‘Shine’: The Life

Meeting David Helfgott is an intriguing experience for those unaware of his need for tactile expression. Everyone he encounters is hugged and kissed, and there is much hand-holding and even attempts at cuddling.

When I meet him in the office of my newspaper, the West Australian in Perth--a city of 1.2 million on the western coast of Australia, where Helfgott grew up--he immediately kisses me on both cheeks. We are about the same age and I had only met him briefly some years ago, but Helfgott greets me like an old friend. He holds my hand as we walk the 50 yards to an interview room, where we have arranged to talk about the release of his new CD recording of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto. In the film “Shine,” which opens Friday, the work serves as a motif for his own personal struggle to resume performing after spending years plagued by mental illness.

Helfgott recorded the concerto last year in Denmark, where he has a representative and a regular round of concert engagements. Until the release of “Shine” in Australia this past August, Helfgott’s concert career consisted mostly of one-night stands in country halls and minor city venues in Australia, where he would mostly play to small, if appreciative, audiences. He and his wife, Gillian, who serves as his manager, would crisscross the country, with many of the concerts within driving distance of their home at Bellingen in northern New South Wales.

Every 18 months or so the pair would head off for European engagements, arranged by his Danish friend and business manager Nils Ruben. But in Australia, “Shine” has already caused a dramatic upswing in Helfgott’s touring schedule and his public profile as a solo concert pianist. Australian audiences now cannot seem to get enough of this intriguingly eccentric yet brilliant pianist with the balding pate and penchant for Russian-style white blouses during concert performances.

In the past few weeks he has been playing sell-out engagements at major concert houses across the country, with invitations to perform at film and music industry award nights also on the agenda. Critics and the public seem to be in accord in their praise of this occasionally wayward pianist who attacks the keyboard with such passion and technical mastery, even if his mutterings and grunts as he swoons over difficult passages are like an additional soundtrack. And his recording of Rachmaninoff’s fiendishly challenging Third Concerto is one of Australia’s biggest-selling classical records.

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This popularity and critical acceptance is a far cry from the obscurity and emotional upheaval of his so-called lost years in Perth in the 1970s and early ‘80s when, as “Shine” shows in graphic cinematic terms, Helfgott suffered a series of mental breakdowns that saw him committed to the state’s mental institution on several occasions.

His years of mental illness ruled out the international concert career that had been predicted when he left Perth in the late 1960s to study at the Royal College of Music in London. Although he completed his studies in London, there are conflicting reports about his success as a student, and he returned to his hometown a disillusioned young man, incapable of fulfilling the promise of his childhood gifts. There remains a mystery about what caused his breakdown, although the film links it to the break with his domineering father, Peter Helfgott, and what director Scott Hicks has called a flawed rite of passage to adulthood.

Whatever the truth, it is unlikely to ever be revealed. Most of what happened to David Helfgott remains locked away in his head, and he is either unwilling or unable to talk about his “lost” years in psychiatric care. For six years from the latter ‘70s to the early ‘80s, Helfgott, 49, lived in a single room in a boardinghouse in Perth, a locale better known as a halfway hostel for recovering alcoholics and psychiatric patients.

He did, however, frequently move out into society, playing the piano with a church group and enjoying a measure of sociability. But it was not until a Perth general practitioner, Dr. Chris Reynolds, invited him to perform in his wine bar, Riccardo’s, that Helfgott’s career seemed capable of renewal. Playing regularly in public gave Helfgott back his confidence, and when Reynolds also took him into his own home to live, his health began to improve.

The bar-owning doctor helped Helfgott tame his addictions to coffee and cigarettes and set him on the road to a fitness program that saw him swim regularly. It was through Reynolds that Helfgott met his wife, Gillian Murray, an astrologer 15 years his senior. After a brief courtship the pair were married and Gillian took over the nurturing role, also becoming his business manager, confidant and spokeswoman.

One of the sadder aspects of the making of the film of his life story is that it led to a rift between the Helfgotts and Reynolds. When Hicks first approached Reynolds 10 years ago with his ideas of making a film, the doctor was considering writing his own book on Helfgott (a book that never materialized) and rejected Hicks’ offer to be part of the project.

Reynolds now says a deal was struck between Hicks and Gillian Helfgott behind his back and that he was written out of the film. (His role is transformed into the bar owner Sylvia, who hires the pianist and introduces him to Gillian.) Reynolds says that he feels betrayed by the film and that he has not seen the Helfgotts for several years.

“If it was not for me, I don’t think there would have been a David Helfgott and the film ‘Shine,’ ” Reynolds says. “When I first met him he was a mess, there’s no question about that. He was in a very cowed state and extremely nervous when he started to play in Riccardo’s. But playing in the bar really did turn him around, and with the help of a lot of other people in Perth, he did get his life back on track.”

Reynolds, who at one time had access to Helfgott’s psychiatric records while the pianist was in his care, says Helfgott was at that time suffering from some sort of schizophrenic affective disorder. (Another close family member, who has qualifications in clinical psychiatry, once described his condition as “atypical schizophrenia.”)

“But I don’t think even a conference of psychiatrists would agree on David’s condition,” Reynolds says. “He remains a mystery, and I don’t think there is much point in putting a label on it.”

Helfgott’s mental problems have left him with a mode of behavior that tends toward the childlike and trusting, and he speaks in a rhythmically pleasant form of wordplay that rarely makes sense to the outsider. He will jabber nonsense rhymes, repeat phrases that please him and dart off down verbal pathways that those not attuned to his peculiar wavelength will find difficult to follow. In short, it is virtually impossible to have a direct conversation with Helfgott even today, when his mental health has markedly improved.

His wife is there to communicate for him on every occasion, and her frankness and directness in dealing with the media have contributed greatly to his popularity in his own country.

“David’s career has undergone a remarkable transformation in recent months,” she says. “He’s handling the pressure of performance and media interviews extremely well and actually seems to be thriving on the attention. People are so interested in his career after seeing the film, and it’s certainly accelerated his success. You could say it has changed his life. David always had a good concert career, but now we are getting bookings in all sorts of places.

“I think many people are coming to his concerts who would not normally be interested in classical music, but they’ve been drawn to David’s personality and his warmth as a performer. One critic said he had never seen a performer who gave as much of himself as David.”

At times during the interview, Helfgott’s hand reaches out for mine, as if seeking my tactile response and reassurance. This is one of the problems for people encountering Helfgott for the first time: how to react to his effusive approach with its desire to touch and fondle. For many, such behavior is endearing; for people who prefer their concert pianists to remain imperious and aloof, the experience can be alienating and rather off-putting.

Not everyone is enamored of such effusive behavior in Australia. Nevertheless, Helfgott has become the country’s most famous pianist with his performances of the great romantic composers such as Tchaikovsky, Brahms and Liszt. What is lacking in his career, though, are invitations to perform with major symphony orchestras. It takes a conductor of rare understanding to coax the best out of Helfgott’s often idiosyncratic solo style, and many orchestral managements are wary of his eccentricity.

There has been considerable interest in Australia about the reactions of members of the Helfgott family to the film.

Some family members have been hurt by its portrayal of their father, Peter, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, who is depicted as a stern and unbending tyrant who occasionally beat his son. David Helfgott’s oldest sister, Margaret, who has lived in Israel for the last 20 years, has written to Australian newspapers complaining that the cinematic portrait of their father is a distortion of the truth.

Their father was a loving man, she says, who would make financial sacrifices to ensure that his son had a decent piano on which to play.

“It is most unfortunate that Peter’s optimistic, lively and joyful nature is not conveyed in the film, and it is not less than a travesty to depict him striking his son, or burning his manuscripts, events which certainly never occurred,” she wrote to the Perth newspaper.

“A fictionalized account based on a person’s life can, by definition, take liberties with the truth. However, a biographical representation of a living family, such as the film ‘Shine,’ can indulge in no such luxury,” she continued. “It breaks my heart that the man behind David’s genius, his father Peter, should have needlessly been misrepresented for dramatic effect.”

Younger brother Les has complained that the film’s disclaimer--that although David and Gillian are actual persons, the film also depicts characters and events that are fictional--comes in fine print in the credits at the end and is too brief and difficult to read.

Helfgott’s mother, Rachel, a shy and retiring woman of 75, still lives in Perth but has not spoken publicly about the film. Helfgott, however, has not rejected the portrait of his father and has frequently complained that his father did block his path to study in the United States when he was in his early teens.

That decision obviously still rankles Helfgott, although whether it sowed the seeds of his eventual mental illness is arguable. Gillian Helfgott says her husband is very pleased with the film version of his life and grateful that it was made with integrity and candor.

To this day Helfgott remains an enigma, a man of formidable intellect hidden behind a childlike demeanor and an oddness of behavior patterns that make the normal transactions of human communication difficult.

The big question about Helfgott is whether he will be able to withstand the pressure of international exposure now that the film is about to be released in the United States and later Europe. He plans to visit the States for the first time in March and is expected to return later in the year for concert dates, which are still being negotiated. In the planning stages is a concert at the Hollywood Bowl for the second half of 1997.

He will also travel in May for concert dates at the Royal Albert Hall in London as well as in Denmark, Switzerland and Germany. The CD of his Copenhagen recording of Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto will be released in the United States by BMG to coincide with the release of the film.