On a drizzly day in February, 2005, I saw a man by the name of Nathaniel
Anthony Ayers playing the violin. He stood on the pavement in downtown Los
Angeles, next to a shopping trolley that appeared to contain all of his
belongings. A closer look revealed a small sign on the side of the trolley:
Little Walt Disney Concert Hall.
As it happens, the actual concert hall, the home of the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, was several blocks away.
I found the scene rather curious, particularly after noticing two things in
particular. First, the man was not playing for money. He didn’t have a hat
to collect coins and his violin case was not open for donations. He was
playing rather intently, as though this were a private practice session
rather than a public performance. The music was stirring at times but
circular, as if he were lost and uncertain about how to proceed. Second, he
was missing two strings.
I am by trade a newspaper columnist, unskilled in all other fields of
endeavour, and to my trained eye this looked like a scene worthy of my next
column. Surely the man had had some classical training, and there must be a
story that explained his current circumstances. I crossed the street, waited
for the violinist to notice my arrival and introduced myself.
He stepped back, warily. I presumed by his skittish nature and bedraggled
appearance that he might be suffering some mental difficulties. He eyed me
as if he was wondering whether I could be trusted and, when he calmed down a
bit, I asked why he played in that particular location. He pointed to a
nearby statue of Beethoven and told me the Master gave him inspiration. “I’m
trying to get back on track,” he said.
I could not have guessed where this tale would lead. The first column in the Los
Angeles Times brought an outpouring of generosity from readers,
including the donation of violins and cellos. There would be more columns as
readers demanded updates. There would be a book called The Soloist: A
Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship and the Redemptive Power of Music.
And there would be a movie called The Soloist, directed by Joe Wright
and starring Jamie Foxx as Ayers and Robert Downey Jr as myself.
Even as I write, none of this seems quite real — The Soloist
available in roughly a dozen countries around the world in book and movie
form. I travel the United States visiting universities that have assigned
the book to as many as 7,500 first-year students at a single college,
telling them what I’ve learnt in nearly five years with a tutor who was
homeless when I met him, crushing cockroaches to clear a space for his
bedding and fending off sewer rats with sticks on which he had written the
names “Beethoven” and “Brahms”.
And what of Ayers?A native of Cleveland, Ohio, he is 58 years old. He is still
a musician; he is still my friend. It took me a year to talk him in off the
streets and into an apartment, and I was helped in that effort by members of
the Los Angeles Philharmonic and by mental health professionals at an agency
called Lamp Community. Today, Ayers lives in that apartment, with a dozen or
more of his most prized possessions — violins, cellos, a French horn, a
viola, a flute, a clarinet, two guitars, a string bass, a trombone and a
piano.
In my 35 years as a journalist no single person has had a deeper impact on me.
No one has exasperated me in the way of Ayers, who has what the medical
profession calls schizophrenia, a treatable but incurable and debilitating
disease that strikes roughly one person in a hundred. No one has inspired me
in the way of Ayers, who has a passion few of us can ever hope to find. No
one has educated me the waythat he has. He has taught me patience and hope,
he has introduced me to the music of his gods, and has helped me to
rediscover my own passion — storytelling that can help us look past
generalisations and stereotypes and change our understanding of ourselves
and the world around us.
Early in our relationship, I spotted Ayers scratching names on the pavement.
When I asked who those people might be, he told me that they had been his
classmates at the Juilliard School for the Performing Arts in New York. He
had fallen in love with music as a boy in Cleveland, and he had taken to
heart his teacher’s advice that there might be a career ahead if he devoted
himself to the string bass. A scholarship to Ohio University followed, and
then Juilliard, where he played in a school orchestra for a brief time with
the cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
In his third year at Juilliard, Ayers began seeing and hearing things no one
else could. Soon he suffered a full-blown psychotic breakdown. His dream was dead, his career finished, his life for ever changed. Many years were spent
in and out of his mother’s home in Cleveland, in and out of treatment that
included shock therapy and a drug called Thorazine, the latter a form of
torture because it stole his passion for music. When his mother died he took
a bus to Los Angeles, believing, incorrectly, that his father lived there.
Another relative took him in briefly, but soon he was travelling across Los
Angeles on foot with his violin. Those travels ended the day he stumbled
upon the statue of Beethoven and considered himself finally home.
From the first word I wrote about Ayers I struggled with a great moral
conflict, wondering what right I had to tell the story of a man who might
not be considered competent rationally to give me his permission. But in
conversation with him, with mental health professionals and his sister,
Jennifer Ayers-Moore, I became convinced that to write nothing would be to
miss an opportunity to humanise thousands like him and to help destigmatise
mental illness.
My purpose was to shine a light on the human landfill we had created on Skid
Row in Los Angeles, shoving thousands of people into a dark hole, out of
sight and out of mind. We had created that horrid place by shutting down
mental hospitals decades ago and never following through on the promise of
community clinics that might have helped the Nathaniel Ayers of the world to
manage their lives. Ayers became the poster person for this cause, reminding
us that many of the street dwellers were severely mentally ill, many of them
veterans who had come home from war broken spiritually or physically. Many
had self-medicated to fight the terror of illness. He became the reminder
that none of those people is a stranger — they are our sons and daughters,
our brothers and sisters, and we know that they can be helped if society
would commit to proven programmes such as Lamp, which provides its clients
with permanent supportive housing and a chance to move on to transitional
housing or even independent living.
I have been privileged to share my knowledge of these programmes across the
United States and as the keynote speaker in a congressional briefing on
Capitol Hill in Washington, DC.
Naturally, I was more than a bit concerned when several movie producers told
me they would like to make a film of the story. I feared that mental illness
would be over-simplified, that all nuance would be lost, that there would be
a neat, happy tie-up, perhaps one in which Ayers joined the Los Angeles
Philharmonic for a triumphant finale. But two producers, Gary Foster and
Russ Krasnoff, assured me that wouldn’t be the case.
Then how would the movie end, I asked. The ending didn’t matter, they said.
The movie was a buddy story about two guys who came from different places
and had a chance encounter that changed both of them for ever. The irony,
they said, was that Ayers would do as much for Lopez as the reverse, helping
him to discover his own purpose as a storyteller and teaching him that there
is grace in giving.
Joe Wright pretty much sealed the deal when he told me he didn’t think he
wanted to make the movie. Why not, I asked. How could he understand Skid
Row, he asked. How would Ayers be affected?
I knew then that Wright was right for this movie, and even more so when he
became something of a regular on Skid Row, wandering the streets in
darkness, rolling his smelly cigarettes from a tobacco pouch as he engaged
with the inhabitants and found them more interesting than the rascals in the
comfy beach houses across town. Nothing gives me greater pride in this movie
than Wright’s insistence that those residents, many of them friends of
Ayers, play themselves in the movie.
“I made this movie for them,” Wright has said on many occasions, and indeed he
did, letting them tell their stories rather than handing them scripts.
On the night of the screening for the cast and crew those players were taken
by bus limo to the theatre in Hollywood. It was, for many, the night of
their lives, and being in their presence was one of the great treats of my
life.
Ayers was there too, afraid to open his eyes because of a fear of
two-dimensional images dancing across the screen like ghosts. He grumbled a
bit at times, objecting to something Foxx or Downey said. I told him that
the story had been changed a bit, but that it was honest nonetheless, true
to the essence of our relationship and capable of educating and healing
people around the world. These days, Ayers asks me to write a second book
and a third. “Make it a trilogy,” he says, and he wants for there to be
three movies as well.
Though it was difficult in many ways for him to read my book and experience
the movie, he has thanked me, saying that he felt he needed to confront the
reality of his life. The mental health professionals would put it another
way: perhaps he has developed more insight into his condition and that can
help him further his recovery.
He has some horrible days in which he is angry, difficult and downright
offensive. Most days, however, he is charming and witty and passionate about
music. He loves going to the beach with three or four instruments. He loves
going to baseball or basketball games. He loves going to concerts and seeing
his many friends in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In recent weeks he has
been to my house for a swim and a barbecue, and he brought five instruments
with him and played them all. A month ago we went to retrieve two of his
violins in the repair shop and ended up buying a new trombone.
Nothing pleases him like music, and he is capable of playing for hours on end.
He loves Beethoven and Bach, Schubert and Saën-Saens, Tchaikovsky and
Mozart. I don’t know whether he will ever be willing to try medication, but
it is clear that, for now, music is his medicine, Disney Hall his hospital
and his friends in the orchestra are his doctors.
Music brings him peace and joy and relief and no small measure of sanity, and
watching him play, eyes closed, head thrown back in ecstasy, takes me back
to the day I met him, a solitary man in a slow drizzle, caught in the spell
of Beethoven and trying to get back on track.
The Soloist is released on Sept 25
Music in the movies
Shine (1996) The template for that marvellous Hollywood invention, the
feel-good mental illness drama — with added music. A biopic that plays fast
and loose with the facts stars a manic Geoffrey Rush as the troubled pianist
David Helfgott and includes prodigious efforts with Rachmaninov at the Royal
College of Music, a redemptive finale and naked trampolining.
Hilary and Jackie (1998) Emily Watson was brittle and brilliant as the
tragic cellist Jacqueline du Pré. More worrying was the controversial source
material, based on the poisonous memoirs of Jackie’s rather bitter siblings,
which alleged that du Pré had slept with her sister’s husband.
Lisztomania (1975) Roger Daltrey is supremely silly as a 19th-century
rock star playing the composer and pianist Franz Liszt in Ken Russell’s
typically baroque splurge, never more so than when delivering the immortal
line “Piss off, Brahms”.
Mr Holland’s Opus (1996) Richard Dreyfuss plucks both heart and
violinstrings as a reluctant music teacher who turns inspirational mentor
over the course of 30 years. Cheesy perfection, graced by the
camembert-loaded finale from Dreyfuss’s loving pupils: “We are your
symphony, Mr Holland, we are your opus”.
Grade As all round.
The Red Violin (1998) The instrument was the unlikely star in this odd
ramble through the 300-year life of a precious 17th-century instrument.
Greta Scacchi and Samuel L. Jackson popped up in the cast, the latter
implausibly as a “violin appraiser”, but the real star was the violinist
Joshua Bell, whose bestselling soundtrack for the film made his name.
Neil Fisher
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