Out of Tune

by Margaret Helfgott

  Although his attitude was troublesome, once he had got over the disappointment of the America trip that never was, David’s musical skills continued to improve. I was amazed at the sensitive way in which he could now interpret some of the works he mastered. For example, he played Prelude No. 8 by Bach (from the first book of Preludes and Fugues) very tenderly; this slow, quiet, and introspective piece required him to demonstrate a range of skills quite different from those required to play the more lively and virtuoso pieces by Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and Balakirev, which David usually performed.

  In October 1961, David achieved a remarkable result for a fourteen-year-old. He scored 184 out of 200 as he successfully passed the exam for his certificate of Associate in Music, and he was awarded the special annual prize by the Australian Music Examinations Board.

  We continued going to concerto competitions and the papers eagerly followed David’s musical successes. Many articles about David were accompanied by a photograph of him wearing a jacket and bow tie, looking serious and confident behind his thick-rimmed spectacles and half smile.

  By now his reputation had been established well beyond Perth. Under the headline “Professor: Helfgott is ‘Great Pianist,” an article in a Melbourne newspaper began: “Professor Sidney Harrison said yesterday that young Perth pianist David Helfgott was among the best and most talented artists he had seen in twenty-five years as an adjudicator. The world-famous music authority said ‘David, at fourteen, was far, far the youngest competitor in the [ABC Concerto] competition. All the judges agreed he has an extraordinary talent… Harrison, professor of music at the Guildhall School of Music in London said David’s rendition of Mozart’s concerto was faultless. ‘When I return to England in July I shall certainly mention David Helfgott as a great young Australian pianist,’ he added.”

  “An enormous talent,” declared the Dutch conductor Willem van Otterloo in an article about David that appeared in 1962. Another critic wrote about “the magic in the brilliant fingers of David Helfgott.”

  I still have newspaper clippings about David’s performances of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto in Perth on June 16, 1964 and in Melbourne on July 4, 1964. The critic Sally Trethowan wrote of the Perth performance: “Under his talented hands this work exploded in a display of aural pyrotechnics that brought long and enthusiastic applause from the large audience.”

  Another critic, Adrian Rawlins, said: “Helfgott played the Rachmaninoff Concerto with great sensitivity and insight.”

  (Scott Hicks, in what he has referred to in interviews as the “ten-year odyssey” it took to research and make Shine, could surely have found out—if not from David or a library, then by speaking to my mother, Leslie, or me—that David had mastered Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto at least five years before the 1969 London performance that, Hicks alleges, caused David to collapse on stage and led to a major breakdown.)

  Year after year—and in marked contrast to the reviews David has recently been receiving—music critics were almost unanimous in their praise of David’s performances. In May 1965, for example, The Sunday Times (Perth) ran an article under the headline “Born to a Piano.” “Helfgott dazzles” was the heading of a piece by Barbara Yates Rothwell in another paper.

  But, as David received more and more praise, his head swelled even larger. His arrogance continued to increase until he left for London in 1966. The whole family felt the changes. As my little sister Suzie said, David’s attitude at the time was “I’m better than anyone.” At one point, totally out of the blue, he actually stopped talking to me altogether. Then one day, he wanted me to type up a poem for him, which I did willingly—I thought he had got over whatever it was he was holding against me. However, after I gave David back the typed-up poem, to my absolute astonishment, he promptly stopped talking to me again. I was flabbergasted.

  7

  STALIN, MAO, AND TABLE TENNIS

  There was more to life in the Helfgott household than music. David and my father shared a keen interest in politics. They were both on the left of the political spectrum and believed that socialism was the way to achieve equality and justice. Sometimes they had heated discussions about which brand of socialism was best, Russian or Chinese.

  My father had finally become disillusioned with Russian socialism as a result of the “Doctors’ Plot” of 1953, when Stalin accused his Jewish doctors of trying to poison him. This was a total fabrication, intended to prepare the way for a vicious wave of anti-Semitic persecution across the whole Soviet Union. Stalin announced that his doctors were part of “an international Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization established by American intelligence.” He then had his doctors tortured in order to extract confessions from them.

  The official Communist Party newspaper Pravda described the Jewish doctors as “the pack of mad dogs from Tel Aviv,” which it characterized as “loathsome and vile in its thirst for blood.” After this my father finally made the break with Russia and decided that Chairman Mao’s Chinese socialism was far more pure and correct; David meanwhile still adhered to a belief in the Russian variety as “the true socialism.”

  Even though my father no longer sympathized with Soviet communism, he nevertheless kept an eye on developments in the communist world. He and David would visit the left-wing Pioneer Bookshop in Perth, and buy magazines called Soviet Union and Red China (the latter may have been called Pictorial China —I can’t now recall for certain). Red China was overflowing with propaganda. Each issue seemed to be filled with pictures of smiling, rosy-cheeked girls picking apples in the field, or carrying baskets bursting with agricultural produce.

  Australia had its own Communist Party, and David struck up a friendship with Katherine Susannah Pritchard, one of its founding members. But while he sometimes went to her house for dinner, neither he nor my father ever joined the Communist Party, nor, as far as I am aware, did they ever go to the Soviet Friendship Society, as they are shown doing in Shine.

  David always yearned to visit the Soviet Union and see the situation there for himself. In 1986, by which time Mikhail Gorbachev was in power, he got his wish. He visited music conservatories and took in the sights in Moscow and Leningrad. He returned to Russia in 1993, after communism had collapsed, and gave a small recital of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” at Rimsky-Korsakov’s home in St. Petersburg, which is now a museum. That year he also visited what had been one of the world’s last bastions of hardline communism, Albania, and performed Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto at the Tirana Opera House accompanied by the Albanian Symphony Orchestra.

  Politics is still one of my brother’s chief interests. In particular, he closely follows events in Russia and Israel, reading news magazines such as Time and watching CNN International. When he visited me in Israel in 1988, I was very impressed by his in-depth knowledge of the intricacies of Israeli political life.

  Although he loved talking to my father, outside the house David was not very sociable. As a teenager, he was somewhat of a loner. He neither had nor sought many playmates. Life essentially revolved around one thing: the piano. It was practice, practice, practice. He wanted to begin playing as early as four a.m., although Dad would not let him.

  By now my father and mother, rather than pushing or coaxing my brother toward more playing, were becoming concerned that David did not have enough other interests or social contact outside the family. He had the odd friend here and there, but not many. Dad tried to encourage him to develop a closer friendship with a boy who lived down the road, called Boris. David played tennis with Boris on a couple of occasions, but after a while, rather than turning up for meetings with his friend, David was back at his beloved piano, mastering Balakirev’s “Islamey” or some other fiendishly difficult work.

  When, at the age of fifteen, I temporarily lost my enthusiasm for playing the piano, I took up classical and modern ballet, and later acting, squash, jazz piano, and yoga. David, on the other hand, spent what spare time he had on his own. He loved readin
g science books. One of his favorites was Fred Hoyle’s Astronomy, which had extraordinary pictures of galaxies. When David was interviewed on the radio and asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said a concert pianist or a conductor. But failing that, he said, his third choice was to be an astronomer.

  Insofar as there was life for David away from the piano, it was mainly with myself, my brother, and my sisters. We all loved playing table tennis and were very good at it. Our brown table tennis table traveled with us on the boat from Melbourne, and together with the Rönish piano, it remained our most treasured family possession. Now battered and old, it is, like the piano, still being used by Leslie and his family in Perth.

  David’s hands, so brilliant on the piano keys, were almost as skillful at table tennis. He favored the grip used by the Chinese, wrapping his thumb and index finger around the handle. Rallies with him were always a challenge. He could put a vicious spin on the ball and, given half a chance, would smash it extremely hard at his opponent, leaving me panting for breath as I raced from side to side trying to return his shots.

  Meanwhile, David’s behavior continued to grow stranger. For example, he became absolutely obsessive about germs. He would refuse to touch taps or sink areas, even at home. When he went to the bathroom he would pry the tap open with a fork, and then, after he had washed his hands, he would take even greater care to close it without touching it, petrified that he might pick up fresh germs.

  In spite of the tension caused by David’s sometimes unpleasant behavior toward us, we still managed to go on enjoyable family outings during this period. We often took the train to the port of Fremantle, twelve miles south of Perth, which is where the Swan River flows into the Indian Ocean. We did not only go to “Freo”—as it is affectionately known by locals—just to have a pleasant picnic. On scorching summer days temperatures could rise to 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Perth, and the special breeze down in the port, known as the “Fremantle Doctor,” provided some welcome relief. All of us, David included, used to love these trips. We either brought our own lunch—hard-boiled eggs, salad, fruit, bread and butter, a thermos of coffee, and fruit juice—or Mom and Dad would treat us to fish and chips at the Fisherman’s Wharf, which was owned by Italian immigrants who went out twice daily to bring back fresh catches.

  While eating, the seagulls would surround us and screech away in their inimitable manner, loudly demanding a share of the meal. We soon learned not to be too generous in giving away the scraps—unless we wanted to be bombarded by another hundred hungry seagulls within a matter of seconds.

  After lunch my parents would lie together on the blanket we brought with us and sometimes they would cuddle when we children went off to play. Nearby were the docks where the big ships came in from abroad. We would scurry down there whenever we saw a boat come in. These foreign ships and their crews seemed terribly exotic to us, and we played all kinds of games, dreaming up tales of pirates and fortune hunters. David and I, being the eldest children, would sometimes think about Europe and the ships that our parents had arrived on. We were already old enough to know the fate of those who hadn’t made it to Australia—“the lucky country” as it is fondly known by its grateful peoples. These otherwise happy childhood moments were tinged with sadness when we thought of our parents’ families and the others who didn’t make it.

  Another place we used to frequent on family outings was Hyde Park, near our home in Highgate. This was a beautiful place, with manicured lawns and gardens and plenty of benches on which to sit and gaze at the peaceful surroundings. Often on weekends we went there to feed the ducks and swans and stroll around the tranquil lake. Sometimes we also went to King’s Park, an area of untouched bush land that Perth’s nineteenth-century founders had deliberately preserved in the center of the city. King’s Park overlooks the Swan River and is very close to the University of Western Australia. We used to run around amid the gum trees and wildflowers there and take in the magnificent panoramic views.

  School naturally played a big part in our lives. In Perth we first went to Highgate State school. Later, when we moved to a working-class area some distance away called Maniana, David and I went to Queen’s Park, which was a fairly poor school with many aboriginal children. When we moved back to Highgate, we split up—I studied at Mt. Lawley High School and David went to Forrest High School for Boys.

  Romance did not play a large part in David’s teenage life. Immersed in music, he didn’t seem to be very interested in girls. During the entire period before he left for London at the age of nineteen, I don’t recall him going out on a single date—although there was no shortage of female music students who developed crushes on him after hearing the magic he produced at the piano.

  I, on the other hand, had reached an age where I wanted to go out with boys. Clothes were always a problem, though. I was quite adept at thinking up all kinds of ways of renovating old clothes so that they would look a little different. I would sew braids on them or embroider them with beads and sequins to give them a fresh burst of life. For instance, I removed some brightly colored buttons from an old cardigan and sewed them on a skirt to create the sort of effect I imagined Gypsies might make.

  In the early days in Perth we went to the synagogue fairly regularly, and some members of the Jewish community used to offer us second-hand clothes. Although my father abhorred charity, he did not like to be rude, so he accepted their gifts. I was once given a lovely dress from one of these handouts, and wore it to synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. When a girl came up to me and said, “Oh, I used to have a dress just like that,” I felt mortified. I could have sunk through the floor. I quickly made up a not particularly credible story about my parents having just bought me the dress from some shop. I wanted to save myself from the shame of receiving handouts. It was only many years later that I realized that charity could be a good thing. Indeed, Judaism dictates that one should give 10 percent of one’s income to the less fortunate. At the time, however, I merely felt like a victim of poverty, and this was a terrible source of embarrassment.

  Despite my discomfort about my clothes, I went out on my first date when I was sixteen. I was asked out by a very handsome boy, who was three years older than me. He took me to a drive-in movie— these were very popular in Perth because of the city’s warm weather. There were two full-length feature films on the program and by the time they ended it was fairly late. But since we were famished, we joined two other couples for a quick late-night bite at Bernie’s Hamburger joint on Riverside Drive, next to the Swan River.

  When he dropped me home, the boy, who I thought was absolutely gorgeous, asked me if I would like to go to a party with him the next evening. Thrilled that he seemed to like me, I could hardly get the word “yes” out quickly enough. But when I went through our front door, much later than planned, I found Dad waiting up for me, worried about his precious eldest daughter.

  “You can’t go,” Dad said to me when I told him I had already accepted a date for a party the next night. My father was very angry about my coming home so late without warning him. But on the following evening, being a defiant teenager, I waited till my father and David left the house to go to a concert in which David was playing, got dressed, and concocted a dummy body for my bed, made up of blankets and pillows to give the appearance of a sleeping person. I then swore the whole household to secrecy. “Don’t you dare tell anyone,” I cautioned my little brother and sister sternly.

  When my father came home with David, he peeked into the bedroom I shared with Suzie, saw the dummy, and presumed I was asleep. Some months later I discovered that my mother had told him the truth and that in any case he had not been fooled by the dummy, but had decided to play along with my prank. Perhaps he was rewarding me for my boldness and initiative, or perhaps he thought there was no point in trying to control his rebellious teenage daughter and that to discipline me would only make things worse.

  All in all, I was going through quite a rebellious phase. For example,
my father didn’t like me wearing makeup. “Natural beauty is far better than artificial beauty,” he told me. But I went ahead and smeared myself with all sorts of colors, just to show Dad that I would do what I liked. Not surprisingly, he went off in a huff when I did.

  My mother at this time had her hands full with my four younger siblings, including a two-year-old baby. So, in search of a sympathetic female ear to listen to my woes about boys and other adolescent problems, I turned to my younger sister Suzie. Although she was eight years my junior, Suzie possessed an understanding and maturity well beyond her years. She would listen patiently to my concerns and then give me her advice: “Mom and Dad will be furious if they see you in that new green eye makeup”; “You should choose this boy because he treats you nicely, rather than that one who is better looking,” she would say. Although Suzie spent most of her time at this age playing with friends, she was already a good listener and giver of advice, skills that served her well later in her career as a social worker.

  Meanwhile, my youngest sister Louise, although only two years old at the time, was beginning to make her presence felt. Her curiosity knew no bounds. She would muster up all the energy in her tiny body and haul the large science and nature books off our shelves. She would turn over the pages, studying the pictures diligently. The next step was reading and writing, which she learned very quickly. She began writing poems at the age of seven and never looked back. Many of her poems have been published, and the plays she has written have been performed. Her latest work, a musical called The Bridge, about destitute street kids, was staged in July 1997 in the theater in Mandurah, a town one hour’s drive south of Perth. Among my favorite of Louise’s poems is Freudian Slips, a humorous account of Freud’s “trek through the jungle of the psyche,” and another one that explores the way people communicate, or don’t communicate, when they sit opposite each other in trains.