Out of Tune

by Margaret Helfgott

  Moreover, the preview scene most commonly being used on television was one where my father beats up my brother. As I flicked from channel to channel, this scene seemed to pop up practically everywhere I turned. It was simply bizarre. I wanted to pinch myself, hoping that I would wake up from this nightmare. I just couldn’t believe it was happening.

  Leslie and I soon started getting phone calls from journalists, asking about “the beatings” that my father administered. Naturally we told them the truth. After that people we knew, but some of whom we hadn’t heard from for years, rang us up, expressing distress at the film’s inaccuracies. There was the Reverend Bob Fairman from Gildercliffe Lodge, our music teachers, Frank Arndt and Madame Carrard, David’s first wife, Claire, his close friend of eight years, Dot, and a host of former friends and work colleagues of my father’s. One by one, I began to realize that a film had been made about my brother and yet almost none of the people who had been closely involved with him had been interviewed or consulted—even though in some cases they had, like myself, specifically made themselves available. Some felt the need to speak out publicly against the film. Frank Arndt, for example, told an Australian newspaper that my father was “a very gentle and intelligent man. I got to know Peter well. He never came across as harsh.”

  The Perth premiere of Shine took place on Thursday, August 15. That night I received a phone call from Scott Hicks, who was in town for the event. He invited me for breakfast the next morning, saying he wanted to “catch up” with me before he left for Adelaide. I was rather surprised, but decided to accept his invitation, hoping that perhaps there was still a way of salvaging my father’s reputation. Would he perhaps go on the record and tell the media that his portrayal in Shine was fictional? Hicks informed me that Gillian would pick me up in her car and bring me to the Sheraton hotel where he was staying.

  But when I heard what Hicks had to say, I could hardly swallow my scrambled eggs. I was admonished for speaking out against the film, I was told I was “harming” it, and that if I continued to speak out, the media would get involved and my family would be harassed by reporters and have no peace. I was further informed that this wasn’t fair on my family because I was going back to Israel and they would have to handle all the press barrage and so forth. I replied that the way my father had been depicted made it absolutely necessary for me to speak out on his behalf. I again asked for a prominent disclaimer; this time Hicks refused point-blank. He said I was “devious, manipulative, and jealous.” He spoke to me in a threatening tone, hinting that he could cause trouble for me. At one point Gillian dissolved in tears. Hicks, who had apparently been left with the impression after our London meeting that he had managed to persuade me to stay quiet, was now angry with me for my comments to journalists. He said he wouldn’t leave until I promised I would no longer speak to the press. I left the meeting feeling extremely scared. I was petrified at the idea of my family being harassed, so I agreed not to make any more public comments.

  Late the next night I received an abusive phone call from Gillian. She said: “I’m sick of the way you’re going on. You’re crapping all over everything.” She also patronized me, calling me “my lass,” and was extremely aggressive and nasty, asking me: “Do you want your mom to be harassed?”

  Although, from a mixture of fear and concern for my mother, I had agreed to hold my tongue, a few weeks later—as the media blitz intensified—I could take it no more. Article after article appeared describing my father in the most dreadful terms. The final straw came when I picked up a copy of what is probably the world’s leading news magazine, Time (September 23, 1996), and read that David was “prodded into prodigy status and tormented toward a nervous breakdown.” I realized that my conscience would not allow me any longer to sit back and fail to stand up for the truth, for my father and also indirectly for “the true” David. Leslie and I, the two eldest children, began to speak up openly about the injustice that had been done. We wrote to newspapers. Leslie agreed to be interviewed on radio and television. He went to a film projectionist to obtain the exact wording of the disclaimer. It took the projectionist two days and a magnifying glass to discern what was written.

  Things got worse. In December 1996, Gillian’s book Love You to Bits and Pieces was published, claiming on its front cover to be “the true story that inspired Shine” Yet it went even further than Shine in creating a mythology around David and his family— myself included. I could hardly believe my eyes when I read David “quoted” as saying: “If Margaret didn’t play well, oh God. She got punished severely. Father was cruel to her verbally and aggressively too. He used violence” (page 103).

  Next came the publication of the screenplay in book format. Now it was clearer than ever that Hicks had not lived up to his assurances in his letter of January 6, 1989, that it was not his intention to be judgmental about my father. I read that Peter Helfgott was “menacing”; at one point his “eyes glow with anger in the darkness” (scene 54a); at another his “eyes glow with hostility” (scene 78), and so on.

  For good measure, some of the cast backed up Shines assertions. For example, Geoffrey Rush told Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine that “this film isn’t about a guy playing the piano, it’s about how easily you can fük up your kids.”

  Shine began to receive award after award. At the Australian Film Institute awards in November 1996, it took nine prizes out of eleven nominations. It won Golden Globes. It won awards from the Screen Actors Guild, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the U.S. National Board of Review, the Writers Guild of America, and more. It won awards in film festivals in a host of cities (Fort Lauderdale, Aspen, Hawaii, and so on) and in many countries, including Canada, Italy, and Britain. Australia’s arts minister Richard Alston praised the film as “dazzling.”

  My father was painted in negative terms in countless articles, not just film reviews but analysis and feature articles, and some even on the editorial and opinion pages of the world’s leading newspapers, including the New York Times. An Internet search reveals, for example, that in a six-month period, forty-eight articles and letters to the editor concerning or mentioning Shine appeared in the Los Angeles Times alone. Many papers carried profiles of the real-life David. “His father disowned him at the age of nineteen,” stated one in the London Sunday Times. While the film’s disclaimer is buried beyond recognition, full-page ads appeared in the papers saying the film was an “utterly extraordinary true story.” Another ad said David was “driven to breaking point by … an abusive father.”

  Then came the big one, the Oscars, in late March 1997. I was extremely tense. Shine had been nominated for seven awards—including Best Director for Hicks, Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay. One of the first awards of the evening was for Best Supporting Actor. When Cuba Gooding Jr. triumphed over the German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl, who played my father, I cried. I said to myself “Thank God,” over and over again. “Sorry, Mr. Mueller-Stahl. I have nothing against you personally, but I’m sure you understand.” But later in the ceremony, when Glenn Close said that Shine is the “true story” of David Helfgott, I flinched. When she went on to say that he “had survived decades of shock treatment,” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I thought: The myth just grows and grows.

  16

  DRAMATIC DISTORTIONS IN SHINE

  Shine is a film purporting to be a true story, but it is in fact riddled with errors and inaccuracies. I have mentioned some of these in previous chapters and do not propose reiterating them all in detail. Nevertheless there are some points on which I would like to elaborate. They concern both the film and the official screenplay—which differs from the version finally shot because some scenes were cut out of the film at the last moment, partly as a result of the increasing volume of the Helfgott family’s protests. However, these scenes remain in the screenplay that is on sale at bookstores throughout the world, including my local bookstore here in Israel. This screenplay was published so
me months after the film’s release, and is likely to be read by film buffs, students, and those interested in finding out more about David’s life. In his introduction to the book, the screenwriter Jan Sardi claims, in what sounds to me like Orwellian double-talk, that the story of Shine “remains faithful to the essence of the biographical facts.”

  My father’s role as the villain of the piece is built around several different themes. One of the first to be introduced is the idea that he regarded winning as all-important. In fact, my father never stressed winning, only doing one’s best. Almost from the beginning, Shine conjures up an atmosphere o: fear and dread around David’s failure to win piano competitions. The character representing me says: “He lost. Now we’ll cop it,” while David walks several steps behind Peter, as if in disgrace. The words in the screenplay, (scene 8) go even further. “Margaret” says: “Now we’ll all cop it. Damn you, David Helfgott,” which I, of course, never said. References to “winning” are sprinkled throughout the film. For example, David says: “Gotta win, gotta win” or something similar at several points (words that are not always in the screenplay). Sometimes the idea of winning at all costs has been used in juxtaposition with scenes that take place in the psychiatric hospital—which led several film reviewers to link David’s mental illness with the supposed emphasis my father put on coming first—“a determination that David succeed at any cost,” as the New York Times critic Janet Maslin put it in her review.

  The theme of my father’s alleged violent nature is introduced gradually. In scene 9, he knocks the chess pieces to the floor in the middle of a game, and then orders a frightened David to pick them up. In the words of the screenplay, Peter at this point “slams his fist on the small table,” setting the stage for his later aggressive behavior. At the same time he says, “Margaret! I told you, tell your friends not to come.” Needless to say, this incident never occurred, nor did my father ever prevent any of us going out with friends or having them to visit.

  When in the film, Ben Rosen comes to our house to offer his services as a music teacher, my father not only refuses but is hostile to this stranger (scene 11 of the screenplay states: “Peter does not accept the proffered handshake by Rosen”). Later, when my father reluctantly takes David to Rosen’s house, the scene is accompanied by ominous music. After an exchange at the door in which Rosen does not invite Peter in, Rosen agrees to teach David and then slams the door in Peter’s face. Then, at a concert, “Rosen catches Peter looking. Neither hides their contempt.” As I have explained earlier in this book, Frank Arndt, the real-life figure on whom the character of Rosen is modeled, had an excellent relationship with my father.

  The first serious act of violence in the film is when Peter enters the bathroom, discovers excreta in David’s bath, and hits him nine times with a towel, while saying, “To shit in the bath. You disgusting animal,” repeating the word “animal” three times. At the end of the beating we see water dripping off the walls. The screenplay, scene 50, adds even more color. It reads: “The attack … continues across his bare back, his head … water runs down the walls like blood”—clearly implying that my father’s beating caused David to bleed. I find this scene not only offensive to my father, but humiliating to my brother. In reality, while David did mess himself as a child, he never excreted in the bath, and my father certainly didn’t flay him with a towel.

  David’s beating at home before he goes to London is the next violent incident. The film depicts a lengthy and disturbing scene showing Peter brutally beating his son, pummeling him over and over until he has to be pulled off by his family. The screenplay describes this over four pages and four scenes (78 to 81): I have outlined much of the dialogue earlier, in Chapter 8, but the stage directions of the screenplay leave the reader no room to doubt what a brute “my father” was: “Peter comes at David like a lumbering bear… Peter slaps David around the head knocking his glasses off… Peter gives Suzie a backhand … Peter throws David across the room. Margaret intervenes … Peter picks up a chair and throws it against the wall… Peter has David in a headlock, choking him … Rachel bashes [Peter’s] arms with her fists trying to get him to let go of David who can’t breathe. Margaret tries to pull Peter away … Margaret says ‘I’ll get the police’… David wipes his bloody nose … Rachel holds the girls, all crying.”

  As I have said before, there was an argument between my father and my brother, witnessed by all of us. It was unpleasant, but there was no violence. My whole family told Hicks that this scene is completely fictitious. Realizing that he could face legal action, he removed some elements, such as my father hitting Suzie, and “Margaret” saying “I’ll get the police,” though these remain in the screenplay.

  As David leaves the house, the fictitious Peter announces: “Don’t make me do it!”—a peculiar enough statement in itself—and then he proceeds to burn David’s scrapbooks and other material. We see the reflection of the fire glowing in Peter’s glasses. As the screenplay says (scene 82): “Music scores burn, schoolbooks, David’s clothes … Peter throws another pile on, stokes the flames. Burning in the fire is the scrapbook—images of young David surrender to the flames.” Nothing of this sort ever occurred. It sent shivers down my spine to see images so reminiscent of the Nazi burning of Jewish books in 1933, when over one million books were incinerated in public bonfires in Berlin’s Opera House square and other locations, solely because their authors were Jewish.

  My father is also shown returning David’s letters. David sits at a table, with bottles of pills next to him, recording a tape to Katherine Susannah Pritchard. He says: “I wrote to Daddy. He didn’t write back.” The camera then moves to a bundle of letters marked “Return to Sender.” David takes a tablet from one of the bottles and swallows it. Here again the juxtaposition clearly implies that a cruel father is driving poor David to medication. In his introduction to the screenplay, Jan Sardi specifically says that his aim was to allow “the audience to participate by having to fill it in for themselves” and that he wants to allow “visuals to tell the story” as well as dialogue. As I have explained in Chapter 9, we still have these letters—all of which were read, answered, and kept—but cannot reprint them since Gillian holds the copyright.

  There are many scenes in Shine that portray David’s close relationships with Pritchard and with his music professor Cecil Parkes; so much so that the two of them assume quasiparental roles in David’s life. This has the effect of making my father and mother appear neglectful and unloving as parents.

  Parkes is portrayed as warm and fatherlike. In the film (though not in the screenplay) Parkes says to David, “Come on, my boy,” and takes him out to visit what appears to be a museum, pointing things out to him in a fatherly way—in much the same manner, in fact, as my father actually did. Parkes and David sing a duet together as they walk along merrily.

  At one point David even addresses Parkes as “Daddy.” In scene 121, Parkes sits next to David at the piano and looks genuinely concerned. He asks: “What on earth is the problem?” David says: “If you do something wrong can you be punished for the rest of your life?” (alluding to my father’s entirely fictional “I won’t let anyone destroy this family” speech). Parkes says: “David, listen to me,” and David replies: “Yes, Daddy, sorry. Mustn’t make you angry, not another angry lion.”

  In the screenplay, the scenes with Parkes have stage directions such as “Light pours in” (scene 112). Hicks has even put my real-life father’s own words about music into Parkes’s mouth. In scene 123, Parkes says to David: “Once you’ve done it [music] no one can ever take it away from you.”

  As well as falsely depicting my father as a tyrant and a bully, Shine totally negates my mother’s role in David’s life. If Cecil Parkes is a quasifather figure, then Katherine Pritchard is a quasimother. David plays for Pritchard, sits next to her, and engages in mother/sonlike dialogue. For example, in scene 63, he says: “Tell me a story, Katherine. What story is it today?”

  In the film version, Pr
itchard has a framed photo of the teenage David on her mantelpiece; her house is warm and comforting, in sharp contrast to the cold and loveless atmosphere with which my parents’ house is shrouded. Later on, David is shown sending tapes from London to Pritchard, but not to his own mother. Pritchard kisses and cuddles David. At one point, David asks her (scene 75) what her father was like, thus inviting comparison between families. In scene 72, Pritchard listens to David playing “the Rach 3,” and then she looks at his photo and says, “Bravo, David.”

  Why doesn’t Hicks have my mother saying “Bravo, David”? Why doesn’t he show my mother reading David stories, as she did so often when he was young?

  Katherine Pritchard’s caring, motherly qualities are contrasted with my mother’s sullen appearances at the kitchen sink. In the film, my mother is constantly grimy and involved in some household chore. She virtually ignores her children, and practically the only communication between her and my father is when they snap at each other. This is the complete opposite of my mother’s true disposition. In reality, she and David have always been close.

  A few months ago, Marta Kaczmarek, the actress who plays my mother in Shine, stumbled across Leslie performing the violin in a Perth market. She approached him and actually apologized profusely for the hurt and harm that have been caused to him by what she now knows to have been an utterly fictitious piece of cinema.