Out of Tune

by Margaret Helfgott

  Copyright

  Copyright © 1998 by Margaret Helfgott-Fisher

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: September 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56519-6

  To my beloved father

  Contents

  Copyright

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  1: OSCAR NIGHT

  2: MY DEAR FATHER, PETER HELFGOTT

  3: FAMILY LIFE

  4: THE MOVE TO PERTH

  5: “MUSIC WILL ALWAYS BE YOUR FRIEND”

  6: A SUGGESTION FROM ISAAC STERN

  7: STALIN, MAO, AND TABLE TENNIS

  8: PETER AND DAVID ARGUE AND MAKE UP

  9: DAVID IN LONDON—A STORY THAT CANNOT BE FULLY TOLD

  10: LONDON LIFE—TRIUMPH AND TRAGEDY

  11: DESCENT INTO ILLNESS

  12: A FIRST MARRIAGE: THE STORY OF CLAIRE

  13: MY FATHER’S FINAL YEARS

  14: THE ROAD TO REHABILITATION: A GOOD WOMAN AND A FAIR MAN HELP DAVID

  15: THE MAKING OF SHINE

  16: DRAMATIC DISTORTIONS IN SHINE

  17 CHEAPENING THE HOLOCAUST

  18: MEDICAL ORGANIZATIONS ATTACK SHINE

  19: DAVID’S 1997 WORLD TOUR: CLASSICAL MUSIC’S HOTTEST TICKET

  20: DAVID AND GILLIAN

  21: A SMALL VICTORY KEEPS THE SHINE STUDY GUIDE OUT OF AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLS

  22: RIGHTING THE WRONGS

  Notes and Acknowledgments

  Much of the first half of this book relates to events that occurred many years ago; naturally, when attempting to recount such events in detail, there is always the possibility of lapses of memory. But in the case of the story I have to tell, I believe I can say with confidence that it is a fully accurate and objective one. Not only am I fortunate in being blessed with an extremely clear memory, but my recollections have become more focused over recent months as Shine’s worldwide success has caused me to think harder about my childhood years. In preparing this book I have also been able to reread the extensive diaries, notes, and letters that I have kept over the years, as well as to speak to many relatives and family friends.

  As far as events in the period before I was born are concerned, most of the information comes from my parents. I have also taken the precaution of confirming things told to me by my father, who passed away in 1975, by speaking to family members and others who knew him well, such as his dear and loyal friends Dr. Jack Morris and Ivan Rostkier, his cousin Zelig Lewcowitz—and of course to my mother.

  The information about Czestochowa in Poland comes from the Museum of the Diaspora in Tel Aviv, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Archives in Jerusalem, the Encyclopaedia Judaica, and from personal recollections of friends and relatives.

  In regard to the chapter on mental illness, I would like to thank the World Schizophrenia Fellowship and the Australian Schizophrenia Foundation (to whom part of the proceeds of sales from this book are being donated).

  Where I have cited lines from the film Shine, these have been checked for accuracy against the officially published screenplay of the film, by Jan Sardi and Scott Hicks.

  Tom Gross and I are extremely grateful to the following for their invaluable help and assistance: Michael Fox, Ron Tira, Tania Hershman, Daniel Chalfen, Simona Fuma, Natasha Lehrer, Rachel Temkin, Cara Stern, Dror Izhar (Israel Film Institute), our agents Beth Elon and Deborah Harris, and Larry Kirshbaum and Colleen Kapklein at Warner Books. I would also like to thank all the Helfgott family, in particular my mother, and all the people who kindly agreed to be interviewed for this book. I would like to add a special word of thanks to my brother Leslie and his wife Marie, who undertook much of the Australian-based research, and to Dr. Albert Jacob for his wise counsel on both medical and musical matters.

  Most of all, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Tom Gross for his patient and skillful assistance and hard work in helping me to write this book, and to my husband Dr. Allan Fisher who has been a tower of strength and support.

  1

  OSCAR NIGHT

  The night of March 24, 1997, should have been one of the most exciting nights of my life. That was the night my brother David performed live at the Oscar ceremony; a moment of great pride for him and for the whole Helfgott family. Not only did he receive a standing ovation from the glittering array of celebrities gathered together for the 69th Annual Academy Awards, but a worldwide television audience of over a billion people saw him hailed as a living example of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity.

  Here was David being embraced by Glenn Close. Here he was sharing the limelight with another special guest star, the former world heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali. Here was my darling brother being applauded and feted by the world. This should have been an utterly joyous occasion, marking the crowning moment in David’s remarkably topsy-turvy career as a concert pianist.

  Instead, I was overcome by a great sadness that night. As I sat at home in Beersheva in southern Israel, I felt dismay and foreboding. I knew that my brother Leslie in Australia felt pain and anger and that my mother had been crying.

  The reasons for our despair and for David’s sudden fame were one and the same: Shine, the film that supposedly recounts the true story of my family, and, in particular, of David’s relationship with his father, Peter Helfgott. We knew that David’s playing that night, combined with the fact that Shine was among the Oscar winners, would mean that millions more would see this already-popular film—a film that is an unforgivable distortion of the truth.

  This is not to say that we were not happy for David and the success he has achieved since the release of the film; but any pleasure we felt was all but drowned out by our concern for the memory of Peter Helfgott. For if David was the hero of the evening, my father was the villain. As film star Billy Crystal, the guest host for the Oscars that night, put it to the audience, Shine, is about “a mean father who made his son practice at the piano until his fingers bled, and then declared ‘my son is dead.’”

  The film suggests that my brother’s promising career was brought to an abrupt halt at the age of 22 by a mental breakdown largely induced by a brutal father—a father whose brutality may well have had something to do with the fact that he was a survivor of the Holocaust. But all this is very far from the truth, and the film is a terrible misrepresentation of a generous and decent man, who was both loving and much loved.

  The real Peter Helfgott was proud and strong, tolerant and tender, full of insight and wisdom. His story is a remarkable one. He was a self-made man whose intellectual powers bordered on brilliance. He wished his children nothing but happiness, and hoped they would share the love of music that had done so much to enrich his own life. David and he had a wonderful rapport—both at the piano and in countless other ways.

  But the impression received by millions of filmgoers was one of a tyrant—an impression reinforced by reviews in many of the world’s leading publications that characterized my father as “cruel,” “threatening,” “violent,” “slightly less lovable than Himmler,” “Flihrerlike.” And it did not stop there. The implications of Shine, as a “true story” became the subject of constant discussion in the press and on television and radio throughout the world.

  Reviewers made no distinction between the film version of Peter Helfgott and Peter Helfgott the real man. How could they? Shine’s director, Scott Hicks, knew this when he chose my father as a subject for his film, relying on information supplied by Gillian, David’s new wife, who only met David eight years after my father’s death. The situation was very different from other recent unflatt
ering bio-pics such as Surviving Picasso and JFK, films also criticized for their historical inaccuracy. There are thousands of alternative sources of information about the lives of Pablo Picasso and John F. Kennedy; not so with my father, plucked from obscurity to be transformed into a beast. “I have suffered great personal distress and public humiliation as a result of the completely false and misleading depiction in Shine of my dear late husband,’ says my mother.

  There were no beatings in our family. There was no dark and oppressive atmosphere in our house, no fearful glances every time my father entered the room. The house was not “like a concentration camp,” as the character called Margaret who represents me says in the screenplay. * There was no emphasis in my home on winning at all costs. Far from ruining David’s career, my father deserves credit for nurturing his talent and paving the way for his success.

  In making what is called a bio-pic, a film director should be allowed a little artistic license if dramatic effect calls for it, and of course it may be necessary to fictionalize parts of a story in order to compress it into a two-hour movie. But the makers of Shine have deliberately distorted the truth beyond all reasonable limits, while allowing the film to be marketed as a true story. ‘Shine is an utterly extraordinary true story,” proclaimed full-page ads in the New York Times and other publications.

  The film contains many travesties of the truth. My Polish-born father was not a Holocaust survivor, despite the film’s use of barbed wire, burning books, and marks on his forearm to imply that he was. He lived in Australia from 1933 onward, arriving there six years before the outbreak of World War II. Nor was his accent German: he had never been to Germany in his life. Nor did he sever contact with David—the two remained close while David was in London. David was in fact living with my father again in Perth at the time of Peter’s death in December 1975.

  While suggesting that my father’s harsh behavior drove his son to insanity, the film conveniently neglects to mention that there is a history of mental illness in the Helfgott family. My father’s own sister was institutionalized, and this was almost certainly linked to the illness that my brother later developed. David did not collapse after playing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto in London in 1969, which he had in any case performed many times before—in Perth and Melbourne in 1964, for example.

  The film also omits David’s first marriage in 1971, to Claire * , a Hungarian Jew who survived Dachau concentration camp. Claire was shocked by the film’s portrayal of her former father-in-law. She told me: “I have only one word for what they have done to Peter Helfgott. It’s disgusting.” Referring to the portrayal of Peter she said, “The film brings back to me my childhood memories when innocent Jews were accused of all sorts of things they never did.”

  Other “key players” in the film and in David’s life, such as our former piano teacher, Frank Arndt, on whom the fictional character of Mr. Rosen is based, and Professor Sir Frank Callaway, who organized David’s studies at the Royal College of Music in London, are equally upset at the film’s depiction of my father.

  During the ten years in which Scott Hicks was planning and shooting the film, I made repeated requests to see the script, since I had heard that my family was intimately involved, and that I myself would be portrayed. But I was never allowed to see a copy. Nor was my mother. Hicks mainly collaborated with David’s new wife, Gillian, who never met my father.

  My concern is not only for my father’s memory but also for my brother, who has been catapulted into stardom despite his still-fragile mental state. After only a few concerts into his grueling 1997 world concert tour, critics were already dubbing him “a freak show” and his performances frequently elicited savage reviews. Only time will tell what the long-term consequences for his health will be.

  As I sat there last March, wondering why a film that contains so many false scenes and false ideas should be considered worthy of an Oscar, I decided I would try to right some of the wrongs. This book is not the plea of a devoted daughter desperate to defend her father at all costs, but an attempt to present the real story behind a film that cynically distorted the truth for marketing purposes. I hope to repair the damage that has been done to the Helfgott family by recounting the truth about my brother, his father, and our family.

  2

  MY DEAR FATHER, PETER HELFGOTT

  To understand where David comes from, it is necessary to know a little about my father, a key figure both in David’s life and in Shine. Pinchas Elias Helfgott—who later anglicized his name to Peter— was born in 1903 in Kamyk, a small town in Poland that was famous for making matzo, the unleavened bread that the Jewish people eat each year at Passover. Kamyk is located not far from a larger town where my mother grew up, called Czestochowa, which lies about 125 miles southwest of Warsaw.

  My mother, Rachel Granek, who is known as Rae, was born in 1920 in another little nearby town, Klubutzka, but moved with her family to Czestochowa when she was seven. Her mother, Chaya, died when Rae was two, leaving her father Mordechai to look after her and her brother Morry. Eventually Mordechai married Chaya’s sister, Bronia, and they had threemore children—two girls, Gutka and Henya (both of whom were to die in Treblinka), and a son, Johnny.

  Like many towns in Poland before the Holocaust decimated Polish Jewry, Czestochowa had a sizable Jewish population, and by 1900, 30 percent of the 40,000 residents were Jews. Czestochowa is known internationally as the city of the Jasna Gora Madonna—the Black Madonna—Poland’s holiest icon. Because of this, Catholics from all over Poland traditionally made a pilgrimage to the city, particularly around Easter time. Unfortunately, many of them took part in anti-Semitic attacks on the local Jewish population. My mother has often told me of her experiences when she was out in the town with her friends, on a trip to the movie theater, for example. Anti-Semitic Catholics would shout abuse and hurl stones and all sorts of objects at them and other Jewish residents.

  As was common among Jewish families in eastern Europe at that time, my father’s family was fairly large. There were seven children in all: Miriam, Zelig, Na’acha, my father Peter; and then after Peter came Rivka, Abraham, and Hannah. Hannah, regrettably, suffered from a hereditary mental illness almost certainly associated with the one that my brother David later developed.

  The Helfgotts were a very religious household, against which my father rebelled. They were ultra-Orthodox Hassidic Jews, who worked as leather merchants but also spent a great deal of time praying. Peter was a very forward-looking thinker, interested in technology and progress, and not very happy with his restrictive family environment. He believed in the notion that equality and the betterment of mankind could be achieved through socialism, which at that time was a very common view, and was shared by many world-famous figures such as George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, and Charlie Chaplin. Personally I don’t think they fully took into account man’s nature, which doesn’t always allow for such an altruistic way of life; but my father nevertheless retained much of his early revolutionary outlook for the rest of his life.

  Peter not only longed to see a better world, he also wanted literally to see the world, and he ran away from home three times. The first time, when he was only about twelve years old, he was caught and brought back. But eventually, at fourteen, he succeeded in running away for good.

  As World War I drew to a close and revolution stirred in Russia, it was a tumultuous period for a young teenage boy to be wandering around eastern Europe, and perhaps not surprisingly he made his escape by joining the navy, although he never talked much about this. An old cousin of my father’s here in Israel, Zelig Lewcowitz, told me that as far as he knew Peter had probably enlisted in the British Merchant Navy. And this was something quite unheard of for a young Jewish boy from a small shtetl to have done in those days.

  The term shtetl is a diminutive for the Yiddish word “shtot,” meaning “town.” Kamyk was a shtetl similar to those depicted in the novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the paintings of Marc Chagall, and films suc
h as Fiddler on the Roof and Yentl. Life in the shtetl was very much based on a sense of community, with a warm and intimate lifestyle centered around the synagogue, the home, and the marketplace. Everyone tended to conform to common values. For my father to have run away and broken free shows that he was very strong-minded in those days, as he was later on, too.

  In 1926, after his stint in the navy, my father moved to Palestine, where he stayed for nearly a year. He looked for work but at that time there was a great depression there, and he failed to find steady employment. Not having much money also made it hard for him to leave the country, a problem he eventually solved by joining a traveling circus as a circus hand. My father used to tell me stories about his circus life. For example, how he had nearly been crushed by an elephant that had pinned him into a corner. If a tamer hadn’t happened to walk by and pull the elephant away, I wouldn’t be here writing to tell the tale.

  He also used to show me the scar on his hand that he had received from a playful tiger. There is a scene in Shine where he shows the scar to my sister Suzie; but the director chose to move the scar from my father’s hand to his forearm—and not to identify clearly what it was. In my opinion this was done deliberately, leaving the audience to assume that this mark was a concentration camp tattoo and that Peter was a concentration camp survivor, which was not the case. They are helped to arrive at this conclusion by the film’s dialogue: almost immediately after revealing the mark on his forearm, Peter says, “No one can hurt me! Because in this world only the fit survive. The weak get crushed like insects.” Certainly several film critics describe Peter Helfgott as “a concentration camp survivor” in their newspaper reviews, no doubt as a result of this and other scenes in the film—for example, the one where David says, “Like Daddy and his family before they were concentrated” (scene 18 of Scott Hicks and Jan Sardi’s officially published screenplay). This is a subject I shall discuss more fully in Chapter 17.