Freddie Mercury (27 page)

The garden went through an ongoing process of change and followed Freddie’s whole
raison d’être
which was to continuously create, adapt and then change and improve. When he arrived, the garden was almost a classic Edwardian affair with a brick and pillar wisteria pergola in great need of repair, large expanses of lawn edged by big shrubberies and in the middle of the lawns there were two fine magnolia trees, one by a pathway and one by the corner of the Japanese room. Over a period of time, a rose arbour was created in the rose bed, the pergola flourished once again, the shrubbery disappeared and the fishponds and Japanese gardens emerged. In the Japanese garden there were two delicate little arbours, one of which became known to us as the bus shelter. The chaos which the creation of a garden can cause is quite unbelievable. Freddie employed a Japanese gardenmaker who spent a lot of time going to quarries and selecting exactly the right rocks. These arrived at the house along with a massive crane which was used to lift them from the flat bed of the truck over the garden wall and into position. Some weighed more than a ton. It took a long time but as far as Freddie was concerned, all the time and effort was well worth it. It was his little piece of his much-loved Japan in his little corner of London.

The lime trees were pleached on the southerly back wall to create a denser privacy and the two huge plane trees on the westerly wall had to be regularly pollarded. Where once huge honeysuckle vines grew on the east wall of the garden, there ultimately sprouted a conservatory.

There was one thorny problem however as regards this conservatory. Freddie wanted to have it built against the wall of the cottages which formed Logan Mews. While he already owned the ground floor of this neighbouring building, its upper floor was owned by someone else. The garage which was the ground floor had its own door into the grounds of Garden Lodge.

To be able to build his conservatory he had therefore to wait until the other owner was prepared to sell. Because of Freddie’s firm intention to build his conservatory, he was therefore at the other owner’s mercy. The man could basically ask what price he wanted knowing that Freddie would have to pay. After a period of time, the man eventually sold and Freddie then had another building which he could convert and decorate and if we thought that Garden Lodge had had a massive face-lift, it was as nothing to what was about to happen at numbers 5 and 6 Logan Mews.

Robin Moore-Ede was once again commissioned as supervising interior decorator. He and Freddie had developed a very trusting rapport which extended to one occasion I remember when Robin, about to be commissioned by Dustin Hoffman, called Freddie and asked if the actor could come and see some of Robin’s work at Garden Lodge. Freddie immediately obliged and laid on tea, not only for Dustin but for his wife and children as well. Freddie asked Dustin if he would do him a favour. Freddie presented him with a Japanese writing board and felt tip pen. Freddie then said, “It’s his birthday,” pointing to me.

Dustin then wrote on the card, Happy Birthday, drew a picture of a birthday cake with candles and signed it ‘Dustin Hoffman’ before handing it over to me. Sadly, it still remains amongst some of my memorabilia in the loft at Garden Lodge. But back to the Mews conversion. The way the adjoining properties existed, the bottom half of number six was Freddie’s garage whereas both floors of number five and the top half of number six were residential The cottages were surprisingly spacious. Freddie intended continuing the idea of keeping the same proportion of residential space but decided, due to the conservatory being against the outside wall, that he wanted the
property’s sitting room in the bottom half of number six to allow access to the conservatory.

This plan necessitated the whole of the inside of the two cottages being gutted in order to re-site the garage in the bottom half of number five.

The conservatory, the initial reason for the project, had a roof constructed of two arched gables in flexible Plexiglas with standard-glazed windows at the front and side. It was divided into two areas, one for dining and one for sitting. There were three big areas for plants plus lots of room for pots. It was a multitude of colour throughout the year with many exotic species including bougainvillea, datura and strellitzia as well as colourful geraniums, all specifically chosen so that there was always something in flower. There was always a lemon tree although not the same one. When one lemon tree died, Freddie would insist another was bought. Lemons are notoriously difficult to maintain even in their natural habitat. The furniture was cane and the cushions were covered with a colourful stripe-pattern fabric Freddie had bought in Ibiza.

Ibiza reminds me of holidays and it is perhaps surprising that Freddie never took holidays as such except on the Balearic island of Ibiza which he discovered through Roger Taylor who had a house there. Freddie loved the place and stayed either at Roger’s house or at Tony Pike’s hotel in the foothills just outside San Antonio Abad. No lager louts at Pikes, merely champagne louts! We would arrive on the island in a ten-seater private jet chartered from Field Aviation at Heathrow. There would be about eight of us as the other two seats would always be required for excess baggage. Even going only for a two week break, Freddie would still insist that half his entire wardrobe came with him. Just in case. I’m reminded of one occasion which wasn’t too funny though. It was extremely hot on the day we flew. No one noticed that the interior of the plane was excessively hot. It wasn’t until the plane was taxi-ing and taking off that we noticed that extremely hot air was being blown through the air-conditioning system. We returned to Heathrow and were told that somehow the exhaust was being partially vented through the air-conditioning ducts! We remained on the ground for three hours until the fault was fixed by which time, had we taken a scheduled flight, we would already have been by the pool at Pike’s.

We were not amused in the slightest.

One of the party on the Ibiza junkets was often Graham Hamilton whom Freddie had known for many years. He and his partner Gordon Dalziel began their company Factotum to provide tailor-made chauffeur services. Nothing out of the ordinary fazed either of them and they would think nothing of having to drive someone’s car to the south of France while the owner went by plane. It was due to Graham’s driving skills and his ability to make Freddie laugh that he knew Freddie would always ask him along to drive the People Mover which Freddie would always hire. Freddie decided that with the number of people going to Ibiza, it would be easier to transport them all at once rather than hiring individual cars and taxis. During one of the visits to Pikes Hotel, Tony Pike persuaded Freddie to go out on his powerboat which he proudly boasted was the fastest on the island. I rather think Dave Clark, who happened also to be staying at Pikes, was included in the party. It certainly was an experience. You get used to travelling on roads at sixty miles an hour but it seems very much faster on a boat. Someone might contradict me but I don’t think Freddie could swim. He therefore always seemed a little uneasy on water. This occasion was no different. While the rest of us might be standing on the back seat and holding onto the cross rail, feeling the wind almost pushing us off the back of the boat, Freddie would be huddled safely in the comfortable seats protected by the windscreen in front. While the boat was at anchor off Formenterra and we all got into the crystal clear sea, Freddie remained firmly on board.

The day out was finally marred when Tony Pike presented Freddie with a bill for the outing which, because of the way he had been invited, Freddie never expected. He thought Tony was just being nice. So much for hotel proprietors. Whenever any of his friends were contemplating a stay at Pikes, he would say, “Lovely, dear. Lovely place but just watch out if he asks you to go out on that fucking boat!”

While generally not someone to bear a grudge, if Freddie got niggled by something, trivial as it might seem, he would behave like a little terrier with a huge cushion, refusing to let go until the cushion had died! He was very prone to being able to make a huge mountain out of what to us might seem an insignificant molehill.

Freddie’s love of Pike’s Hotel was so great that he had ‘that’ famous birthday party there. He chartered a plane and flew fifty of his friends from Britain to join the other three hundred guests from all around
the world. The principal food at this bash was paella. But
paella
for four hundred? The pans were enormous and all heated by open fires. Fire figured a lot. Due to some guest’s over active arm movement while holding a cigarette, some of the paper decorations caught fire which again set light to fabric hangings which had been draped down the side of the house. Everything wet was thrown on to try and douse the blaze, from buckets of ice cubes and water to champagne. Considering the spectacle, I think only twenty five per cent of the gathered guests realised anything was amiss. The rest were, frankly, far too far gone. Uncharacteristically, Freddie disappeared halfway through the party and retired to his room with a handful of friends and let the party go on without him. Although he frowned upon such reclusive behaviour in others, on this occasion even for him the crowd was too much and if you think about it, he couldn’t possibly have known all those four hundred people. He just needed to give the smiling façade a break.

But anyway, back to the mews where upstairs, there were to be four bedrooms, three with an en suite bathroom and one with an adjoining toilet. The main bedroom and bathroom were three of the original upstairs rooms knocked together. He carried the marble theme of his own bathroom through to this bathroom but rather than use marble throughout, he was very interested in, and used, an applied painted marbling on the bath panels and the architraving around the doors. This bedroom also incorporated a dressing room area at its entrance. The marbler was another of Mary Austin’s boyfriends by the name of Piers Cameron who later fathered her two children.

The second bedroom was decorated with wallpaper that Freddie had saved after a shopping trip in Japan many years before. It was a shade of maroon with gold pattern of Japanese inspiration. The decoration of the adjoining bathroom adhered to the Japanese theme.

Next came my room, which of all the bedrooms in the mews was the one I fell in love with. I can’t think of any reason why except perhaps the colour in the bedroom which was eau-de-nil and the adjoining bathroom which had all its surfaces finished in black granite. Very Thirties, perhaps yet another inspiration from Freddie’s Hollywood fascination. I just loved the black. I moved into that bedroom as soon as the mews conversion was completed. This enabled Mary to move her secretarial office into Garden Lodge where she assumed my old room. In the centre of the ceiling of the landing, a skylight was
installed which flooded the whole area with light. This was just as well because Freddie had had woven a dark blue fabric of an Oriental golden design which was then backed and hung as wallpaper. Without the skylight, it would have been a very gloomy space.

There was one central staircase which led down to one side of the sitting room which was the whole of the ground floor area of number 6. Towards the back of the room, there was a small raised area where Freddie sited the dining table and six chairs. Also, within this area was the small kitchen which was decorated in the Mediterranean yellows and greens of Freddie’s holiday discovery, the island of Ibiza. On one trip to Madrid, he bought a series of antique Spanish ceramic tiles which he incorporated in the mews’ kitchen. It was the yellows and greens from these which he used for the washed-out and sun-faded peasant look he wanted to achieve.

It was on the same trip to Madrid that Freddie was taken by Pino Sagliocca to an antique shop in the city’s centre. It was a rambling old building, one of those which is far bigger on the inside than it appears from the outside. We were guided around many rooms which contained all manner of antiques from ancient Egyptian relics through to suits of armour from mediaeval times and then to more recent nineteenth and twentieth century works, sculpture and paintings and objets d’art.

Towards the top of the building we found something that looked rather incongruous. Every now and then there was a glimpse of metal bars like a jail cell. We paid no attention and were led into what was described as a room which had been removed intact from one of the country’s ancient aristocratic palaces. It was a complete wood-panelled room including the ceiling. As soon as we were all inside, someone closed a metal gate behind us. We started to worry, thinking immediately of a kidnap or some such drama until we were calmed by the shop’s owner who proceeded to alter the lighting within the room and then carefully slid back three of the wall panels.

Hidden there were three of the most beautiful paintings Freddie said he had ever seen. One was very dark and exuded very dark vibes. The second I cannot remember clearly because the third remains so seared into my mind. It measured some twelve by eighteen inches and was a painting of the Madonna, in all the luminous blues and whites and golds associated with her image. Maybe it was a trick of the light but that painting really stood out.

Freddie was so taken by one of the pictures which was by the Spanish master Francisco Goya that he decided, no matter what he had to go through, he simply had to have it.

The owner of the painting was prepared to let it go for five hundred thousand pounds which Freddie was quite prepared to give. Before making final arrangements, a stumbling block arose. The Spanish government was not prepared to allow any of the country’s national treasures in the form of works of art to be exported. Therefore, the only way Freddie could acquire the painting was by purchasing a property in Spain. Many solutions were suggested, including a house in Ibiza or in Barcelona but the nearest he came to buying was when someone sent him the plans and photographs of a house very near Santander near the Franco-Spanish border in the north which was one of the very few private houses outside Barcelona that had been designed by Freddie’s favourite architect, the Catalan, Antoni Gaudi.