to give up live public performance at the age of thirty-two. (Gould would talk and sing to himself while playing, in a manner not unlike David’s behavior in the last few years.)

  Even Shines favorite musician, Rachmaninoff, himself suffered a nervous breakdown in 1897 and did not compose for several years until a prominent physician, Dr. Nikolai Dahl, used hypnosis and autosuggestion to bring him out of his despair. (To the best of my knowledge no one has made up a film about Rachmaninoff’s father beating him into illness.)

  Unfortunately, in spite of all this, the vast majority of newspaper commentary on Shine swallowed Hicks’s version. Only a small minority of writers understood the games he was playing. One of these, Peter Rainer of the New York Times, hit the nail on the head when he said that Shine blames Peter Helfgott because “physiology doesn’t play as well as Freud.” Unfortunately, in making the kind of film he has created, Hicks was not just hurting the Helfgott family but seriously misleading the public and affecting millions of those touched by mental illness across the world.

  19

  DAVID’S 1997 WORLD TOUR:

  CLASSICAL MUSIC’S HOTTEST TICKET

  He came, he played, he conquered.” Thus began the review in the Philadelphia Inquirer of one of David’s concerts on his 1997 world tour. It was about the only good review my poor brother got. In Australia, his concert was compared to “a freak show.” In New Zealand, one critic said: “A Helfgott performance is like Beethoven on Prozac.” In America, David’s playing was described as “shapeless and utterly incoherent.” A British newspaper said: “It was like watching a Muppet give a recital.” His recital was “an exaggerated clatter,” said another.

  To coincide with the release of Shine in Australia, a concert tour was arranged for David. The whole Helfgott family, myself included, attended the first concert, a sellout performance at the Perth Concert Hall on August 31, 1996. When it became apparent that Shine would become a worldwide success, a lucrative world tour was hastily arranged, beginning in New Zealand in February 1997 and then taking David to some of the world’s most distinguished musical venues.

  It was a grueling schedule. In New Zealand my brother played six concerts in ten days; between each concert he changed location, skipping almost nightly from city to city and venue to venue. In March and April, David crisscrossed the United States, playing in the country’s leading concert halls: the Boston Symphony Hall, New York’s Avery Fisher Hall, Los Angeles’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, San Francisco’s Nob Hill Masonic Hall, the Seattle Center Opera House, the Chicago Auditorium Theatre, the Philadelphia Academy of Music, the Atlanta Fox Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Pasadena Civic Auditorium—in addition, of course, to playing at the Oscar extravaganza at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

  In Canada, David played at the Theatre St.-Denis in Montreal and at the Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto. He traveled on to Britain in May, giving a concert at the Royal Festival Hall in London; then up to the English Midlands to play at the Royal Centre in Nottingham, back to London to perform at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane and twice more at the Royal Festival Hall, and then back to the Midlands, playing at the Birmingham Symphony Hall. The tour organizers could hardly have arranged a more punishing timetable.

  David returned to the U.S. in August and September and performed at the Los Angeles Hollywood Bowl, San Francisco’s Nob Hill Masonic Hall (again), Cleveland’s Severance Hall, the Detroit Opera House, and Miami’s Dade County Auditorium. In October, David once again crossed the Atlantic to Britain, playing at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall, in Belfast, and at London’s Royal Albert Hall, just a few steps away from the Royal College of Music where he had studied thirty years earlier. By year’s end he would have appeared in Europe—in France, Switzerland, Germany, and elsewhere—before flying off to Japan and Southeast Asia, to perform in Seoul, Tokyo, Sendai, Nagoya, Osaka, and Taipei; at the same time plans were already being made for a further international tour of fifty concerts in 1998.

  In the entire history of classical music performance, there can hardly have been a wider gap between critical reaction on the one hand and public reaction on the other. While my brother’s tour elicited some of the most savage reviews ever bestowed on a classical musician from professional critics, he captivated the general public. Almost all his concerts were sold out well in advance and he received rapturous applause wherever he played. At the first concert in Auckland, New Zealand, the audience of 2,200 rose to their feet to acclaim his performance. The reaction was no less enthusiastic in America. In Boston, a 3,000-strong audience gave him four standing ovations. At the two sellout concerts in Chicago’s 110-year-old Auditorium Theatre, all 3,600 seats were filled on both nights. The 150-year-old historic Academy of Music in Philadelphia was surrounded by scalpers who, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, were selling $75 tickets for four times the price. In Atlanta, David played to 4,000 people. In Toronto, the 2,700-seat Roy Thomson Hall was sold out on both nights. David sold out Los Angeles’s 3,000-seat Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (twice), the 2,900-seat Masonic Hall in San Francisco (all tickets were sold in two hours), and London’s 2,500-seat Royal Festival Hall (three times). He even played the “Rach 3” at the 18,000-seat Hollywood Bowl, with the famed 100-piece Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, an adjunct of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

  In New York, Jack Kirkman, associate di
rector of concerts for the Avery Fisher Hall, said that describing Helfgott’s concerts as sellouts “is putting it mildly. I have been here for the last thirty-four years, and I’ve never seen anything like it.” Tickets for the 2,800-seat hall went for three times their normal price on the black market outside. Inside, David received five standing ovations.

  But as the standing ovations got longer and louder, the attacks by the critics grew more vituperative. Almost from the first, they were savage. In a scathing review of his sellout recitals at the Sydney Opera House, the Sydney Morning Heralds music critic, Peter McCallum, claimed that David’s success was based partly on “the appeal of the freak show.” He ascribed my brother’s popularity to that idiosyncrasy in human nature that applauds the peculiar while condescending to it. “Without the frenzied media and public acclaim which has greeted Shine, Helfgott’s disjointed performances would barely merit attention. [The reality is that] his trademark chatter and wild gesturing during performances drained the music of both its balance and its artistry.”

  American critics were no kinder. “David Helfgott should not have been in the Symphony Hall last night and neither should the rest of us,’ said Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe. In New York, a few nights later, Isaac Stern actually walked out of David’s concert.

  The New York Times tried as best it could to explain the phenomenon of audience adulation: “Mr. Helfgott is not now a great, or even a particularly good, pianist. If the medium for his ‘genius’ had been chess or mathematics, his shortcomings would probably have become more quickly and indisputably apparent to more people.”

  The British critics did not restrain themselves. Michael Wright of the London Sunday Times wrote: “Occasionally, between chords, Helfgott allows his arms to dangle, while he puffs like a steam train gearing itself up for a particularly steep incline … And then there is the singing. Glenn Gould famously sang along to his own performances of Bach, but at least he sang in tune. Helfgott emits a dirgelike wailing noise, a mumbling to the music.” Another critic wrote: “He accompanied his playing with sporadic moans, pitched somewhere between a ghostly wail and a low snore.” Another said it was “like sitting in someone’s living room listening to them practice.”