Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (14 page)

Tragedy struck in Freddie’s life (and many shared the sadness) on 18 September 1970, when his idol Jimi Hendrix died. The definitive rock musician who had famously performed “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Woodstock Festival the previous year, who had just opened his own state-of-the-art recording studio, Electric Lady, in Greenwich Village, New York, and who had only the previous month played for his biggest-ever audience—600,000 people at the Isle of Wight Festival—was found dead in a pool of red wine vomit at girlfriend Monika Dannemann’s Samarkland Hotel apartment in Notting Hill. While insiders would claim for years that Hendrix was murdered, the most likely cause of his death was an overdose of the sedative Vesparax, ingested with excess alcohol. Dannemann later committed suicide.

Freddie was inconsolable. Too devastated to work, he and Roger closed their stall as a mark of respect. Later that day, while rehearsing at Imperial College, virtually on the doorstep of the scene of Hendrix’s death, Brian, Roger, and Freddie played their own personal tribute in a
jam session of “Voodoo Chile,” “Purple Haze,” “Foxey Lady,” and other now immortal Hendrix hits.

The perfect bass player continued to elude the trio. Not until February 1971 did they run into John Deacon by chance at a London disco. Leicester-born Deacon, who had been involved with bands since the age of fourteen, was an electronics undergraduate at Chelsea College. A man of few words, he made up for it with an acute sense of rhythm and a restless brain. He was also a dab hand with amplifiers and other music equipment, and was looking for a band to join.

More than that, says Roger: “We thought he was great. We were all so used to each other, and were so over the top, we thought that because he was quiet he would fit in with us without too much upheaval. He was a great bass player, too—and the fact that he was a wizard with electronics was definitely a deciding factor.”

From February 1971 until Queen’s final gig on 9 August 1986, the band lineup remained exactly the same.

Six months of intense rehearsal ensued as Brian, Roger, and Freddie set about teaching John their repertoire. At the time, John was still a student, while Brian was working on his thesis. They still regarded Queen as an extracurricular hobby. Only Roger and Freddie could devote their time totally to Queen and had set their hearts on a full-blown rock ’n’ roll career. On 11 July 1971, Queen began an eleven-date tour of Cornwall, culminating in the outdoor Tregye Festival of Contemporary Music on 21 August. Further gigs followed throughout the Michaelmas term, including another at Imperial College on 6 October, an appearance at Epsom Swimming Baths on 9 December, and a New Year’s Eve show at Twickenham’s London Rugby Club.

Roger, meanwhile, had lost interest in the market stall. The novelty had worn off, but worse, it had started to feel “undignified.” He quit the “Kasbah,” leaving Freddie to team up with fellow stallholder Alan Mair. Freddie remained as enthusiastic as ever about the Kensington scene. Not just because he was a deep-dyed mover and shaker. He had fallen in love.

7

All my lovers asked me why they couldn’t replace Mary, but it’s simply impossible. To me, she was my common-law wife. To me, it was a marriage. We believe in each other, and that’s enough for me. I couldn’t fall in love with a man the same way as I did with Mary.

Freddie Mercury

The self-realization process would have been so important to him . . . Freddie came from a culture in which you are not supposed to love men. So you try and conform, even though you are tortured within. It’s not uncommon. Elton did it twice. On the route to self-discovery for a gay man from a repressed background, there is often an interlude of having a girlfriend. This is sometimes about need, and sometimes a case of one trying to do what is expected of one.

Paul Gambaccini

W
ith her
apricot hair, green eyes, and Bambi lashes, Mary Austin was the embodiment of a Hulanicki Biba poster. When the fashion designer founded the Kensington emporium from which a flourishing fashion movement arose, Barbara Hulanicki might have chosen Mary as her muse. Petite and fine-boned, what Mary lacked in terms of stature and confidence she more than compensated for with almost textbook seventies style.

*   *   *

Mick Rock, a London-born Cambridge modern languages graduate and alumnus of the London Film School, got into professional photography when the late Syd Barrett (former lead singer of Pink Floyd) asked Rock to shoot him for the cover of his solo album
The Madcap Laughs
. Rock—his real name—tumbled into seventies drug culture and befriended David Bowie, becoming his official photographer. He is credited not only with documenting the music scene—“The Man Who Shot the Seventies”—but with having helped to create it. He took some of the first publicity pictures for Freddie and Queen, going on to produce iconic album artwork for
Queen II
and
Sheer Heart Attack
. Rock has lived in New York since 1977, after becoming immersed in the underground scene created by the Ramones, Talking Heads, and David Bowie.

“Freddie was already living with Mary when I met him, so I got to know and love them both equally,” Rock tells me. “I was always popping round to their little flat to hang out with them at teatime. Freddie was big on tea. At the height of the glam rock scene, Mary was a really cute-looking lady who could have had anyone, done anything. But she never saw herself as anything special. She never wanted to put herself forward in any way. She was self-effacing, sweet, and charming. You just wanted to give her a cuddle.”

Pale, coy, and peering through shiny tresses, she had the demeanor of an earlier namesake, Mary Hopkin—the fresh-faced prodigy of Paul McCartney who’d had a hit with “Those Were the Days.” The Marys shared a chaste, untouchable, ethereal quality, which complemented the bohemian fashions of the day. What would later be dubbed “the Stevie Nicks look” after the Fleetwood Mac singer was already common on Kensington High Street: midi dresses, maxi coats, suede platform boots, chiffon scarves, velvet chain chokers, purple lips, and smoky eyes.

“She’d had a tough background,” remembers trusted journalist David Wigg. “Her parents, who were deaf and dumb, and who communicated through sign language and lip-reading, were poor. Her father worked as a hand trimmer for wallpaper specialists, and her mother
was a domestic for a small company. But that wouldn’t have bothered Freddie. He wasn’t interested in toffs. He somehow preferred people a little below his own level. An insecurity thing, I always thought. He did like people in his life who were artistic, or who had come from nothing. Artistic and amusing were the key: he loved to laugh. Mary was shy, but she could make him giggle.”

A nineteen-year-old trainee secretary when she landed her job at Biba, she has been described variously as having been a “PR,” “secretary,” “salesgirl,” “floor manager,” and “manageress.” Whatever her role, or roles, at the famous fashion emporium, retail seems an odd career choice for a shy young woman who found conversation challenging, having grown up in a largely silent home. The incense-filled, fern-adorned store was a noisy, busy Aladdin’s Cave, stuffed with clothes, shoes, makeup, jewelry, bags, and beautiful salesgirls. The many music and movie stars attracted to the joint mingled freely with the merely fashion-conscious, plenty of whom were “just looking” for a Jagger or a McCartney.

Despite her shy demeanor, Mary found herself caught up in London’s rock scene. Brian May was the first to notice her at an Imperial College gig one night, in 1970, and the pair got chatting.

In many ways, she was precisely his kind of girl. Tall, dark, dishy Brian wasted no time in asking Mary out. They got on, but their encounters lacked spark. Brian soon saw that things were not going to develop beyond friendship. Freddie, on the other hand, saw otherwise. Having pestered Brian for an introduction, Freddie landed the girl of some of his dreams.

The attraction between them was immediate, mutual, and would last a lifetime. Puzzling, then, that Mary spent the next six months trying to avoid him, to the point of dating other men—though no one serious. Only years later did she explain that it was because she believed Freddie was interested in her friend, not in her. One night, after one of the band’s gigs, she left him at the bar with her girlfriend, excused herself to pop to the ladies,’ and vanished into the night. Freddie was
dumbstruck but would not be deterred. When he asked her on a date for his twenty-fourth birthday, 5 September 1970, Mary pretended that she was busy that night.

“I was trying to be cool,” she told David Wigg. “Not because there was any real reason I couldn’t go. But Freddie wasn’t put off. We went out the next day instead. He wanted to go and see Mott the Hoople at the Marquee Club in Soho. Freddie didn’t have much money then, and so we just did normal things like any other young people. There were no fancy dinners—they came later when he hit the big time.”

The pair became inseparable and almost immediately began a sexual relationship. Their relationship would take precedence over every affair, with man or woman, in which Freddie would later indulge.

In many ways, Freddie and Mary had much in common. Each had felt estranged from their parents and had responded to the urge to assert independence. Each had a “tip of the iceberg” personality and tended to reveal little of their true selves. Each could give the impression of being shallow, flippant, and frivolous, with materialistic tendencies and a live-for-the-moment style, particularly in their younger days. But most of this boiled down to image and to deliberate concealment of innate shyness. Both were highly sensitive, naturally reserved, and deeper than they appeared. That they recognized themselves in each other became the foundation of a fascinating and everlasting bond. As they matured, the more contrasting and contradictory aspects of their personalities began to weld them. Mary might look like a gentle soul who couldn’t hurt a fly—but her fragile image concealed an inner strength and serenity that Freddie admired deeply, perhaps because he feared that the “Great Pretender” in him did not really have those qualities himself. Although Mary knew that Freddie had family living in Feltham, it would be some time before he took his girlfriend home to meet them. It is not difficult to see why: Mary was everything the Bulsaras could have wished for in a daughter-in-law. Chances are that they would all too soon have been putting pressure on their son to marry her and give them the grandchildren they craved. Freddie was not yet ready
for anything like marriage. Little did his family know at that stage that he never would be.

Over the years, Mary became Freddie’s rock. He would rely on her to be strong for him. Whenever Freddie felt his sex/drugs/rock ’n’ roll lifestyle spiraling out of control and was unable to cope with the pressures of recording and touring, it was to Mary that he turned. Solid and reliable, ever-forgiving, all-accepting, she was the mother figure to whom he would always cling.

“Mary Austin
was
Freddie’s mum, in a way,” reasons music publicist Bernard Doherty.

“She was there for him every moment of every day, putting her own life on hold to do so. Where he went, she went. She hardly ever left his side. No wonder he was devoted to her. She evidently filled that great hole that was left by what his parents should have been to him when he was small. Instead, they stuck him on a ship and sent him to school thousands of miles away. He was eight years old. Can you imagine? In his deepest psyche, he would never have resolved that. Then there was Mary. ‘Mother Mary comes to me,’ sang McCartney on ‘Let It Be’ in 1970, didn’t he?: coincidentally, the year Mary and Freddie met.

“It could have been their theme tune, with its matriarchal Blessed Virgin Mary connotation. Mary was the Mary in that song. She was pure. Not even Freddie was sleeping with her in the end . . .”

Because by this time Freddie had chosen to be gay, rendering Mary a born-again virgin?

“The myth was preserved,” nods Bernard. “In his mind she was perfect, and all for him. For Freddie’s benefit only did Mary exist.”