Out of Tune

by Margaret Helfgott

  A month later, on April 24, David gave a much better performance. As part of a charity concert, he played Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat before 8,000 people at the Royal Albert Hall, one of England’s largest classical music concert venues. Critics were eager to praise him once more. One wrote: “David Helfgott completely identified himself with this romantic music, his fabulous technique in the louder passages being equalled by the exquisite poetry of the more lyrical places.”

  But over the next three months David’s condition took a rapid turn for the worse. By the summer he was writing to us of his longing to come home and be with his family again. He began sending letters to the people who had been responsible for organizing his trip to London in the hope that they would provide the financial means for his return.

  On July 5, 1970, he wrote to Mrs. Luber-Smith about his “psycho-trouble,” explaining how terrible it was and that it wasn’t his fault. While the letter was reasonably chatty, and expressed the hope that one day he would get better, he also told her that he could not endure another chilly winter in London without a place to live, and he really wanted to come back to Australia.

  Four days later, on July 9, David wrote a far more distraught letter, this time to Professor Callaway. He said that he was simply not able to survive in London any longer. He told Callaway that he had no food, no money, no job, and no accommodation. He pleaded with him to arrange his fare home. On the next day, July 10, no doubt worried that the letter would take too long to arrive, David sent Professor Callaway a cable—this time begging him to be allowed to return to Perth.

  On July 13, Professor Callaway’s secretary, Lorna Trist, wrote back to David to say that their office had only received his cable that morning and that Callaway was overseas in Moscow and would not get David’s message until he returned to Perth the following weekend. Trist let David know that she had immediately passed his frantic message to Mr. Walton, the secretary of the Music Council, who was that very day sending him a banker’s draft to help him with his living expenses.

  But clearly this wasn’t enough for the overwrought David. On July 18, he again wrote to Callaway, asking to come home as soon as possible.

  Professor Callaway replied on August 6 and has kindly granted his copyright permission to reprint the letter.

  DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC

  August 6th, 1970.

  Mr. David Helfgott,

  6/8 Evelyn Gardens,

  LONDON. S.W.7. England.

  Dear David,

  I am sorry I have not written before this but, as you are aware, I have been overseas. Unfortunately I did not get to London this time, so missed seeing you. I am aware that you are now keen to come home and I expect that Mr. Walton of the Music Council will be making the necessary arrangements. You will appreciate that the financial aspect of things is not my concern but rather that of the Music Council. When your plans are made and you know when you will be arriving in Perth do let me know, as I will be keen to do anything I can to help get you established in Australia. There will be difficulties of course, but all artists have to face up to such problems and I only hope that appropriate opportunities will be forthcoming in your home country.

  I was very pleased to hear of all your successes at the Royal College of Music and I know how proud Mr. Cyril Smith and Sir Keith Falkner have been of all your achievements.

  With best wishes,

  Yours sincerely,

  Frank Callaway

  Professor of Music

  One week later—and four years to the day after he had left for London—David was home. His flight from Heathrow was arranged by the University of Western Australia’s Music Council, with the help of Mrs. Luber-Smith and the Jewish community. Since we still didn’t have a phone and because the travel plans were made in such a hurry, Rabbi Rubin-Zacks of the Perth Hebrew Orthodox Congregation rushed round to our house on August 13 to let my father know that David would be arriving early the next morning.

  During David’s final months in London, when he was starting to become seriously ill, David had begun saying, for the first time, confusing and contradictory things to Dad in his letters. He would tell him that he loved him with all his heart and that he missed him and the family terribly, but in the very same letter he would suddenly start harking back to the fact that he had not gone to America nine years earlier, after Isaac Stern’s visit. He told Dad that he blamed him for this. Consequently, my father was initially apprehensive about David’s return, and not completely sure how David would treat him.

  My father had also been terribly shocked and upset by these baseless accusations. David did not seem to realize that he was ill—and that his illness had nothing to do with whether or not he had gone to study in America, or indeed whether he had left the house after an argument. What a terrible thing it must be to accept the fact that one is suffering from mental illness. It requires a tremendous will and readiness to take responsibility, and it is so much easier to start blaming a parent—however loving and concerned that parent has been. As David himself repeatedly put it in later years, this is a period during which his life became “foggy and misty and misty and foggy.”

  Leslie recently took the letters we received from David during his last months in London to a leading psychiatrist in Perth. We could of course see for ourselves that something was amiss just by looking at the erratic punctuation and odd handwriting. The psychiatrist examined the letters, and told Leslie that it was very common for someone undergoing a mental breakdown to blame a member of his family or someone else close to them.

  The psychiatrist said: “These letters are in fact loving letters. They would indicate that David loved his father very much. But they also demonstrate a common occurrence in the mentally ill—the factor of ‘blame.’ And blaming someone is itself part of the illness. The letters also show that Peter Helfgott seemed to have been a loving and caring father.”

  My father’s anxiety was almost unbearable in the hours before David was due home. He paced restlessly up and down. It was bad enough knowing that David was sliding into serious mental illness without having to contend with accusatory letters. To his immense relief, however, on their reunion at home on August 14 everything was fine.

  Dad’s fears had been unfounded. After David returned home, he expressed only affection for Dad and never showed hostility toward him either in person or in letters to other people. The next time we heard about the idea of David blaming my father was more than twenty years later, during the making of Shine. In 1970, he was just glad to be back in the family nest. He had left London for home so dazed and disorganized that all he brought with him were some odd items of clothing and a few letters and sheets of music. He had forgotten to pack such valuable items as the medal he had been awarded.

  I was living in Melbourne at this time and had been receiving daily bulletins from my father, keeping me informed of developments. He wrote to me immediately letting me know of his relief. He told me that as soon as David had arrived home he had “changed his attitude completely and was very grateful for everything” and how “happy everybody was.”

  My whole family was so overjoyed at David’s return that they all wrote to me separately telling me the good news in their own words. Louise, then 10, had been just six years old when David had left for London, so for her it was like receiving a “new” brother. She wrote to me on August 16:

  Dear Marg,

  On Friday morning at 3.00 A.M. David arrived from London. Rabbi Rubin-Zacks came and told us. On Friday afternoon the rabbi brought David here. David has been living with us ever since. I was surprised when I first saw David as he is fair haired! … He has a fabulous technique and I have been getting on very well with him.

  (signed off with over 30 kisses)

  From the first day David arrived back home, he made it clear that he, too, was overjoyed. It was a world away from the mental distress, loneliness, rain, cold, and lack of food that he had been enduring in London just a few days earlier. His change in m
ood, said my mother, was miraculous—he even took Suzie, now seventeen, to a concert three days later. He started playing the piano again and went to see Madame Carrard, who he said he had also missed terribly.

  He also wrote a very optimistic letter to Professor Callaway, thanking him for helping to arrange the years of study in London, and asking him to convey his thanks to Mr. Walton and the Music Council for assisting him. David let Callaway know he was living back at home with his parents and added that he hoped to be completely well again soon.

  But it was not to be. David’s condition deteriorated again rapidly. On August 24, only ten days after his return, my father wrote to tell me that David seemed to get exhausted very easily. I was extremely worried about him, not only on account of his health, but also because of his dashed hopes—he had departed for London with such high expectations and dreams of becoming a world-famous pianist, and now he had been compelled to come back unwell and in such haste. I was also anxious about my father because I knew how distressed he was about David. This stress, I knew, was liable to play havoc with my father’s health—whenever he worried too much, it caused him heart problems.

  I knew that my father was now very concerned that his son might be suffering from the same mental illness that had afflicted both his aunt in Poland and also his beloved sister Hannah. Hannah was the only one of my father’s six brothers and sisters to have been spared extermination at the hands of the Nazis. With the outbreak of war imminent, my father had sent all the money he could raise to his father, urging his family to leave Poland. My grandfather had known that of all his children, his fragile daughter Hannah would least be able to stand up to the Nazi terror, and in 1938, my grandfather sent Hannah to join my father in Australia.

  My father looked after Hannah, his gentle blond-haired sister, devotedly. But her illness became so severe that she finally had to be institutionalized in Melbourne. Before her condition worsened, she briefly married and had a son, Joe, born in 1949. But two years later, she had to be admitted to hospital, and Joe came to live with us in Melbourne for six months. I remember how my mother used to tend lovingly to him in his cot.

  Hannah spent the rest of her life in mental institutions, first in a hospital and then in a hostel for the mentally ill, until her death in 1989, while Joe was raised in an orphanage. Whenever I was in Melbourne I visited Hannah often. I always found her timid, withdrawn, a lost soul. It was often difficult to have a proper conversation with her and sometimes she didn’t recognize me at all. My father also visited both Hannah and Joe whenever he could.

  My father, it seemed, was once again destined to undergo the anguish of having one of his loved ones afflicted with mental illness. David’s condition changed from one day to the next. Sometimes he seemed just fine and played the piano merrily, at others he was utterly drained and exhausted and had to rest frequently.

  It was Madame Carrard who suggested David should go for a complete medical checkup. When he did this, at the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, in late August, the doctors diagnosed his condition as serious. (The medical records are confidential and cannot be made public unless David gives his permission in writing, which he has always said would be too emotionally traumatic for him.) What we had thought would be a brief examination turned into a prolonged stay and David was in and out of the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital for the next four and a half months. (Australia, like many other countries, has a system of free public health care.)

  My father immediately wrote to me in Melbourne. “David has entered the hospital,” he reported, “and is going to have a complete checkup and the doctor told me he may be there for up to a month.” He signed the letter, “Yours always and always, your loving pop forever,” with about twenty kisses.

  The hospital is on the other side of Perth, and my family visited David at least two or three times every week. My parents didn’t own a car and had to make the journey by bus, which took about an hour each way. Dad especially spent as much time as he could visiting David.

  David was, on occasion, sedated by the drugs; seeing his son in such a condition broke my father’s heart. On September 7, he wrote to me, saying that “I would like to know whether they can trace the root of David’s trouble. He’s definitely sick. I think it is a biochemical disorder in his organism, and it would affect his behavior in a certain way. I don’t like to describe his symptoms in the letter yet, as I like to have the doctor’s opinion first.”

  My father’s amateur diagnosis was later proved correct by medical experts. David suffers from a biochemical disorder, which is a physical condition in the same way that diabetes or a liver complaint are physical conditions. He is not, as Gillian so blithely suggests, merely “a delightful eccentric.” He was diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder, which can produce the symptoms of both schizophrenia and/or mood disorder.

  Naturally, I was extremely worried about my darling brother, imagining him to be in a terrible state. I pictured scenes of the kind in movies where mental hospitals are shown as hideous, scary places. So it came as a great relief to me when my family wrote to tell me that the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital was not like that at all and that David was in fact quite cheerful, sitting up in bed and asking for an astronomy book to read.

  I even cried when I received a sweet letter from him (dated September 11) confirming that he really was in an upbeat mood. He told me in the letter that the hospital was “very nice,” how happy he was that all the family were coming to visit him and that everything was fine. He said Madame Carrard had promised to give him lessons again shortly and that he was looking forward to playing duets and concertos with me soon.

  The psychiatric wing was part of the general hospital. The gardens were beautifully kept, and the devoted staff had done their best to make the wards light and pleasant. David wasn’t usually heavily medicated at that time—that came some years later when he was in another Perth hospital, Graylands, and it was most distressing to witness.

  My family wrote to me about the atmosphere in the hospital, which was friendly and—as far as possible—relaxed. David was in Block C, a newly built wing. My parents and siblings described in their letters how the nurses hovered around David, and how cheerful he was, especially on the days my parents came to visit. His ward was colorfully painted with artworks displayed on the walls and there were always flowers.

  Leslie also paid him frequent visits, and the two of them even managed to find a table-tennis table to play on in the hospital recreation room. In fact, there was a wealth of activities laid on for the patients, including handicrafts, volley ball, and lawn bowls on the grass outside. The hospital even organized cricket matches between the staff and the patients. Individual counseling and group therapy were also available. There was a TV lounge, too. David also went on the walks the staff organized in nearby King’s Park, the area of natural bush land that we had loved going to as children.

  Conditions for David in the hospital have been depicted as harsh and gloomy in much of the material that has been written about him as a result of Shine. Media reports have suggested that David had a terrible time locked up and languishing in mental institutions. In fact, the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital was a very stimulating environment. Leslie remembers hearing one patient there comment that it was more like a hotel than a hospital.

  After the first few weeks of hospitalization, David was allowed to come and go freely, and he often visited the family. When he was at home, he would practice the piano again. At one point, Professor Callaway even arranged a series of concerts for David through the University of Western Australia Music Department. David played on two occasions, but the remaining concerts had to be canceled because of his illness.

  It was also while he was in the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital that David started going swimming every day. He would go down to the beach, no matter what the weather. (In London, he had not always been able to afford the entrance charges to public swimming pools, so he had gone for dips in the murky waters of the Serpentine Lake
in Hyde Park.) Since that time, David’s enjoyment of swimming has turned into an obsession, which has never abated.

  My father’s grief at having to come to terms with another member of his close family succumbing to mental illness was modified at least in part by the knowledge that David, although undoubtedly sick, was being well cared for and was not too unhappy.

  Professor Callaway, who has only ever wanted the best for my brother, says that it was during this period of hospitalization that he realized that sending David to London may have been a mistake. “It’s a great pity that Scott Hicks did not consult with me over Shine,” he told me. “I would have told him that I now realize in retrospect, given David’s breakdown, that it would have been a good idea to have consulted more fully with Peter Helfgott about the suitability of David’s going to London. As it is, Shine—although in some respects a remarkable film—turned out to be far from the truth.”

  Of the failure to consult David’s music teacher, Madame Carrard, about David’s trip, Callaway says: “This was not my decision. The Music Council of the university were the decision-makers, not myself.”

  The way in which David’s return from London is portrayed in Shine is utterly false, and could even be called cruel. It is another key element in building up a ghastly, totally distorted picture of my father and David’s relationship with him.

  In Shine, the following two scenes occur straight after David’s collapse while playing the “Rach 3” (scene 131):

  SCENE 132 INTERIOR. HOSPITAL WARD. DAYTIME

  DAVID’s glasses are put on a metal tray. Electrodes are placed on his temples. The ECT dial is turned up. DAVID’s fingers flutter as the current runs through his body and then they quiver to a stop. He lies there, staring into a void of white light. The phone keeps ringing.