Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (28 page)

Despite Freddie’s blatant promiscuity in the Bavarian capital, Mack believed that the attraction of this type of gay lifestyle was beginning to pall.

“Freddie told me a number of times, ‘Perhaps I’ll give up the whole gay thing one of these days.’ He more or less decided when he was twenty-four or twenty-five that he was gay, and before that he was considered straight. With him, nothing was impossible. I do think he could have given up being gay, because he loved women. I saw what he was like in their presence, and he wasn’t the kind of gay man who didn’t like them in his life. He was the opposite.”

Freddie became a frequent visitor to Mack’s home and grew close to Mack’s wife Ingrid. The couple chose him as godfather to one of their children. Mack described how Freddie was not immune to the comforts of family life, and even suggested that Freddie had implied a desire to radically alter his lifestyle. The star, Mack said, would have loved to marry and have children himself, despite the fact that there was no significant other in his life at that point.

“Freddie’s biggest thing was to have a family and a normal life,” Mack insisted.

“I was once badly screwed and found myself having to pay a load of back tax. I was very depressed, and I talked to Freddie about it. He told me: ‘Fuck, it’s only money! Why worry about something like that? You’ve got it made, you’ve got everything you need—a wonderful family and children. You have everything I can never have.’ That’s when I became aware that when he was at our house, he was watching everything and taking it all in. Seeing what a family life was like, and how it could have made him happy.”

But in New York the following year, Freddie would tell Rick Sky: “By nature I’m very restless and highly strung, so I wouldn’t make a good family man. I’m a very emotional person, a person of real extremes. And often that’s destructive, both to myself and others.”

His sister Kashmira agreed with the view that Freddie would not have made a good father: “No, I don’t think so at all. He was very good at spoiling you, but not so good at laying down the law.”

Mack also discovered, during the time they spent together in Munich, that Freddie had been painfully lonely as a child.

“One day I overheard a conversation between Freddie and my second son, Felix,” he said. “Freddie was telling him, ‘I never had any of this. When I was young, I spent a lot of time away from my parents because I was at boarding school. Sometimes I would hardly ever see them.’ He talked to my kids about his childhood quite a lot. Freddie adored children. As soon as they could walk and talk and respond, he got on with them.”

As for the music Queen made in Munich, Brian was the first to admit that the change in direction was inspired by Freddie.

“We approached it from a different angle,” he said, “with the idea of ruthlessly pruning it down to a coherent album rather than letting our flights of fancy lead us off into different areas. The impetus came very largely from Freddie, who said that he thought we’d been diversifying so much that people didn’t know what we were about anymore. If there’s a theme to the album, it’s rhythm and sparseness—never two notes played if one would do, which is a hard discipline for us, because we tend to be quite over the top in the way we work . . . that was breaking new ground for us, because for the first time we went into a recording studio without a deadline, purely with the intention of putting some tracks down as they came out . . . This was to put ourselves in a totally different situation,” he explained.

“It’s a way of getting out of that rut of doing an album, touring Britain, touring America, etc. We thought we’d try a change and see what came out. You have to make your own excitement after a while.”

Mack continued to rave about Freddie’s studio technique, his spontaneous inventiveness, his commitment, his enthusiasm, the speed and dexterity with which he worked. Only Freddie’s limited attention span got the better of him, as it tended to do in his personal life. If something appeared too laborious and long-winded, Freddie would suddenly lose interest. As Mack remembered, he could never focus on any one thing for more than about ninety minutes at a time.

“With ‘Killer Queen,’ you can tell that he just sat down at the piano and did it. The end is a little bit unresolved. I think that was a typically
Freddie quality. He just loved to get on with something new and different. I got on exceptionally well with Freddie. I liked the fact that he was a genius. He really was, in terms of perception of music and seeing the focal point of where the song should be.”

Together, they added a new dimension to the Queen sound, which matched the mood of the era and inspired the band towards new creative heights.

After performing at open-air German festivals that August, Freddie returned to London to join rehearsals for a charity performance to be given by the Royal Ballet on behalf of the City of Westminster Society for Mentally Handicapped Children. Freddie had been persuaded to take part by his close friend Wayne Eagling, then a Royal Ballet principal. “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” were both choreographed, and Freddie added live vocals. On performance night, at the London Coliseum, he danced so well that he received a standing ovation.

“I only really knew about ballet from watching it on television,” Freddie confided to John Blake, then a pop writer on the
London Evening News
. “But I always enjoyed what I saw.”

“Then I became very good friends with Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI, also chairman of the Royal Ballet board of governors, and I began to meet all these people who were involved in ballet. I became more and more fascinated by them. I finally saw Baryshnikov dance, and he was just mind-blowing. More than Nureyev, more than anyone. I mean, he can really fly. When I saw him on stage I was so in awe that I felt like a groupie.”

Referring to his own performance with the Royal Ballet, he commented: “They had me practicing at the barre and all that, stretching my legs . . . trying to do things in a week that they’d been doing for years. It was murder. After two days I was in agony. It was hurting me in places I didn’t know I had, dear. Then, when the night of the gala came, I was just amazed at the backstage scenes. When I had my entrances to do, I had to fight my way through Merle Parke and Anthony Dowell and
all these people, and say, ‘Excuse me, I’m going on now!’ It was outrageous.”

Freddie danced his scene while singing “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

“Yes, dear, I did this leap. A wonderful leap, which brought the house down, and then they all caught me and I just carried on singing!”

Asked if he would have liked to have been a professional dancer, Freddie replied, “Yes, but I’m very happy doing what I do. You can’t suddenly say at thirty-two, I want to be a ballet dancer.”

The dance led to rumors that he might be something of a “man’s man,” at which Freddie roared his head off. “Oh
God
, dear! Let them think what they want. You see, if I actually said no or yes, that would be boring. Nobody would ask me anymore. I’d rather they just kept on asking. Oh, it’s all just so boring. My dear, the private life is up to the individual. I mean, with someone like Elton, I think: what can I say? He’s more press oriented, isn’t he? I’m not that mad about it.”

Freddie later joked further about his Royal Ballet performance to his journalist friend David Wigg.

“Singing upside down is wonderful. I was shivering in the wings with nerves. It’s always much harder when you are put outside your sphere, but I always like a challenge. I’d like to see Mick Jagger or Rod Stewart try something like that.”

He also dropped into the conversation, with customary mischief, that his most vivid memory of the entire evening was having his bottom pinched by famous Rhodesian-born ballerina Merle Park: “She’s outrageous, that woman!”

Freddie’s excursion into the world of
pointes
and
pliés
was soon to provide him with a friend for life.

15

I generate a lot of friction, so I’m not the easiest person to have a relationship with. I’m the nicest person you could ever meet, my dears, but I’m very hard to live with. I don’t think anyone could put up with me, and I think sometimes I try too hard. In one way I am greedy, I just want it all my own way, but doesn’t everybody? I’m a very loving person, you know, and I’m a very giving person. I demand a lot, but I do give a lot in return.

Freddie Mercury

I was Freddie’s chief cook and bottle-washer, waiter, butler, secretary, cleaner . . . and agony aunt. I traveled the world with him, I was with him at the highs and came through the lows. I acted as his bodyguard when needed, and in the end, of course, I was one of his nurses.

Peter “Phoebe” Freestone

B
ackstage at
the Royal Opera House during preparations for his ballet debut, Freddie met young wardrobe assistant and dresser Peter Freestone. Indispensable at first sight: promptly rechristened “Phoebe,” Peter was to become the singer’s personal assistant. He remained his devoted companion until the end of Freddie’s life.

“Freddie came up to the Opera House to try on the outfits that he
was going to wear for the Royal Ballet Gala at the Coliseum,” Peter told me. An amiable, larger-than-life character for whom nothing was too much trouble, it was easy to see why Freddie had taken an instant shine to him.

“Freddie was extremely nice and polite that day I first met him,” remembered Peter.

“I’d later discover that he was always polite, unless people really annoyed him, in which case he would let rip. He was pretty in awe of the Opera House. He was out of his normal sphere of experience. This was a bastion of the Establishment, and Freddie was the total opposite. The Gala was brilliant. The way Freddie was manipulated around the stage by those dancers was superb.

“He sang ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody.’ He came out in all his leather gear for the first one, then went behind a wall of dancers and reappeared dressed in sequins. It was the first insight I had into the showman in Freddie. Up until then I’d vaguely heard of Queen, and I’d once seen Freddie with Mary having tea in the Rainbow Room at Biba in 1973. He had the hair down to here and a fox fur jacket. It was unmistakably him.

“I remember his very being there was a performance,” he later added.

At the after-show party at Legends, Peter bumped into Freddie with manager Paul Prenter, and stood chatting with them both.

“Three weeks later, Paul telephoned my boss and asked if he knew anybody who would be interested in a six-week contract to do wardrobe for the Queen tour. After watching that performance on stage, I just wanted that excitement. I’d watched
Sleeping Beauty
and
Swan Lake
a thousand times . . . Now, I wanted to see more of this exciting person. See more of rock. I had no way of knowing what I was letting myself in for. All I thought was that wardrobe for four people couldn’t be nearly as bad as running wardrobe for the Royal Ballet.”

Having quit his permanent job “with prospects” to take up the short-term contract with Queen, Peter found himself out of work. He
was forced to accept temporary employment as a telephone operator for British Telecom, “Until Queen went on tour again, and I was invited back. After that, I was kept on a retainer when they weren’t on the road. When they were home, I’d do bits and pieces in the office. After the American tour, Paul and Freddie decided that I should look after Freddie exclusively. I’d still do wardrobe for everybody on tour, but otherwise I was only concerned with him.”

The pair soon discovered that they had both attended boarding schools in India, thousands of miles from home and separated from their parents. A bond was struck, and Freddie’s barriers began to come down. One of the first things that struck Freestone was Freddie’s aversion to confrontation.

“He was never a rude man,” Peter said. “If something started happening, he’d appear to withdraw and let others get involved while he sat back and observed. He’d just throw a line in here and there. It’s true that he and Mary squabbled a great deal. But that was mainly because he had expectations of people, and if people didn’t live up to them, he’d get annoyed. You would tend to learn your lesson. If something happened once, he told you about it, and you’d make sure you didn’t do it again. But that didn’t stop Mary doing things again and again. Once she’d got something into her head, she would just do it, the best way she saw fit. But if that didn’t fit in with Freddie’s plans, there would be the big row.”