'It's macabre. It's sick.

My friend Jackie has been

betrayed,' by John Williams
By Nicci Gerrard
Sunday 24 January 1999 14.44GMT

John Williams had known Jacqueline du Pr from when they did their homework together over
tea as teenagers. When multiple sclerosis established its grip on her, the guitarist and the cellist
remained close friends. He saw her grow crazier, more bloated, more tormented - her girlish face
fattening, her sight failing, her ears ringing, her thoughts scattering.
By the end, the exuberant young musician who had electried the nation (her husband, pianist
and conductor Daniel Barenboim, once wrote of her that she played as if she were composing the
music as she went along) sat helplessly in a wheelchair, moon-faced and mute.
In an interview with The Observer , Williams added his voice to the swell of critical distaste over
the lm Hilary and Jackie , the story of Du Pr's relationship with her older sister, Hilary. Based on
the self-regarding memoir by Hilary and her brother Piers, A Genius in the Family , the lm
depicts an intense and loyal sibling love: a love so unselsh that when Du Pr was in need Hilary
gave her everything - including her husband, 'Kier' Finzi.
Hilary writes with pervading sentimentality, and claims that she was absolutely central to her
sister's tragically shortened life - she developed MS when only 26 and died in 1987.Williams
insisted passionately: 'Hilary du Pr should absolutely not be entitled to leave to posterity such a
grossly distorted picture of Jackie.' Presenting Du Pr's sexual encounters with Kier as an aair
enabled by the saintly Hilary was 'sick'.
'By the end it is true Jackie was sick with her terrible illness; sick in her head and her body. But
she was never sick like this kind of sick - this is macabre sick,' he said.
The critics who have lined up to protest at Hilary and Jackie include many of the greatest
musicians alive: Yehudi Menuhin, Itzhak Perlman, William Pleeth, Mstislav Rostropovich,
Pinchas Zukerman and Julian Lloyd Webber. They say this picture of Du Pr as 'selsh, spoilt and
manipulative' is 'not the Jacqueline du Pr we knew'.
Williams emphasised that his objection to the lm and to Hilary's mawkish written account of her
sister was not to do with the facts.'I'm willing to accept the facts are true. I totally believe that
Jackie had enormous mental problems by the end of her life; I totally accept that she slept with
Hilary's husband.I don't have problems with that. And actually I don't think it is necessarily a bad
thing for us to know about things like that; I don't think that a life need be hidden. But it depends
on who is doing the telling. It depends on the messenger.'
The messenger, he believed, was a 'nutty woman' who never cared for her sister, who abandoned
her and then claimed to have been with her, and who rapturously claimed her after she was gone.

Williams pointed out that Hilary and her husband lived in a pseudo-religious Sixties commune.
'I'm not judging his behaviour. I think everyone took it for granted. All I am saying is that it is
really obscene, and wrong, to present it as an aair where one sister, like the Virgin Mary, handed
over her man to the other. Jackie was one of half a dozen, maybe.' Williams is disturbed that the
media have simply accepted the sibling line. 'You would think they would check their sources,' he
said.
During Du Pr's nal days, Williams was not aware of her brother and sister being around to
support her, although Hilary claims they were always there for her. He said: 'Of course, I wasn't
there 24 hours a day; maybe they came a few times and we didn't know about it. Two of her great
friends, Cynthia Friend and Diana Nupern, who also died young, used to visit her every day. They
were like sisters to her. Perlman or Zukerman, all her musical friends who lived abroad, would
come to see her every time they were in London. Not Piers and Hilary - I got the impression really
that she had left her family, or they her.'
Du Pr once told Williams what she also, repeatedly, told Cynthia Friend: that Piers and Hilary
had told her MS was 'God's punishment for leaving Christ' (she converted to Judaism when she
married Barenboim).
'I don't want to attack religion,' said Williams. 'Just because I don't share a religion doesn't mean I
am intolerant of it. I don't have a problem with someone carrying a cross on their shoulder at
Easter. But if that someone says that MS is God's punishment, well that summons up a certain
kind of picture in my mind. I nd it creepy. Very creepy.
'We're into dottiness, here. There's a kind of religious piety that leads to this kind of madness and it is much more dicult to identify than Jackie's madness, which came from MS, the steroids
she had to take, a chilly remote family, and her physical inability, in the end, to deal with it all.
'You can tell a bigger lie,' he added sombrely, 'by using half the truth.'
Williams remembers Du Pr as 'a bit like a schoolgirl, totally open, rather jolly - but she had these
shrewd, discerning eyes. Someone else's eyes in her round jolly face. People take dierent routes
to deal with life, they become cynical or alcoholic or depressed. Jackie always took everything
totally to heart. There was no bit of cynicism in her.
'She was very vulnerable to pain. There was something childlike about her, as there is with a lot of
romantic geniuses. Like Mozart and Barenboim. She was very wonderful. This stu by Hilary is well, it's all woohoo.'
Cynthia Friend , who was with Jackie when she died, is also distressed by the recasting of her life.
'I did love her,' she said, 'and I spent a lot of time with her, as did a lot of her friends. She had a lot
of people who loved her. Her last ve years were dreadful, you can't imagine how dreadful. If she
had been an animal you would have wanted to have put an end to the suering.
'I saw her every day, just about. I used to sit and feed her by the end. I rarely saw her brother or
sister - once, twice perhaps. I was an only child myself, and I always felt Jackie had no family
either.
'They endlessly told her it was God's punishment. She used to ask me if that could be true. It's a
bit sick really.

'At the end, the doctor said her death was imminent - it could be two hours, two days, a week.
They didn't come. I don't understand that. There were a few of us there, and they didn't come.
They came when she was dead.
'I don't want any medals - I loved her, of course I wanted to be with her. But I've got two
daughters and a son and I would hope that they'd be there for each other. I wouldn't even criticise
their absence - except for the claims they make now.'
There was, says Friend, one member of the family who was amazing to Jackie - Barenboim's
mother, Aida. 'When Daniel was away, touring or whatever, he would call her in Israel. One phone
call and she'd drop everything: teaching commitments, husband, home. She'd come, for a month,
six weeks. She always used to say to me, in that Israeli-Argentine accent of hers: "She has all this
family, and where are they?" She could never understand it.'
A few days ago, Friend read a magazine report that Hilary said that at the end Du Pr's so-called
'celebrity friends' had abandoned her. 'I felt like vomiting when I read that. We never deserted
her. At the end, it got more and more dicult, but we didn't desert her. Her diary was full of
people who came to be with her.
'She was special, you know. Not because she was famous, but because she was lovely. And she
loved Daniel, you know - it was a great love aair they had. I hate it that some people now will
just think of her as a sexy bird.
'I can't tell you how special we thought she was, nave and joyful and a privilege to know. She was
just lovely, so handsome, so strong, what a walk she had, yanking along her cello, she was like a
gypsy, a girl from the Russian steppes.'
People often lay claim to the dead, ght over their possessions and their memories. Williams and
Friend say they are not trying to appropriate Jacqueline du Pr as their own but to free her from
the shroud her sister has laid upon her.

Topics
Multiple sclerosis
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