Out of Tune (8 page)

In any case there simply wasn’t enough money available to finance the trip to America. Contrary to what is related in
Shine
, where my father and Mr. Rosen decide that David should have a bar mitzvah as a method of raising money for this trip, David
had already had his bar mitzvah almost a year earlier, when he turned thirteen, the usual age for this ceremony. His bar mitzvah
had nothing to do with “digging for gold,” as Mr. Rosen puts it in
Shine
, in one of several offensive references in the film to Jews or Judaism. My father may not have been an Orthodox Jew himself,
but he still had a strong desire to hold onto the basic tenets of Jewish tradition and to pass them on to his children.

So, with insufficient money forthcoming with which to fund the trip, the whole American proposal inevitably came to nothing.
However, the atmosphere created by the press, even though it had no real basis in fact, had raised David’s hopes sky high.
I remember my father tactfully trying to explain all this to David. But my brother had been so excited at the prospect of
going that he didn’t really take it all in, and, in part at least, blamed his father for the “offer” not materializing—as
though it were my father’s fault that he didn’t have enough money to pay for David to go and live in America.

* * *

After the Isaac Stern episode and its aftermath, the relationship between David and my father became less close. We were still
not sure, however, whether David’s gradual withdrawal from the family wasn’t simply the kind of difficult phase that many
adolescents go through. I was becoming more independent myself at this time, and went to work in Melbourne— though there was
of course a huge difference between my spending a few weeks in Melbourne, under the watchful eye of my grandparents, and the
idea of David, who was two years younger than me and considerably less mature—he still could not even tie his own shoelaces—spending
years alone on the other side of the world.

Although his attitude was troublesome, once he had got over the disappointment of the America trip that never was, David’s
musical skills continued to improve. I was amazed at the sensitive way in which he could now interpret some of the works he
mastered. For example, he played Prelude No. 8 by Bach (from the first book of Preludes and Fugues) very tenderly; this slow,
quiet, and introspective piece required him to demonstrate a range of skills quite different from those required to play the
more lively and virtuoso pieces by Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and Balakirev, which David usually performed.

In October 1961, David achieved a remarkable result for a fourteen-year-old. He scored 184 out of 200 as he successfully passed
the exam for his certificate of Associate in Music, and he was awarded the special annual prize by the Australian Music Examinations
Board.

We continued going to concerto competitions and the papers eagerly followed David’s musical successes. Many articles about
David were accompanied by a photograph of him wearing a jacket and bow tie, looking serious and confident behind his thick-rimmed
spectacles and half smile.

By now his reputation had been established well beyond Perth. Under the headline “Professor: Helfgott is ‘Great Pianist,”
an article in a Melbourne newspaper began: “Professor Sidney Harrison said yesterday that young Perth pianist David Helfgott
was among the best and most talented artists he had seen in twenty-five years as an adjudicator. The world-famous music authority
said ‘David, at fourteen, was far, far the youngest competitor in the [ABC Concerto] competition. All the judges agreed he
has an extraordinary talent… Harrison, professor of music at the Guildhall School of Music in London said David’s rendition
of Mozart’s concerto was faultless. ‘When I return to England in July I shall certainly mention David Helfgott as a great
young Australian pianist,’ he added.”

“An enormous talent,” declared the Dutch conductor Willem van Otterloo in an article about David that appeared in 1962. Another
critic wrote about “the magic in the brilliant fingers of David Helfgott.”

I still have newspaper clippings about David’s performances of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto in Perth on June 16, 1964
and in Melbourne on July 4, 1964. The critic Sally Trethowan wrote of the Perth performance: “Under his talented hands this
work exploded in a display of aural pyrotechnics that brought long and enthusiastic applause from the large audience.”

Another critic, Adrian Rawlins, said: “Helfgott played the Rachmaninoff Concerto with great sensitivity and insight.”

(Scott Hicks, in what he has referred to in interviews as the “ten-year odyssey” it took to research and make
Shine
, could surely have found out—if not from David or a library, then by speaking to my mother, Leslie, or me—that David had
mastered Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto at least five years before the 1969 London performance that, Hicks alleges, caused
David to collapse on stage and led to a major breakdown.)

Year after year—and in marked contrast to the reviews David has recently been receiving—music critics were almost unanimous
in their praise of David’s performances. In May 1965, for example,
The Sunday Times
(Perth) ran an article under the headline “Born to a Piano.” “Helfgott dazzles” was the heading of a piece by Barbara Yates
Rothwell in another paper.

But, as David received more and more praise, his head swelled even larger. His arrogance continued to increase until he left
for London in 1966. The whole family felt the changes. As my little sister Suzie said, David’s attitude at the time was “I’m
better than anyone.” At one point, totally out of the blue, he actually stopped talking to me altogether. Then one day, he
wanted me to type up a poem for him, which I did willingly—I thought he had got over whatever it was he was holding against
me. However, after I gave David back the typed-up poem, to my absolute astonishment, he promptly stopped talking to me again.
I was flabbergasted.

T
here was more to life in the Helfgott household than music. David and my father shared a keen interest in politics. They were
both on the left of the political spectrum and believed that socialism was the way to achieve equality and justice. Sometimes
they had heated discussions about which brand of socialism was best, Russian or Chinese.

My father had finally become disillusioned with Russian socialism as a result of the “Doctors’ Plot” of 1953, when Stalin
accused his Jewish doctors of trying to poison him. This was a total fabrication, intended to prepare the way for a vicious
wave of anti-Semitic persecution across the whole Soviet Union. Stalin announced that his doctors were part of “an international
Jewish bourgeois-nationalist organization established by American intelligence.” He then had his doctors tortured in order
to extract confessions from them.

The official Communist Party newspaper
Pravda
described the Jewish doctors as “the pack of mad dogs from Tel Aviv,” which it characterized as “loathsome and vile in its
thirst for blood.” After this my father finally made the break with Russia and decided that Chairman Mao’s Chinese socialism
was far more pure and correct; David meanwhile still adhered to a belief in the Russian variety as “the true socialism.”

Even though my father no longer sympathized with Soviet communism, he nevertheless kept an eye on developments in the communist
world. He and David would visit the left-wing Pioneer Bookshop in Perth, and buy magazines called
Soviet Union
and
Red China
(the latter may have been called
Pictorial China
—I can’t now recall for certain).
Red China
was overflowing with propaganda. Each issue seemed to be filled with pictures of smiling, rosy-cheeked girls picking apples
in the field, or carrying baskets bursting with agricultural produce.

Australia had its own Communist Party, and David struck up a friendship with Katherine Susannah Pritchard, one of its founding
members. But while he sometimes went to her house for dinner, neither he nor my father ever joined the Communist Party, nor,
as far as I am aware, did they ever go to the Soviet Friendship Society, as they are shown doing in
Shine.

David always yearned to visit the Soviet Union and see the situation there for himself. In 1986, by which time Mikhail Gorbachev
was in power, he got his wish. He visited music conservatories and took in the sights in Moscow and Leningrad. He returned
to Russia in 1993, after communism had collapsed, and gave a small recital of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” at
Rimsky-Korsakov’s home in St. Petersburg, which is now a museum. That year he also visited what had been one of the world’s
last bastions of hardline communism, Albania, and performed Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto at the Tirana Opera House
accompanied by the Albanian Symphony Orchestra.

Politics is still one of my brother’s chief interests. In particular, he closely follows events in Russia and Israel, reading
news magazines such as
Time
and watching CNN International. When he visited me in Israel in 1988, I was very impressed by his in-depth knowledge of the
intricacies of Israeli political life.

Although he loved talking to my father, outside the house David was not very sociable. As a teenager, he was somewhat of a
loner. He neither had nor sought many playmates. Life essentially revolved around one thing: the piano. It was practice, practice,
practice. He wanted to begin playing as early as four a.m., although Dad would not let him.

By now my father and mother, rather than pushing or coaxing my brother toward more playing, were becoming concerned that David
did not have enough other interests or social contact outside the family. He had the odd friend here and there, but not many.
Dad tried to encourage him to develop a closer friendship with a boy who lived down the road, called Boris. David played tennis
with Boris on a couple of occasions, but after a while, rather than turning up for meetings with his friend, David was back
at his beloved piano, mastering Balakirev’s “Islamey” or some other fiendishly difficult work.

When, at the age of fifteen, I temporarily lost my enthusiasm for playing the piano, I took up classical and modern ballet,
and later acting, squash, jazz piano, and yoga. David, on the other hand, spent what spare time he had on his own. He loved
reading science books. One of his favorites was Fred Hoyle’s
Astronomy
, which had extraordinary pictures of galaxies. When David was interviewed on the radio and asked what he wanted to be when
he grew up, he said a concert pianist or a conductor. But failing that, he said, his third choice was to be an astronomer.

Insofar as there was life for David away from the piano, it was mainly with myself, my brother, and my sisters. We all loved
playing table tennis and were very good at it. Our brown table tennis table traveled with us on the boat from Melbourne, and
together with the Rönish piano, it remained our most treasured family possession. Now battered and old, it is, like the piano,
still being used by Leslie and his family in Perth.

David’s hands, so brilliant on the piano keys, were almost as skillful at table tennis. He favored the grip used by the Chinese,
wrapping his thumb and index finger around the handle. Rallies with him were always a challenge. He could put a vicious spin
on the ball and, given half a chance, would smash it extremely hard at his opponent, leaving me panting for breath as I raced
from side to side trying to return his shots.

Meanwhile, David’s behavior continued to grow stranger. For example, he became absolutely obsessive about germs. He would
refuse to touch taps or sink areas, even at home. When he went to the bathroom he would pry the tap open with a fork, and
then, after he had washed his hands, he would take even greater care to close it without touching it, petrified that he might
pick up fresh germs.

In spite of the tension caused by David’s sometimes unpleasant behavior toward us, we still managed to go on enjoyable family
outings during this period. We often took the train to the port of Fremantle, twelve miles south of Perth, which is where
the Swan River flows into the Indian Ocean. We did not only go to “Freo”—as it is affectionately known by locals—just to have
a pleasant picnic. On scorching summer days temperatures could rise to 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Perth, and the special breeze
down in the port, known as the “Fremantle Doctor,” provided some welcome relief. All of us, David included, used to love these
trips. We either brought our own lunch—hard-boiled eggs, salad, fruit, bread and butter, a thermos of coffee, and fruit juice—or
Mom and Dad would treat us to fish and chips at the Fisherman’s Wharf, which was owned by Italian immigrants who went out
twice daily to bring back fresh catches.

While eating, the seagulls would surround us and screech away in their inimitable manner, loudly demanding a share of the
meal. We soon learned not to be too generous in giving away the scraps—unless we wanted to be bombarded by another hundred
hungry seagulls within a matter of seconds.