Out of Tune (24 page)

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
Shine
s 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.

S
hine 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 some 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.