“I was his music teacher and yet the people who organized the trip didn’t even come to talk to me!” she added, still surprised by this. “I would have advised against. I knew David’s fragile mental state. I knew that he would be lost once he went to London. But I wasn’t able to explain this to David because I knew he wouldn’t understand why I did not want him to go. I was very sorry that he left.
“There was goodwill there on the part of the Jewish community but they didn’t realize that David was a very sick person. I don’t know what Mrs. Luber-Smith was thinking of.”
Madame Carrard continues: “His stay in England was a complete failure. He was no good, he missed his lessons. He missed history lessons and theory lessons and he was just lost. I can’t understand why his father let him go at all.”
Nevertheless, my father reconciled himself to the fact that David was going. After the argument, David stayed with Phillip and Edna Luber-Smith for a short while before he left for England. My parents were not angry with him for doing this. They realized that on reaching adulthood children sometimes need to put distance between themselves and their family, as indeed I had already done when I went to Melbourne. David made regular visits back home while he was staying at the Luber-Smiths’ and my parents would give him some fruit, some money, or whatever he needed.
In recalling David’s stay with her, Mrs. Luber-Smith remembered David’s untidiness; how he would eat with his fingers rather than a knife and fork; and how he preferred to eat at the piano, which he was loath to leave, rather than at the table.
Since the original organizers refused to cancel their concert, my father had to drop his plans to hold one at the Capitol Theater. The concert organized by the National Council of Jewish Women of Australia went ahead on May 17, 1966, two days before David’s nineteenth birthday, although the word “charity” was dropped from the program.
In addition to the money raised from the concert, David received a grant from the university music department toward his fare, tuition, fees, and living expenses. Another Jewish charitable organization, the Phineas Seeligson Trust, provided David with the clothes he needed for London, including a tailored suit, an overcoat, and various pairs of smart shoes. (David only won a scholarship from the Royal College of Music three years into his course, which gave him the right to study for a fourth year.)
The program for David’s farewell concert read as follows:
RECITAL
by
DAVID HELFGOTT
PIANIST
GOVERNMENT HOUSE BALLROOM
PERTH
Tuesday, 17th May, 1966
at 8 p.m.
in the presence of His Excellency the Governor,
Sir Douglas Kendrew
and Lady Kendrew
Arranged by
The National Council of Jewish Women of Australia,
Perth section
The program notes read as follows:
“DAVID HELFGOTT
Tonight’s concert is the latest milestone in the career of nineteen-year-old David Helfgott who will soon be leaving to study at the Royal College of Music, London. He has recently been awarded an overseas bursary by the Music Council of W.A., a scholarship by the Music Examinations Board of the University of Western Australia and a grant from the Phineas Seeligson Trust of Perth.
David is well-known to Perth audiences for his many performances at concerts and music festivals, and on radio and TV. He received his first piano lessons at the age of five from his father. At nine he played a Chopin Polonaise at a country music festival and at twelve he entered the ABC Concerto competition for the first time, playing the Bach D Minor Concerto. The following year he was selected as a State Finalist and gained second place with the Ravel G Minor Concerto. The succeeding three years saw him State winner, first with the Mozart C Minor Concerto, then with the Liszt E-flat Major, and finally at the age of seventeen with the Rachmaninoff D Minor Concerto.
David holds both Associate and Licentiate certificates of the AMEB and won the Vincent Memorial prize for the best results in Associate with 184 marks out of a possible 200. Visiting celebrities for whom he has played and who have predicted a brilliant future for him include Julius Katchen, Louis Kentner, Isaac Stern, Gina Bachauer, Abbey Simon, Tamas Vasary, and Daniel Barenboim. David is at present studying with Mme. Alice Carrard.”
That evening, following the National Anthem, David performed works by Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and Mussorgsky. The packed hall gave him a standing ovation. It was a true moment of glory and an appropriate musical send-off.
Three months later, on August 14, David set sail from Fremantle for London on the Himalaya, which would be making a brief stop in Egypt before arriving in London a month later. David’s dreams of leaving Australia were finally being realized. As he set sail with both excitement and trepidation, none of us could know what triumphs and disasters awaited him.
9
DAVID IN LONDON—A STORY THAT
CANNOT BE FULLY TOLD
David lived in London for four years, from September 1966 to August 1970. Throughout this time relations between father and son remained close. The suggestion made in Shine that there was a total breakdown in communication is preposterous; they wrote to each other regularly. David also wrote to my mother and to all his siblings—and we all wrote back. David’s letters were never sent back unopened by my father marked “Return to Sender,” as is shown in the film. Nor did my father burn his collection of press clippings about David. David himself now has the originals—I borrowed them and made photocopies in the 1980s.
The correspondence between David and my father reveals enormous love and affection. The letters begin along the lines of “Dear Dad, it was super to get your letter; it made me very happy” (letter of November 11, 1969), and end with such expressions of unqualified love as “Cheerio for now, Dad, all my love and affection, your loving son, David,” or “From the bottom of my heart, all my love and affection, David.”
When my father died in 1975, he was living with David, Leslie, Louise, and my mother in the house that Leslie had bought in South Perth in 1971. He left to Leslie the letters that David wrote from London. The publication in full of these letters, in David’s own handwriting, would establish once and for all that Shine is based on lies. Yet they cannot be published for one reason: the obstructive attitude of David’s second wife, Gillian.
Gillian Murray, a divorcee, first met David in 1983, eight years after my father passed away. She married David a year later. She is one of the principal sources for Shine, collaborating closely with Scott Hicks throughout his “ten-year odyssey.” She provided him with a great deal of information, and even went so far as to be present on the set during the filming of some scenes.
Her spin-off book of the film, Love You to Bits and Pieces, described on its front cover as “The true story that inspired the movie Shine,” has become an international best-seller. In it, she not only repeats many of the falsehoods told in Shine, but adds some new ones of her own. She seems happy to vilify my father even though she never met him. Either she defames him directly or she does so by quoting what she claims David has said. However, I believe it is highly doubtful that David actually spoke the words attributed to him; and if he did, I do not believe these genuinely represent his own feelings. David, who after years of psychiatric treatment, is still on constant medication, remains childlike, easy to manipulate, and heavily under Gillian’s influence. (Gillian herself even admits at one point in her book that David is “extremely malleable material.”)
Here are a few examples of the things said about my father in Love You to Bits and Pieces:
“Peter Helfgott was a helpless, hopeless, sickly father who could do nothing for his son but provide him with a rickety piano and a homemade stool.”
“Peter Helfgott once told his son that he would one day end up ‘dead in the gutter.’”
“Father belted me to the living daylights, he did.” (According to Gillian this is
David’s recollection of the boat trip to Perth in 1953, when he was aged six.)
“Father burned them all [the letters], set them on fire,” Gillian quotes David as supposedly saying. (These particular letters weren’t actually written by David to Peter, but are rather letters David had saved from a close friend. Nevertheless this passage certainly suggests my father is the kind of person who would burn someone else’s letters.)
In reading these completely fictional statements one soon begins to understand where Hicks found his inspiration for Shine. There was, of course, no burning of letters or any other material in the Helfgott household by my father or anyone else. This is the kind of thing the Nazis did.
Yet Gillian’s book, in a manner reminiscent of the movie that preceded it, purports to be an “honest” account of David Helfgott’s life. Love You to Bits and Pieces is, as I write this, still on the best-seller list in a number of countries—which is no doubt the reason why Gillian is now doing her utmost to prevent the publication of David’s letters.
Perhaps unaware that copies of the letters still existed at the time she was supplying Hicks with information for Shine, Gillian has now panicked. Since learning from an Australian radio program that my brother Leslie had them, she has utilized every means at her disposal to ensure that the true facts be suppressed. First, she persuaded my still mentally fragile brother to sign over to her the copyright of the letters he wrote to his father. Then, in February 1997, she instructed her lawyers to write an extremely hostile letter to Leslie threatening legal action and seeking damages for breach of copyright should we reprint them, warning ominously of “severe sanctions for noncompliance.”
International copyright law dictates that while letters themselves are the property of the recipient, who can pass them on to whomever he likes (in this case Leslie), the copyright of the content of a letter remains with the writer. This somewhat strange dichotomy in the area of legal rights means that it is not technically permissible for the owner of a letter to republish it without permission from the copyright holder, in this case Gillian. Since Gillian has prevented their publication, legally we are able only to paraphrase these letters or quote short extracts from them.
I need hardly say that the entire Helfgott family is shocked by Gillian’s threats—and bewildered by her unilateral decision to communicate with her family through her lawyers.
If, as Gillian claims, she wants to give an “honest” account of David’s life, it is quite beyond me why she has forbidden Leslie and me to reprint letters that show only warmth between David and his father, letters that state: “Dad, I miss you and Mum terribly, I wish you could come over”; and “I only wish you and the family could come over to London. I do miss you and Mum very much”; and “From the bottom of my heart I send you all my love and affection for your 25th wedding anniversary and I’m always thinking of you!” And so on.
It is in these letters that the truth can be found, not in Love You to Bits and Pieces.
10
LONDON LIFE—TRIUMPH
AND TRAGEDY
Upon arrival at the Royal College of Music, David— even given the high standard of his fellow students—was judged to be one of the top pupils. He was allocated a grade 4B out of a maximum grade of 5.
The Royal College is one of the world’s great conservatories and a wonderful place to study. It was founded in 1883 by royal charter under the presidency of the then Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII). In 1894 it moved from its premises in Kensington Gore to a magnificent Victorian red-brick building on Prince Consort Road, on the southern edge of Hyde Park in London’s fashionable Kensington district, and just a few steps away from the Royal Albert Hall.
Among its former pupils, who developed their skills in its resonant and intimate practice rooms, are Benjamin Britten, Barry Douglas, John Lill, Leopold Stokowski, Joan Sutherland, and Michael Tippett. Students need only browse among the college’s valuable collection of antique musical instruments and portraits to gain a sense of its historical importance.
Although David’s years in London ended in tragedy, England’s capital city was also the scene of a number of his outstanding successes. In 1967, he won first prize for piano in grade 4. In 1968, he won the Marmaduke Barton Prize and the Hopkinson Silver Medal, awarded by the Royal Amateur Orchestral Society, for his performance of Beethoven’s D Minor “Tempest” Sonata, Balakirev’s “Islamey,” and Chopin’s Etude op. 25, no. 11. The medal was presented to him the following year by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. News of David’s accolade traveled back to Perth and a photograph of David, head bowed as he meets the Queen Mother, appeared in the local Perth newspapers.
David also began to receive excellent reviews in British papers. In the Buckinghamshire Examiner in 1969 under the headline “Pianist Played on Until Midnight,” David Chesterman wrote: “When 22-year-old David Helfgott, an Australian pianist, finished his programme at Germains on Sunday, many of the audience refused to go home, and demanded more. He was supplied with coffee and something a little stronger, and he continued playing till after midnight, finishing with that musical Everest, the Liszt Sonata. David Helfgott is a man who, once seated at a piano, moves straight into the world of music, oblivious of everything else …”
David was awarded a scholarship in 1969 (after his grant from the University of Western Australia music department ran out), and his professor at the Royal College even compared his technique to that of the world-renowned Russian-born pianist Vladimir Horowitz. David told us about these triumphs in his letters and naturally we were all thrilled.
He also wrote with great enthusiasm about the concerts he attended. “I have been to two Barenboim recitals (all Beethoven sonatas)—what a pianist; and what a personality he’s got! He plays superbly,” he wrote in one letter. “I’ve got a ticket for Vladimir Ashkenazy in Brahms’s Second Concerto, I’m so excited,’ he said in another. David told us that on the morning after a concert he would get up early and rush off to buy the score he had heard the night before and then sit in a cafe and study it in detail.
He also kept us informed about his own progress as a musician. In one letter he proudly told how he was going to play at the Wigmore Hall—a small but distinguished venue where many of the world’s greatest performers have appeared. David had already mastered composers such as Rachmaninoff and Balakirev prior to his studies at the Royal College of Music; he told us that while in London his aim was to master other composers, of whose work he was not yet in full command. In one of his letters to Dad, he talked about grappling with the intricacies of Liszt, whom he referred to as a “demon.” (Many years later, in 1993, David would actually have the opportunity of playing on Liszt’s own piano in the composer’s former house in Weimar, Germany. He described the occasion at the time as the “most spiritual and moving musical experience of my life.”)
David’s letters to his siblings, like the ones to his parents, are full of affection. The letters to me begin “Dear Marg” or “Dear Maggie” and usually end “love always” circled by a ring of kisses. (I have been unable to secure permission from Gillian to reprint them.) His letters to Leslie are particularly charming. He asks his younger brother how his violin playing is coming along; in one letter he tells him that he has bought a new sponge-covered table-tennis racket and is looking forward to challenging him to a game next time they meet. Leslie, who collected coins, was absolutely thrilled when David sent him an “Elizabeth I” English shilling dating from 1571 for his birthday.
David also sent us a number of photos from London. We even received one from his stopover in Egypt on his journey to England in which he is smiling and wearing a fez, with several camels sitting idly in the background.
One person who got to know David well while they were both students at the Royal College is Niel Immelman, now professor of piano there. Professor Immelman told me that at that time David seemed to be at the peak of his performing ability as a pianist.
“I first came across David in a practi
cing room at the Royal College of Music,” says Professor Immelman. “He was playing the first solo in the Brahms Second Concerto and I was struck by the sheer physicality of his approach. As I got to know him better, through playing second piano for some of his lessons on Rachmaninoff, I came to admire his lightning-quick reflexes and his outstanding ear. David had supreme technical ability and a flair for public performance. Although he was not overendowed with social skills, his warm, outgoing nature made him very popular with his fellow students. One of his party tricks—and if there was a piano at a party David would spend 90 percent of the time playing it—was to play both the solo and orchestral parts of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto without missing out anything. When asked how long it took him to make this transcription, he replied, ‘Oh, I didn’t make it, I just play what I hear.’” (David’s ability to sight read difficult or complex music without having to practice beforehand, is a rare gift indeed.)
When David arrived in England, the “Swinging Sixties” were at their peak, and with its bright lights and Beatlemania, its shops, museums, theaters and galleries, there were few places more exciting than London. “When David and I were students in the sixties, the Royal College of Music was a friendly and easygoing place,” Immelman continues. “Not too much academic work was demanded from those of us on the Performers Course, which left us plenty of time for practicing and concert attendance. David was often seen in the audience at performances by the great pianists of the time such as Arrau, Annie Fischer, Gilels, Richter, and Rubinstein. There was time to reflect and we learned much from discussions with our fellow students in the college canteen and the college pub, affectionately known as ‘the 99’— there were only 98 teaching rooms before the new extension was opened in the sixties.”
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