I met Jacqueline du Pre and spent time alone with her. Ditto, Daniel Barenboim. Ditto, Hilary and Piers du Pre. Ditto, Bill Pleeth, her mentor and the man she called her “cello daddy”. Following her death I talked about her to people ranging from Dr Adam Limentani (her psychoanalyst) to Lord Harewood (her god-father), as well as to countless musicians. None of this makes me an expert on Jacqueline du Pre. But it does, I think, help me understand the depth of animus unleashed – again – by last week’s release of Hilary and Jackie.
I’ll never forget sitting with her that Saturday afternoon in the mews house near Harrods where she lived. The girl with the flying, wheaten hair had transformed into a bloated, twitching mass in a wheelchair. Though she was still five years or so from death, she had virtually lost the power of speech. But her wide eyes kept looking around the room and she repeatedly tried to tell me something. “Church?” I finally, hesitantly, guessed. Her face lit up and she nodded furiously; the house, she was trying to tell me, was built from a church. Then Barenboim joined us and she started trying to communicate something again. I looked towards Barenboim for guidance:
“She wants me to put on one of her recordings,” he explained.
Moments later, the sounds of her playing an arrangement of Le Cygne by Saint-Saens soared ethereally from stereo speakers all round us. She sat entranced, jerking around in her wheelchair and making hopelessly doomed attempts to recreate the fingerings and bowing she had used as a 17 year old some two decades before. Looking back, I think she was trying to tell me that she was still the same beautiful woman, so full of life, inside; that the terrible wreck before me was not the real Jacqueline du Pre. It was an almost unbearably poignant sight – one that Barenboim and others close to her endured countless times before her death in 1987.
Long before Hilary and Piers du Pre had written their much-maligned book and almost ten years before the film was produced, I came to my own independent conclusions in the Observer:
But with the legends have come bitterness, recriminations, endless gossip. It is as though someone has to be found to blame for the tragedy no one can explain, as if a human scapegoat must be produced.
The current scapegoats are the du Pres, who not only watched the painful disintegration of their sister but also suffered simultaneously through that of both parents; at other times it has been Barenboim himself, who fathered children and started a new life in Paris while still married to Jackie; or Ruth Ann Cannings, her devoted Guyanese-born nurse for 16 years and an evangelical Christian, accused of telling her she could be cured if she turned to the Lord; or Limentani, allegedly for encouraging her to dwell on her past; Jews, for taking Jackie away from her roots; and so on. But my own conclusion then, irrespective of what the du Pres have been saying since, was inescapable: the real and only scapegoat was what Jackie herself called “multiple fuckosis”.
Having read the book and seen the movie, I find it sad to see self-publicists like Julian Lloyd Webber – not, it has to be said, the world’s most gifted cellist – leap on to that denunciatory bandwagon. An article by him in the Daily Telegraph, for instance, is headlined “An Insult to Jackie’s Memory” but ends with a telling plug: “The CD of Julian Lloyd Webber’s tribute to Jacqueline du Pre, Jackie’s Song, is out this month on Philips.” Enough said? Or would Lloyd Webber like me to be more specific about the name of “one young British cellist” which I said ten years ago would provoke “loud raspberry sounds” from Jackie?
It is, sadly, irrefutably true that she became foul-mouthed and then tried to turn each person in her life against the others. Even Lord Harewood told me that “Jackie became very irresponsible with what she said – it was a sort of fantasy, manoeuvring things in her mind”. The only major new fact that nobody told me in 1989 – but which has since emerged from the book and film – is that Jackie is supposed to have slept with Hilary’s husband.
We are meant, it seems, to hold up our hands in horror over this; we must not allow difficult realities to sully that seductive image of the smiling girl with the waving hair flying so triumphantly through Elgar or Dvorak. I believe, though, that both Jackie’s long-term image and history itself are well served by the book and movie (whatever their undoubted simplicities, shortcomings and even fictions). We learn that great artistry often comes at a terrible price; how a well-meaning but over-ambitious parent can create awful familial dysfunction that literally then destroys lives; how human nature seeks to hold others to blame for the inexplicable; and how the lives of the apparently enviable and glitteringly successful can so easily, in reality, be private hells.
Her life had a terrible symmetry: 16 years driving relentlessly towards superstardom, ten years in the glare and blur of the spotlight to which she had been unwittingly and uncomprehendingly propelled, then another 16 years retreating from it all in mysterious illness and death. Now sales of her recordings – especially her Elgar – are going through the roof around the world. But to remember Jackie I prefer to listen to her Schumann concerto, the recording that Bill Pleeth’s son put on as she lay dying. It’s a truly miraculous recording. She made it with Barenboim when she was just 23, yet the young Englishwoman from Purley could perfectly and instinctively evoke the melancholic fatalism of a 19th-century German man already going mad. Listening just to those elegiac opening bars, somehow, no further words are necessary.
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