Out of Tune Page 7

  I left school at the age of fifteen and spent three years working as a secretary in a big shoe shop. It never occurred to me to go on to higher education because I knew this wasn’t financially feasible. As the eldest child, I also knew my contribution would greatly help my parents. So my wages were divided into board for my parents and of course a portion for myself. As soon as I received my paycheck every week, I would rush out and buy myself a new piece of clothing—a cardigan, a skirt, stockings, or a pair of shoes. It was a great feeling finally to start buying my own things and to become independent.

  I had some brief periods away from home. At sixteen, I stayed in Melbourne with my grandparents for a few weeks and took part in the Jewish Sports Carnival. I was picked to play on the girls’ hockey team representing the Jewish Community of Western Australia, though I was in fact a very poor hockey player, running away if the ball came at me too hard. But I had great fun at the two-week carnival and made many new friends.

  Two years later I returned to Melbourne for several weeks and worked for a fashion business. Upon my return to Perth, I worked for two years for a firm that supplied paint, easels, and drawing equipment for artists. I used to love the aroma of the paint, and the artistic types who would wander in and browse among the glowing colors. After that, from 1965 to 1968, I worked as a check-typist for the State Electricity Commission (SEC) of Western Australia. My father had already been working at the SEC for many years as an electrical fitter in the meter shop, and Leslie also started working for them as an electrician in 1966. Although we all worked for the same government department, we didn’t see each other much at work, because our workplaces were in different locations.

  My father worked in the meter shop until he retired in 1968 at the age of sixty-five. He is famous among his workmates for bringing his violin in to play. At first they wouldn’t believe a blue-collar worker could play a classical instrument. Dave Bowron, the chief engineer in charge of the meter shop, told my brother Leslie recently: “We didn’t really believe Peter could play, so we dared him to bring his violin in. But when he took up the challenge and brought in his fiddle we were all very impressed.”

  It was only in my early twenties that I decided to go back to studying, taking my Associate in Music exams, which were issued by the Australian Music Examinations Board, under the auspices of the University of Western Australia. Previously I had thought that higher education was only for the very rich or for students gifted enough to obtain a scholarship, and it had never occurred to me when I left school that I could do something more ambitious. Later, at the age of thirty, when I moved to Israel, I took a bachelor of arts degree in History and English Language at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

  David, too, left high school after earning his Junior Certificate, even though my parents very much wanted him to stay on and obtain his Leaving (Higher School) Certificate. But he was obsessed with the piano; he just wanted to devote his entire life to it.

  Louise, my youngest sister, was the only one of us who stayed on at school beyond the age of fifteen and then continued her education at university where she gained bachelor’s degrees in psychology and creative writing. Suzie, like me, took a break. She left school young, worked for a few years, and then later went on to higher education. She took a degree in social work at the University of Western Australia and now helps adults with alcohol and drug problems. Leslie, who left school with a very respectable score of eight subjects for his Junior Certificate, is a qualified electrician, but now earns his income as a musician.

  Although there were many material things that I craved in my childhood, I realize now that growing up poor is not without its benefits. I will always appreciate being able to enjoy material comforts—buying clothes and so on—in a way that I might not have done had we always taken such things for granted. And growing up without many possessions also meant there was a much greater emphasis on enriching our childhood in other ways—from music to chess to acrobatics—for which I am truly grateful.

  8

  PETER AND DAVID ARGUE AND MAKE UP

  One day, out of the blue, David announced to my father that he intended to go and live in England. His plan was to study at the Royal College of Music in London to work toward a performer’s diploma. David said that he had already been talking for some time to several members of the Jewish community whom my father didn’t know. They had agreed the idea was a good one, indeed they may even have thought it up themselves; and they had promised to help organize and fund the trip. David said he had also been discussing the plan with Frank Callaway, professor of music at the University of Western Australia.

  My father had mixed feelings about David leaving. He wanted the best for his son’s career, which he himself had done so much to foster. But he also knew that David’s behavior was not quite normal, and he was worried about what might happen when he was left to look after himself alone in London, a city so much bigger and more cosmopolitan than Perth. But as they talked, he could see how much David had set his sights on going. It was 1966, David was now eighteen and no longer a child, and though he was still legally a minor (under Australian law at the time, the age of majority was twenty-one), my father felt that in practice he had the right to decide for himself.

  One thing my father could not abide, though, was the idea of other people interfering in his son’s life behind his back. David told my father that some members of the Jewish community, eager to become involved in the life of Perth’s “star musician,” had decided to organize a “charity concert in aid of David Helfgott.” My father was a proud man who did not like the idea of his family receiving charity, especially when he had not asked for it—and in this case he had not even been told about it. He was not at all happy about the idea of his son being, as he saw it, paraded publicly as an object of charity.

  It seemed to him that the tight-knit Perth Jewish community included one or two individuals who, though no doubt well-meaning, were overstepping the mark in involving themselves in other people’s affairs. In the old shtetls of eastern Europe, no family event was private. The individual was submerged in the wider community, and family sorrows as well as family joys were shared by the community as a whole, which felt it had a right and a duty to make its opinions known. Some of these attitudes were carried over to Australian Jewry, and various individuals felt they still had the right to busy themselves in the family affairs of other members of the community— in this case Peter’s—as they saw fit.

  Peter was not against David going to London per se, and certainly not against his receiving the best possible training to further his musical potential. What concerned him was that people, whom he didn’t know and who he believed didn’t really understand David and his special needs, were making arrangements on David’s behalf without consulting him.

  I remember vividly David and my father sitting around the kitchen table one night discussing David’s trip. My father said: “Look, if you really want to go to London we’ll fix it up, we’ll arrange it for you. But we’ll do it in a proper way. You don’t have to go to others and ask for charity.” Just as my father had quickly recognized David’s deep desire to go to London, so David understood my father’s distress that it was being arranged without his involvement. The two of them—who, despite their differences, were still probably the closest members of the family— reached an understanding: David would drop the “charity concert,” while my father, who had his own contacts in the music world, promised that he would arrange a farewell concert for David at the Capitol Theater. It would be a regular concert for the paying public, not a charity event.

  It therefore came as a great surprise to my father when a little while later, after he had begun making inquiries about organizing a concert, he opened The Maccabean, the Perth Jewish newspaper, and read the following: “A charity concert will be held on the 17th of May in aid of David Helfgott.”

  Despite their agreement, David had apparently continued to plan a charity concert rather than allow my father t
o organize a regular one. Much of what happened next is described in a lengthy letter that my father wrote to Professor Callaway on April 13, 1966. In the letter he says that he was upset because no one had asked David’s parents whether they thought such a charity concert in aid of their son was a good idea. The wording of the announcement for the concert, he wrote, “sounded to me like David is starving and he needs some aid.”

  My father told Callaway that he had written to The Maccabean and asked the editor who had been responsible for placing the announcement. In his opinion the newspaper should not have had it printed without first consulting him since his son was still legally a minor.

  A few days later my father received a letter from a Mrs. Green (not her real name), one of the organizers of the charity concert. In her letter, she lectured my father on “human morality, how a father should do things, and how wrong you have been in writing to the editor of the newspaper and expressing your indignation.” My father wrote back to Mrs. Green, telling her (as he explained in his letter to Professor Callaway) that he was not interested in her “good intentions of running a concert for David’s benefit.”

  Another woman actually came to see my father and informed him it was she who had put the announcement in The Maccabean. “You can’t cancel the concert. I may lose my job,” she said. She told my father to leave things as they were and not interfere. She then became very offensive and abusive—“most unladylike,” as he put it in his letter to Callaway. He added that “it’s not my way of treating a lady, but I had to walk out of the room and leave her.”

  My father makes clear in his letter to Callaway that he was not against a fund-raising concert or opposed to David going to London. “If they had asked me in a proper manner, I cannot see why I should not have consented to the concert, but I did not like them to arrange things without giving me the slightest hint about it.”

  I typed this letter for him and still have a copy. Had Scott Hicks agreed to speak to me when concocting his “true story,” I would have been more than happy to let him see it.

  When my father confronted David and reproached him for having broken their agreement by secretly continuing discussions about the charity concert, they got into a big argument that was witnessed by the whole family, myself included. But the way in which this argument is depicted in Shine—it is a crucial turning point in the film, where the character of Peter is extremely violent toward David and swears never to speak to him again—is utterly untrue.

  Firstly, the argument was not about whether David should study in London, an idea that my father had already accepted. It was about the way in which David had deceived him and about the way my father had found out about it. Dad picked up a copy of The Maccabean and said angrily, “What’s this? You told me you weren’t going to go ahead with this.” He paced back and forth in the living room, emphasizing how upset he was that David had gone behind his back. David shouted back that he wanted the charity concert. The rest of us sat quietly on the sofa, watching in disbelief as my father and my brother shouted at each other for fifteen minutes.

  Secondly, although the argument was certainly unpleasant, there was no swearing or physical violence. My father never once hit David or threatened to hit him. I am not the only one who is absolutely certain of this. My mother and siblings are equally sure. As Suzie says, “Dad was never physically violent.”

  Thirdly, David was not thrown out of the house by his father on the night of the supposed beating, nor did he leave as a result of it. David had already packed his suitcase before the argument, having decided to take up an invitation to stay with one of the organizers of his trip to London, Mrs. Edna Luber-Smith, president of the Perth branch of the Australian Council of Jewish Women. After the argument, David just picked up his suitcase and went down the street to nearby Mt. Lawley, where the Luber-Smiths lived.

  Finally, the idea that my father never spoke to, or threatened never to speak to, David again is ridiculous. The character who represents my father in Shine says: “You cruel, callous, stupid boy… If you go, you will never come back into this house again. You will never be anybody’s son … You want to destroy this family! … You will not step outside that door. You will be punished for the rest of your life!!” My father said nothing of the sort. He and David remained in close regular contact both during and after David’s time in London. When David returned to Perth, he came back to live with us.

  Callaway is a man much respected in international music circles. In 1997, he won the highly prestigious UNESCO Music Prize, previous winners of which include Dimitri Shostakovich, Yehudi Menuhin and Leonard Bernstein, and he was hailed by UNESCO as “one of the great pioneers and ambassadors of music education of our time.” After Shine was released, Callaway told my brother Leslie and myself that he remembers the meeting that took place around that time with my father and David in his office at the university. He said that my father was perfectly pleasant and calm throughout. As a minor, David had to have his parents’ permission to study abroad. Callaway said: “Your father was perfectly willing to sign the papers. He did so without any tension or problem at all. Peter just gave his blessing and wished David all the best and he signed the necessary papers for David to go and study in London.”

  Professor Callaway, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1981 for his services to Australian and international music, said: “As for David, I had no idea at the time he was mentally unbalanced. I just thought he was highly excitable.” Callaway told me that neither Hicks nor anyone else involved in the making of Shine ever contacted him, though he would have been more than willing to speak about David and his decision to study in London.

  The entire family believed that my father was in the right. Of course David was not under an obligation to inform Dad of his plans, but it would have been the decent thing to do, especially after all that my father had done for him.

  For David’s part, it seems he may still have been harboring some resentment toward my father for the failure of his trip to America after Isaac Stern’s visit. So when people outside the family suggested that he be sent overseas, he was particularly receptive to the idea. For him, England, as a European country, and as the home of composers such as Edward Elgar and Benjamin Britten, was one of the great centers of classical music.

  Although we could understand David’s excitement, we realized that our father was justified in his opposition to the trip. Leslie says: “Dad was 100 percent correct—although of course Professor Callaway and Mrs. Luber-Smith are no more to blame for David’s subsequent breakdown than my father. I am sure they had nothing but good intentions. However, it is usually more appropriate for people to consult with the parents than with the children.”

  Suzie says: “Dad did oppose David going to England, but so did the whole family. Dad knew how young and vulnerable David was; he knew he would not be able to manage on his own. It was interfering outsiders who didn’t understand that.”

  Another person who remembers this period well is Madame Alice Carrard. By the time these events occurred, she had been David’s principal piano teacher for about three years—Frank Arndt had stepped aside when David was fifteen, feeling that he had taught David all he could. Madame Carrard spent more time with my brother during this period than anyone else outside the family. As with Professor Callaway, Hicks did not speak to her when making Shine, although she tells me she would have been happy to inform him about the truth of what happened.

  Widely respected as the “grand old lady” of Perth’s musical circles, Madame Carrard arrived in Perth in 1942, bringing with her the rich musical traditions of her native Hungary and the historical grandeur of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Both David and I were extremely privileged to receive her unique musical training. It was under Carrard’s tutelage that, in June 1964, David gave a virtuoso performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, accompanied by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra.

  She celebrated her 100th birthday in Perth in April 1997 by giving a recital of
Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, opus 111, and then treating the audience to a burst of Bela Bartok, the great Hungarian composer with whom she had studied piano in Budapest at the age of sixteen. Carrard, who had a flourishing career as a concert pianist, used to tell me about “the shivers that ran down my back when Bartok gazed at me with his penetrating beautiful brown eyes.”

  Madame Carrard became David’s piano teacher again in the 1970s and still remains in close touch with him. She knows him very well and cares deeply about him. She is a remarkable woman who still plays the piano daily and is now believed to be the world’s oldest piano teacher. Despite her age, she retains sharp recollections of all the difficulties surrounding David’s trip.

  On a visit to Perth in the second half of 1996, I went to pay my respects to Madame Carrard, who at the time was ill in hospital. She had seen and disliked Shine, but even I was unprepared for the vehemence with which she defended my father. “Sending David to London was tantamount to sending him to commit suicide,” she said, attacking those members of the Perth Jewish community who had failed to show consideration for my father’s views.

  Later, in May 1997, when I was back in Israel and had decided to write this book, I asked my brother Leslie and his wife Marie to interview Madame Carrard to get a fuller grasp of her view of what had occurred during this period. They sent me the cassettes of that interview. “I was against David going abroad,” she says. “Why? Because David was never normal! I think he was born with that mental problem. His father and I instinctively knew this.

  “I’ve seen the film. It’s fiction, fiction, fiction. It’s all fiction. There was not much Peter Helfgott could do. Everything was organized behind his back and David wanted to go to London. Peter knew David better than anyone. He realized David should not be left alone. David was a very sick person and not very reliable. His father was right, but David wasn’t listening. He thought that there would always be someone looking after him, as there had been in Perth. He didn’t realize it wouldn’t be good for him to try and cope alone. David was too young and taken in by everybody.