But despite (or perhaps because of) the crowds and excitement, London can be a very lonely and overwhelming place for the outsider from the “back of beyond.” In Perth, David had been a local celebrity, a big fish in a small pond. In London, he no longer had just his siblings to compete with, but was surrounded by talented child prodigies and slick, sophisticated urbanites.
As time went by the tone of David’s letters began to change. He seemed to be becoming increasingly distressed and confused, and to be moving frequently from place to place. Initially Hillel, a Jewish student organization, had helped David find accommodation in Willesden, where he rented a room in the house of a Jewish widow, Mrs. Strauss, who also used to cook for him. But after a while, almost every letter seemed to have a new return address. Accustomed to Perth’s mild climate, David was having great difficulty in adjusting to the London weather and, perhaps because he wasn’t dressing sensibly, he was very cold in the winter.
He was unable to manage his budget properly and so frequently found himself without money. He told us he would spend his last five or ten pounds purchasing a front-row ticket for a Rubinstein concert rather than pay for food or rent. He spent the large sum that it cost at the time to buy contact lenses, but then had no money left for a scarf in winter. He said that he was beginning to miss his family and that it wasn’t easy for him to be alone in the large and unfamiliar world of London, forced to fend for himself. He even spoke about having terrible nightmares. We were all very worried by these letters, which not only revealed David to be suffering financially, physically, and emotionally, but also seemed to indicate a precarious mental state. Leslie, the next eldest child, remembers this period well: “At first, there was normal communication between David and the family. His breakdown occurred gradually. After a while, he couldn’t cope, he was going to pieces. Dad wrote to David very often, trying to help and advise him, and David wrote back regularly. He did not seem to be in a good living environment or to be eating well—at one point he subsisted on a diet of chocolates, milk, and wine. Nor did he seem to have enough money. His letters became erratic and his handwriting strange. We could see changes in his mental state through his letters.”
David’s letters caused my father tremendous anxiety and pain. He desperately wanted to go and visit his son, but he did not have the financial means to make the trip. We were still too poor to afford a telephone, so we could not even speak to him.
My father’s concern reached such a point that he began urging David to return home. Dad wrote to me about this when I was in Melbourne, in a letter dated August 4, 1970: “When David told me in one of his letters that he is sick and of all his troubles, my reply was to pack his bags and come home without a care in the world to worry about. As a matter of fact, I pointed out to him to let me do all the worrying.” (A short while later David did actually take up Dad’s suggestion and returned home.)
My father wrote to David frequently. Naturally he didn’t usually keep copies of his own letters, so we no longer have them. Only one has been found and it provides a little of the flavor of my father’s attitude to David. One must bear in mind that English was my father’s third language, and his written English was not perfect—he had never been taught formally how to write. The letter, from October 1969, reads as follows:
“Dear, Dear, Dave,
It made us very happy to hear from you so soon, and that your problems are easing off. It is a matter of fact, I had a lot of problems myself, or at least I thought I did, till one day I decided to take control of them … So what did I do? I considered every problem and analyzed it from every aspect, and what do you think? I found that I had no problems at all, as happiness doesn’t really lie in certain material gains, as sometimes they have the opposite effect—when you got it, you find you don’t want it…
But I can assure you that with your musical ear and the present knowledge you possess you will have no trouble to enjoy life to the utmost, provided you look after yourself while you are in London alone … I’d like to know whether you still keep up your physical exercises. Let us know, all love and kisses from everybody,
Your loving Pop, xxxxx “
Throughout his time in London, David also maintained a regular correspondence with Professor Callaway from the University of Western Australia. At first his letters were warm and enthusiastic, and Callaway was always friendly when he wrote back. He told David about important “milestones in my own musical career” by way of encouragement, and told him to “keep working hard.”
But after a while the letters to Professor Callaway, like the ones to his family, displayed mounting distress. Callaway, too, traces David’s descent into illness to his period in London. He told me: “I first began to become aware of David’s inability to look after himself through the lines of his letters. The reports by his professor, Cyril Smith, also suggested something was afoot. They indicated David’s studies were haphazard and regressing. I saw this for myself in 1968-69 when I met David three times during my stay in London. Although he appeared happy in some respects, he also appeared overly excitable and was very worried about money problems.”
In 1969, Mr. and Mrs. Luber-Smith went to visit David in London. In recalling her trip later, Mrs. Luber-Smith remembered that by his third year David had started seeing a psychiatrist. She also said that David had found himself living quarters that were crawling with rats and mice, and that he had bought a dilapidated old piano. The place in which he was living, she added, was “awful” but he was very happy as long as he had a piano.
Mrs. Luber-Smith had been surprised when she had gone to a concert in which David was scheduled to perform, but he hadn’t turned up. The audience had sat, slightly embarrassed, in the dark while the stage remained empty; one of the organizers had cried out “David Helfgott! David Helfgott!” repeating this again a few minutes later, but there was no response. So the harpist who was due to perform next, had taken David’s place on stage. Twenty minutes later David appeared and took over from the harpist. After the concert, Mrs. Luber-Smith asked David where he had been and what had caused the delay. David replied, without any hint that his behavior was out of the ordinary: “I went to have a steak. I was hungry.”
This kind of erratic behavior was also observed by Morry Herman, a mathematician from Perth. He remembers visiting relatives in London in 1967. “We were round at some friends for a dinner party and David Helfgott, who was then at the peak of his career, was due to give a private recital. But he dropped his contact lens and all present then spent the entire evening on their hands and knees looking for it, and no music was performed.”
David’s reports from the Royal College also show a mixed record. They read as follows:
REPORT ON STUDIES, ACADEMIC YEAR 1966-67
Mr. David Helfgott
Subject Piano. Professor Cyril Smith: “He has bursts of brilliant playing, but needs a steadier application to sound work and more attention to basic rhythmic problems.”
Composition/Analysis. Mr. Bryan Kelly: “A rather muddled year, a keen pupil but emotion dominates over mind and the results are hectic.”
REPORT ON STUDIES, ACADEMIC YEAR 1967-68
Mr. David Helfgott
Subject Piano. Professor Cyril Smith: “He has extraordinary pianistic talent, but his work is ill-organized and spasmodic.”
Composition/Analysis. Mr. Bryan Kelly: “Enthusiastic, but convinced that emotion is more important than mind.”
REPORT ON STUDIES, ACADEMIC YEAR 1968-69
Mr. David Helfgott
Subject Piano. Professor Cyril Smith: “In many ways he is, even now, scarcely reliable, never having his feet placed quite squarely on the ground, but there have been moments and even minutes of near genius.”
Composition. Mr. Bryan Kelly: “Mr. Helfgott is, without question, the most frustrating student I have ever tried to work with. Being totally undisciplined, incredibly sloppy, and oblivious to suggestion, he has produced no single, complete meaningful piece of music. Behind hi
s incomprehensible (but often delightful) exterior, there seems to be considerable talent but it is thoroughly confounded by his approach to things.”
REPORT ON STUDIES, ACADEMIC YEAR 1969-1970
Mr. David Helfgott
Subject Piano. Professor Cyril Smith: “His life has been so disordered and chaotic that pianistic progress has only been allowed sporadic opportunity. Nevertheless, such fantastic hands have sometimes produced almost unbelievably brilliant passages.”
Composition/Analysis. Mr. Bryan Kelly: “A calmer approach wanted in work, a very hectic year.”
Undoubtedly, David did give some brilliant performances in London. Among these was his rendition of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto in D Minor in July 1969, for which he was awarded the Dannreuther Prize for best performance of a piano concerto at the Royal College of Music for that year. However, the way it is depicted in Shine—as a dramatic scene in which David collapses on stage while playing, causing him to suffer a mental breakdown and then to return directly to Perth—is entirely fictional.
Firstly, David had already played the piece in public several times before, for example, in Perth and Melbourne in 1964. Secondly, David did not collapse. Thirdly, he stayed in London for another year after this performance, giving several other concerts, among them Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto again, on March 24, 1970, at the Duke’s Hall at the Royal Academy of Music in Marylebone Road. Fourthly, the onset of his illness was slow, both predating and postdating this concert, and his condition was almost certainly connected with a history of chronic mental illness in the Helfgott family. And fifthly, he did not blame his “daddy.”
In the published film script (scene 131) the end of the Rachmaninoff scene reads:
DAVID sweats, hyperventilating.
DAVID (mumbling): “Did my best, Daddy …”
… David begins to fall backward—in slow motion, in silence until his head hits the stage. His spectacles fly off. Eyes wide open, he stares at bright swirling lights. Silence.
Cut to overhead lights in:
[Scene 132] Interior Hospital ward. Day time …
While Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto is undoubtedly a technically and physically demanding piece, the film’s attitude to it is quite ridiculous. In scene 98 David’s music tutor Cecil Parkes says to David: “No one’s ever been mad enough to attempt the Rach 3,” and David replies: “Am I mad enough, Professor? Am I?”
The character of Cecil Parkes was played by the eminent British actor Sir John Gielgud at the age of 91. The figure upon whom Parkes was loosely based is David’s music tutor at the Royal College, Cyril Smith. Smith was famous for having the use of only his right hand after suffering a stroke that paralyzed his left. He had become David’s tutor as a result of being an acquaintance of Professor Callaway in Perth. Smith was a highly distinguished man. He had been professor of pianoforte at the Royal College since as long ago as 1934, and was acclaimed as a fine interpreter of Rachmaninoff. Sergei Rachmaninoff himself—whom Smith had met on many occasions—said before his death in 1943, that Smith had given the best performance by any Englishman of his Third Piano Concerto.
Smith had risen to stardom from a humble background. He was born the son of a bricklayer, and grew up in a working-class part of Middlesburough, an industrial city in the far north of England known for its shipbuilding. He was a brilliant musician and himself attended the Royal College. But at the age of forty-six, during a concert tour of Russia, disaster struck: he suffered a stroke and lost the use of his left hand. He had been asked by Walter Legge of EMI to record Rachmaninoff’s concertos and was in the process of preparing for this when the tragedy prevented it. With remarkable fortitude, he rehabilitated himself, rebuilt his life, and embarked on a new career. He now played three hands on two pianos with his wife Phyllis Sellick, with whom he had previously formed a conventional two-piano team. This experience is recounted in his moving and inspirational autobiography, Duet for Three Hands.
Professor Immelman, who, like David, was one of Smith’s pupils, told me: “Cyril Smith was a rather shy but also a passionate man and a great teacher. He had a sharp and penetrating mind and brought to his teaching the experience he had gained on the concert platform. He considered instrumental mastery to be vital for any aspiring pianist. But it was only a means to an end, the springboard from which a performance can take off. The firmer the technical base, the greater the flights of true musical imagination can be. From the moment one entered his teaching room all that mattered was the quality of one’s playing. He was relentless in his pursuit of productive practicing procedures no matter how unusual or extreme. Those of us who had the privilege to study with him (and we knew ourselves to be privileged) acquired skills of objective analysis that could be applied to all areas of the repertoire even many years later.”
Immelman added that “John Gielgud’s portrayal of a woolly minded exponent of what I call ‘Fjords in Norway’ school of piano teaching and the endless ego-tripping could not be further removed from the truth. Far from being a doddery man, Cyril was very sharp.”
Smith died in 1974, but in April 1997, his widow, Phyllis Sellick, herself a concert pianist of great ability, phoned me from London after reading an interview with me about Shine in a British newspaper. When I mentioned to her that I was considering writing a book, she strongly encouraged me to include what she had to say:
“David did not break down or collapse when playing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto as depicted in the film. I was at that performance, and it was a wonderful rendition by David … During the four years that David was Cyril’s pupil, we became friendly and saw him on many occasions outside his lessons. He never once said anything about his father being violent to him. Quite the contrary. They seemed to be very close. David told Cyril and me that he got along very well with his father and that his father had been writing him lots of lovely letters whilst he was in London.”
She also complained about the way her husband’s character had been portrayed in general throughout Shine. “Cyril would never have said things like ‘Don’t you just love those big fat chords’ to describe Rachmaninoff’s music; or ‘the piano is a monster; tame it or it’ll swallow you whole!’ That’s just ridiculous,” Phyllis Sellick told me.
David’s forty-minute performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto was undoubtedly one of the highlights of his time in England. Mr. J. R. Stainer, registrar of the college, who was present, wrote afterward: “I have not heard a bigger ovation since I have been at the college.” And Professor Immelman told a leading British arts television program, The South Bank Show, that when David was rehearsing for the Third Piano Concerto, people often dropped into the concert hall to listen. “They knew it was special, but that performance in late July 1969 exceeded everyone’s expectations. I find it particularly unfortunate that the memory of this glorious occasion was degraded by the film suggesting, without any justification, that David had suffered a blackout. Nothing like that occurred.”
Immelman told me, no doubt exaggerating a little: “For anyone connected with the Royal College in the late sixties, David’s performance of the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto has become a point of reference almost along the lines of ‘Do you remember where you were when you heard that Kennedy had been shot?’ It was one of those rare occasions when everything came together. Of course David had all the virtuoso qualities required for this challenging work but he also had the gift for playing gentle, expressive passages with a freshness and freedom that rendered them pure, almost innocent, so far removed from the tricky self-indulgent approach often encountered. The excellent integration with the orchestra achieved on this occasion also reflected the care and attention to detail that David and Smith had lavished on the score.”
Immelman also remembers that “he did do something rather unusual after the Rachmaninoff concert. He was driven back to his modest one-room apartment by an elated Cyril Smith and Phyllis Sellick and as soon as he got home he threw some
clothes into a bag and set off for the launderette!”
Throughout 1969 and 1970 David’s behavior became more and more unbalanced and his moods swung up and down erratically. Professor Immelman said: “David’s behavior was often unusual, a trifle eccentric. Not many of us realized at the time that he was suffering mental problems, but with hindsight one recognizes that there were already signs of chemical imbalance. I certainly do not recall him ever saying anything negative about his father or mentioning his father in this respect.”
David’s condition worsened to such an extent that in October 1969 he checked into a psychiatric hospital for the first time. He told us in a letter that he was seeking psychiatric treatment, but knowing how distraught Dad would be at the news, he didn’t admit at the time that he was actually confined to a hospital. It was all very traumatic for a young boy who had been the subject of so much attention and praise and upon whom so many expectations had been placed only a few years earlier.
11
DESCENT INTO ILLNESS
David’s last few months in London were not all bad. Having been discharged from the psychiatric hospital shortly before Christmas, he was soon at the piano again, continuing to practice and perform. He gave another performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto on March 24, 1970, at the Duke’s Hall of the Royal Academy of Music (a separate institution from the Royal College). This time around, however, David’s playing was far poorer. Cyril Smith is reported to have said after the concert: “I did not teach him to play like that.” Roberta Dodds, a Royal College staff member, added that the performance had been “histrionic.”
Out of Tune Page 9