Out of Tune

by Margaret Helfgott

  Cut to close-up—the phone still ringing. A hand picks up the receiver.

  MAN: Hello. (No response) Hello, who is this?

  The accent strikes us—it is PETER. We are in:

  SCENE 133 INTERIOR. HELFGOTT HOUSE. NIGHT

  PETER: Hello?

  DAVID: Hello, Daddy?

  SCENE 134 INTERIOR. PHONE BOOTH. DAY

  DAVID, hair cut short, pale and gaunt, clutches his bag.

  DAVID: Daddy? I’m back.

  SCENE 135 RESUME—Peter, numb. He listens in silence, then hangs up slowly. New angle seen through the window: PETER stands there, stunned. He pulls the blind down. Fade to black.

  In the next scene we are back in what the screenplay describes as “the morning sun” in the psychiatric hospital gardens. The way Shine shows David being shunned by his family on his return to Perth is a lie from start to finish—beginning with the fact that David did not receive ECT shock treatment at this time. Nor did we own a telephone. And, as at many other points in the film, it is remarkable that my father is always shown in the dark, as though we did not own any lightbulbs at home, whereas phone booths and even psychiatric hospitals are by comparison bathed in light.

  Even more outrageous is what Gillian writes in Love You to Bitsand Pieces: “Peter Helfgott came to visit David during his first week in hospital… After being told that there was nothing physically wrong with David, Peter never came to see him in the hospital again … Peter went home in a rage … He [found] a suitcase of his son’s private possessions— forwarded by a London friend shortly after David had returned—and among these things Peter found a little bundle of Katherine Susannah Pritchard’s * letters.

  David was discharged from the hospital on January 16, 1971. After this, my brother’s life took a decided turn for the better as a wonderful woman entered into it.

  12

  A FIRST MARRIAGE:

  THE STORY OF CLAIRE

  On June 26, 1971, less than six months after he had been discharged from the psychiatric hospital, David again won the State Final of the ABC Concerto and Vocal Competition. His performance of Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini,” with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra under the baton of conductor Tibor Paul, “electrified the capacity audience,” reported the Perth Sunday Times the following morning. His victory was “a unanimous decision,” said the paper. The judges who had been enthralled by his playing did not know that my brother had also been enraptured: his “electric” performance was sparked by his meeting a few months earlier with the woman who, two weeks later, on July 10, would become his wife. David knew that his startlingly swift rehabilitation was largely due to one person: Claire.

  “I have never seen a man more in love with a woman than David was with Claire,” their friend and neighbor at the time, Allan Macpherson, told me recently.

  Though he was fairly upbeat when discharged from the hospital, five months in a psychiatric ward had inevitably taken a toll on David. The improvement in his mood in the six months that followed was partly the result of the love and care that my parents had given him, and also due to assistance from others—in particular, Cliff Harris, president of the Music Council and a Perth City councilor. Harris organized a grant for David from the Perth mayor’s office, enabling him to be set up in a flat of his own and provided with a piano. But above all David’s astonishing recovery was the result of his relationship with Claire.

  David had been introduced to her by Carl Berent early in February 1971, about three weeks after he left the hospital. Both Claire and Carl were members of the “Cultural Club,” a small local group of music and arts enthusiasts. My brother and I had known Carl since childhood. Carl was a piano teacher who also played with several orchestras in Perth. He had been a friend of my father and had given us a few piano lessons before we started with Frank Arndt. Carl could see instantly how much David liked Claire, a widow several years older than David who was bringing up four young children. Carl wanted to help David, realizing that he was somewhat disoriented after his discharge from the hospital. Knowing how warm and giving Claire was, he encouraged her to get to know David better (as did Madame Carrard). After their first meeting, David told Carl how very much he wanted to see the pretty, dark-haired woman again.

  Claire told me: “David and I quickly struck up a friendship. David started to visit me often. He was a gentle person and we shared a love of music and had a lot of fun together. After a while our friendship developed into a relationship. He wanted to stay with me more and more, which I didn’t mind at all since he got on very well with my children. He would practice on my piano for hours. I knew how difficult the previous few months had been for him and that he was still under medical treatment and I wanted to do what I could to help.

  “Within a short time of moving in, David began telling me how much he loved me and that he wanted to marry me. I didn’t take him seriously at first—I didn’t really want to marry anyone, and in any case I was not entirely sure about his mental state. But then David started going round telling everyone he was going to marry me, and I realized he was deadly serious.”

  Before Claire decided whether to accept David’s proposal, she thought it a good idea to ask David’s doctor, Dr. Czillag, for his opinion. Dr. Czillag headed the Sir Charles Gairdner Psychiatric Unit and, like both Claire and Madame Carrard, was a Hungarian-born Jew. During the months before their marriage, as Claire had grown closer to David, she had come to know his doctors well; indeed, they enlisted her help in ensuring that David took his medication and in monitoring his moods.

  Dr. Czillag told Claire that he knew from David how much he loved her and that he believed that the stability of marriage would be excellent for his wellbeing. He added that David had told him that he had always liked the company of older women because they gave him more sympathy and understanding.

  This was not the first time David had fallen for an older woman. While in London he had a relationship with a nurse fifteen years his senior—she had even wanted to follow David back to Australia, but he was too distraught at the time to invite her. Gillian, too, is sixteen years older. The attraction of the older woman probably stems from the fact that David likes and needs a lot of looking after. Older women may express maternal feelings for him whereas younger ones may not have the necessary patience or maturity.

  “Dr. Czillag told me there was another pressing reason, too,” Claire added. “He said he was very worried about the harm that interfering busybodies were continuing to cause David. He said he could not believe the audacity of people like Mrs. Luber-Smith, Cliff and Rae Harris, and the conductor Georg Tintner. They were still trying to take control of David and push him toward being a world-class concert pianist without any regard for the medical consequences.

  “Dr. Czillag said the Harrises were trying to raise money to send David away again to study, this time to America, and an announcement about this had again appeared in the paper. He stressed that David simply would not be able to handle the pressure of going abroad. He needed rest and stability. Marriage, he said, would have the benefit of serving as a kind of protection for David, since he could see that Claire had his best interests at heart. It’s the people who are interfering in David’s life that are aggravating his condition, Dr. Czillag said.”

  Claire told me that she could see for herself how these people were trying to influence and manipulate David against his family, even after he had returned from London. “They were trying to persuade him that it was they who wanted what was best for him,’ she said, adding, “Peter was a bit of a softie and could not stand up to these people. His manner was too gentle for a confrontation.”

  David’s other doctor, Dr. Matthews, was equally angry with the people interfering in David’s life, and he, too, stressed the need for love and stability. Claire told me: “Of course I said yes out of love, but it reassured me that his doctors thought it was a good idea. They also led me to believe that David’s illness could be controlled and that further
hospitalization would not be necessary. I don’t think I’ve ever seen David look happier than when I said ‘yes.’”

  Mrs. Luber-Smith’s attitude was very different. “David’s decision to marry was foolish,” she said. “I had nothing to do with David after that. I was so upset that he had left the Harrises after all they had done for him, I just couldn’t get involved any further.”

  Claire and David married in Brisbane Street Synagogue. It was an orthodox service conducted by Rabbi Shalom Coleman. “David and I discussed it and we both decided we wanted a traditional Jewish wedding, albeit a simple and quiet one,” said Claire.

  Claire had been married before, in 1952 to a fellow Hungarian Jew whom she had met in Perth. But her husband had died of cancer in 1960, leaving her with four small children, who she struggled to bring up on her own. Claire, a cooking teacher by profession, was born in Budapest to a middle-class professional family. Her father had been a textile designer and her mother a schoolteacher.

  Her life had included the worst that “humanity” has to offer. Deported as a child by the Germans and their fascist Hungarian allies to the infamous concentration camp at Dachau for the “crime” of being Jewish, she had miraculously survived and emigrated to Australia in 1952.

  When American forces entered Dachau on April 29, 1945, what they found—skeletal tortured bodies mangled together, piled naked on top of one another, wriggling and squirming half alive, half dead—was so horrific that, according to a leading Holocaust historian, Sir Martin Gilbert, photographs taken that day have never been published.

  “I was liberated by the Americans in May 1945 at the end of the war, in Schwandorf forest,” Claire told me, still trembling at the memory. “As the Allies advanced, the Germans had emptied some of the camps, including Dachau. Though they knew the war was lost, they still planned to kill us. Those of us still alive were forced to march to the nearby forest, where it would be easier to bury and hide our bodies. Many thousands of us were gathered there—not just from Dachau but from other camps, too. We had to dig a huge mass grave. The killing went on all night. But then the SS heard the approach of tanks from far away, and fled. When the tanks arrived, American soldiers jumped out and hugged and kissed us children. We were petrified, starving, and itching, because we were covered in lice. A black American soldier took me in his arms and started crying.”

  Claire, who was fourteen at the time of the liberation, was left with no parents, aunts, or grandparents, and was subsequently looked after by an American Jewish organization. She went to a school for Jewish orphans run by the Americans in Germany. (At the time, the British were still using all means necessary to prevent Jewish Holocaust survivor children from entering Palestine.) “Eventually I chose to go to Australia. I imagined it to be a place with no guns, no war,” Claire told me. “The United Nations relief agency arranged my flight.” (Though Australia, like most countries, was very restrictive in the number of Jews it agreed to admit immediately before the war, it was much more generous in allowing Jewish survivors to move there after the war, as part of its enlarged immigrant intake from all over Europe.)

  At the time of David and Claire’s wedding, which happened at short notice, I was living in Melbourne and unfortunately wasn’t able to take time off work to make the long journey back. We still didn’t own a phone, but my father had written immediately to let me know the good news.

  I returned to Perth the following month, and, of course, I couldn’t wait to meet Claire. I had heard so many good things about her, and I knew she had had a wonderful influence on David. Claire and I quickly became friends, a friendship that has lasted to this day. I regard her and her children as extended family. I have always admired her, not just for her warmth, courage, and sincerity, but for her commitment to David—especially considering how difficult life with him could sometimes be. His health went through frequent bad patches, and she would update me, his concerned older sister, on his condition.

  Claire said recently: “My relationship with all of David’s family was an excellent one. I could see how close they were, which I liked since I had come from a very close family myself. David had taken me to visit his parents a few times before we were married. His father always welcomed him by putting his arm around him. After the first time we visited, David was very happy because, he said, “My mom and dad liked you very much.”

  “Peter and Rae often came to visit us. Peter was kind and good-natured. We used to chat about life in Eastern Europe. My children all liked him very much—he told them jokes and stories from the circus and played the violin for my daughter, who also became friendly with David’s youngest sister Louise.”

  Claire was stunned by what she saw in Shine: “During the whole time that I was with him, David never once told me that his father had beaten him or ill-treated him in any way. He always talked about his father with love. He told me how lonely he had felt in England, and how many times he had thought to himself that perhaps he should never have left. He told me that it was at those times that he realized how wrong it would have been if he had gone alone to America after Isaac Stern’s visit.”

  There is no sense in which David was “lying dying on the floors of halfway houses” after his return from London, as Scott Hicks claimed at the official pre-Oscar press conference in Los Angeles. Nor was his life devoid of music until Gillian“rescued” him. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s David spent a great deal of time at the piano and gave many concerts, especially during the period when he was under Claire’s solicitous eye.

  Allan Macpherson, a former classical music radio producer who knew both David and Claire very well throughout this time, recalls: “In his first year with Claire, David’s playing and mental condition improved. Claire asked Carl Berent, who had successfully trained two State winners in the ABC Concerto and Vocal Competition, to train David. David liked Carl and felt comfortable with him. Carl was fully aware of David’s mental condition and could communicate with him better than anyone else I knew.”

  At the time he met Claire, according to Macpherson, David could play long and difficult pieces but lacked finesse. The first thing Carl persuaded him to do was to slow his playing down, in some cases to half speed, as David tended to race his pieces and bravura passages. He also transformed David’s somewhat “bashy” sound into a more sophisticated tone. He worked with him to prepare a recital of solo pieces, improving David’s keyboard technique as well as his conceptual approach to music; and he inculcated the romance, drama, and tragedy that the pieces required. They worked together on “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Mussorgsky, the Sonata in B Minor by Liszt, “Gaspard de la Nuit” by Ravel, “Lisle Joyeuse” by Debussy, the “Appassionata” Sonata by Beethoven, and the Ballade in G Minor and Polonaise in E Minor by Chopin.

  Macpherson was intimately involved in classical musical circles in Western Australia at the time and wrote regularly on classical music for various magazines. “David was quite remarkable to hear,’ he recalls. “He played powerfully and managed difficult bravura passages with great dexterity and accuracy. He was in excellent physical condition. I remember that he had broad shoulders and that his back muscles rippled through his shirt when he played. There was no sign of the hunchback or disabled demeanor he was to develop later.

  “He was friendly, even ingratiating, but mostly shy,” Macpherson continues. “His only eccentricities were noisy breathing and face-pulling while he performed. He kept his face very close to the keyboard and sometimes muttered along with the music as he played. When I helped him and Carl by turning the pages David spoke little but frequently said ‘yes, Yes, yes.’ David was different. My first impression of him was that he was an inhabitant of another place, another world. Everyone made a tremendous fuss of him and I am sure that he enjoyed the attention.”

  In 1972, David’s mental condition again took a turn for the worse. He became morose and languid, stopped exercising, and even gave up playing the piano for several weeks. That year he failed to qualify for the ABC
Concerto and Vocal Competition, which greatly upset him. “Claire tried to do everything for him—she even negotiated with the ABC to enable David to give broadcasts of piano works, but his playing was so poor and he was so uncommunicative that they abandoned the project,” says Macpherson.

  With Carl and Claire’s help, however, David’s playing improved again. In July 1973 he gave a triumphant performance of Shostakovich’s Concerto for Piano, Trumpet and Strings with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra. Under the heading “Pianist Dazzles at Concert,” the music critic of The West Australian newspaper, Mary Tannock, gave it a glowing report: “Local pianist David Helfgott stole the show at the Perth Concert Hall last night … Mr Helfgott gave a dazzling display. He brilliantly juxtaposed frenzied clarity in the first movement with even-tempered expressiveness in the second. The detail and momentum of the entire interpretation was superb.”

  But as is often the case with people suffering from schizo-affective disorder, David’s condition gradually grew worse. Living with him, admits Claire, could be very difficult. Allan Macpherson recalls that “when David reentered the ABC competition a year later and was not even placed, he cried and muttered so much that Claire had to get the paramedics to help get him home. Claire’s effort in looking after David was nothing short of superhuman. She cared for David a great deal, and looked after him continuously without any support from outside agencies. She became a focus of love for him, a kind of whole world, just like the piano. Claire was only a small woman and David almost engulfed her. He would lock his arms around her shoulders and continually kiss her on the cheek, stroke her arms, and fondle her clothing. He would behave like this in company, which I think became embarrassing for Claire. When he was not touching her, he would stare at her transfixed as if experiencing a religious vision.”