Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (33 page)

A fortnight later, Freddie, Roger, Bowie, and Mack reconvened at New York’s famous Power Station studios to remix the track, Brian having backed out of the project.

Power Station, known for artists as diverse as Tony Bennett, Aerosmith, and later Duran Duran, had been a working power plant on West Fifty-third Street and was remodeled as a recording studio by producer Tony Bongiovi. The place had a fantastic acoustic. When Bongiovi gave his second cousin a leg up into the music business by offering him a gofer job at the studio, also covering the cost of his demos and singing lessons, he unwittingly provided Freddie and Bowie with a teaboy who would one day be as famous as they were. Bongiovi’s young cousin, Jon, later changed his surname to Bon Jovi, launching a band of that name. The cousins would fall out, and Power Station would become Avatar, but the legend endured.

“Under Pressure” turned out to be one of the most challenging recordings any of them had ever worked on. The mixing desk collapsed, Bowie wanted to remake the track from scratch, and things came to a head. At one point Bowie refused to allow its release but later backed down.

“ ‘Under Pressure’ is a significant song for us,” Brian would say, nearly thirty years later, “and that is because of David and its lyrical content. I would have found that hard to admit in the old days, but I can admit it now. One day, I would love to sit down quietly on my own and remix it.”

The October 1981 single was Bowie’s first formal duet recording with another artist.

Reaching Number Twenty-nine in the United States, it was to be Queen’s second UK Number One single. It would also be their last until
“Innuendo,” almost a decade later, a few months before Freddie died. “Under Pressure” also appeared on Queen’s tenth studio album
Hot Space
, released in May 1982. Later it would be sampled by rapper Vanilla Ice on his 1990 single “Ice Ice Baby”—without Queen’s permission—and would become the debut single of Jedward, the identical twins from ITV’s
The X Factor
. Their version reached Number Two in the UK and Number One in Ireland.

*   *   *

Come September, Freddie was ready to party. He celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday in style, at a cost of £200,000, by flying a posse of pals including Peter Straker and Peter Freestone to New York on Concorde. Freddie had taken a lavish suite at the Berkshire Place Hotel on East Fifty-second Street, on the corner diagonally opposite the Cartier store. Over five misspent days, a staggering £30,000 worth of vintage champagne was downed.

“I remember the absolute mess our suite got into,” groaned Peter Freestone. “And I remember Freddie sprawled out on a huge heap of gladioli. Those were what you could call ‘parties.’ ”

That birthday marked a turning point for Freddie. He gave a rare press interview, explaining how he had changed and how he now viewed fame and fortune rather differently than he had in his younger day.

“I hate mixing with lots of show business personalities,” he confessed. “I could do a Rod Stewart and join that crowd, but I want to stay out of all that. When I am not in Queen I want to be the ordinary man in the street.

“I’ve changed. In the early days, I used to enjoy being recognized. Not now. I spend a lot of time in New York, where a lot of people don’t know me. I may be very rich, but the days of posing and pretending to have money have long gone. I’m a jeans-and-T-shirt man around the house and everywhere else. I don’t put on a show anymore when I leave the stage, because I’m secure in my own knowledge of who I am and what I have. Gone are the days when I wanted to walk into a room and
stop everyone’s conversation. I can’t predict whether we will go on, but as long as we keep breaking new ground, the fire will remain in Queen. If I lost everything I had tomorrow, I’d claw my way back to the top somehow.”

Could these have been his most honest public words to date? Was this statement confirmation from Freddie that a deliberate metamorphosis was underway, or was he going all out to convince himself? Some saw this as a thinly disguised attempt to show the world that he was finally comfortable in his own skin. Was he really, though? Whether or not he felt genuinely at one with his true personality, or whether this was mostly wishful thinking, we could only speculate.

Freddie joined the rest of the band in New Orleans after his birthday party, to begin rehearsals for another Latin jaunt. This second foray, dubbed the Gluttons for Punishment tour, for all the obvious reasons, was the antithesis of their first. First, they traveled to Venezuela to perform three gigs at the Poliedro de Caracas. But their schedule was interrupted by the death of former president and national hero Rómulo Betancourt, resulting in several Venezuelan shows being canceled. With ten days to wait before the next wave of gigs in Mexico, Queen withdrew to Miami.

There was no accounting for the ensuing wave of Mexican mishaps: serious crew illness, shocking corruption, threats to personal safety, their promoter’s arrest, and, not least, the collapse of a bridge outside Monterrey’s huge Estadio Universitario—“Volcano” stadium—after one show, which resulted in a number of injuries to fans. The second gig was canceled and Queen moved on to Puebla, where they were booked to play two nights at the Estadio Ignacio Zaragoza. The experience was a fiasco.

“We thought we could repeat what we’d done in South America,” said Brian. “But we escaped by the skin of our teeth.”

*   *   *

Earlier that year, the
New York Times
had reported the phenomenon of a rare form of skin cancer affecting forty-one previously healthy
homosexuals. At least nine of them suffered unexplained immune system deficiency. Kaposi’s sarcoma had until then occurred almost exclusively in elderly males of Mediterranean descent. Other cases were reported in San Francisco and Los Angeles. By the end of August, the number had risen to 120, most of them in New York. It was soon confirmed by the US Centers for Disease Control that Kaposi’s sarcoma and a rare, parasitical form of pneumonia called pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP) were inexplicably on the rise across America. Of all reported diagnoses, more than 90 percent of victims were gay men. Thus began speculation that a new “gay plague” could be linked to a promiscuous homosexual lifestyle and/or to drug abuse. Conclusive evidence showed that the disease originally referred to as GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) also affected millions of heterosexual men, women, and children, and that it occurred notably in hemophiliacs and intravenous drug users. It was eventually established that the disease now renamed AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome) was spread via blood, blood products, the sharing of hypodermic needles, and through unprotected sex.

Freddie didn’t pay too much attention. Queen were preoccupied with other things. Tenth-anniversary products included their
Greatest Hits
album, the
Greatest Flix
collection of all their promo videos, and a set of portraits by Princess Margaret’s former husband, Lord Snowdon. They also starred in their first feature film of a live concert, filmed in Montreal. The final weeks of 1981 sent them scuttling back to Munich. Officially still tax exiles, they were due to begin another album there, and the Arabella-Haus apartment hotel welcomed Freddie back.

“Only for a night or two, because he hated it so much,” recalled Peter Freestone. “It was above the Musicland Studios, and was yet another dreadful concrete block, its corridors filled with the pungent smells of Arab cooking. At first, Freddie lived with Winnie Kirchberger (a local boyfriend) at his place. Later it was the Stollbergplaza apartment hotel in a more elegant part of central Munich, where he met Barbara Valentin, a well-known actress who lived opposite.”

With Peter to see to his needs and accompany him on nightly jaunts, Freddie’s lifestyle in Munich seemed quite charmed. Worryingly for the rest of the band, however, he seemed to have lost the taste for work.

“He got to the point where he could hardly stand being in a studio. He’d want to do his bit and get out,” remembered Brian.

Queen’s return to the Bavarian capital marked the beginning of a frantic and confusing period in Freddie’s personal life, when he would become embroiled in a distressing tangle of love affairs.

The first was with Winfried Kirchberger, rechristened “Winnie,” naturally: an aggressive, uneducated Tyrol-born restaurateur with thick black hair and a bristly moustache. He was so bluff and ready that none of Freddie’s entourage could fathom the attraction. They had not taken on board that “unwashed truck driver” was now Freddie’s preferred male type.

The second was with an Irish hairdresser called Jim Hutton, whom Freddie had picked up in a London club. He would fly Jim to Munich and parade him to make Winnie jealous. Ironically, a much deeper bond was to develop between Freddie and Jim, who would remain at Freddie’s side for the rest of his life.

The third lover in the equation was perhaps the most unexpected. Freddie’s new drinking partner, Barbara Valentin, was a famous Austrian-born former soft-porn actress and model dubbed “the German Jayne Mansfield” or “Brigitte Bardot.” She had made her name in edgy, stylized films about love, hate, and prejudice with cult movie director Rainer Werner Fassbinder of the New German Cinema movement. Fassbinder, who would die the following year aged just thirty-seven from a sleeping pill and cocaine overdose, was a complicated man with a scandalous lifestyle. He was described by one of his wives as being “a homosexual who also needed a woman,” thus appearing to have plenty in common with Freddie. But it was Barbara, not Fassbinder, who would become Freddie’s live-in lover and almost constant companion—bizarrely sharing him with both Winnie Kirchberger and Jim Hutton, who were also his lovers. As Barbara herself remarked, it was all a “crazy time.”

I visited Barbara Valentin in Munich in 1996, at the chintzy third-floor apartment she and Freddie purchased together on HansSachs Strasse in the by then seedy Bermuda Triangle district. The flat was cozy: all rugs, drapes, and velvet sofas. There were valuable-looking paintings, rustic Bavarian furniture, and a fine antique chandelier. Her sideboard was crammed with framed photographs of her children, her grandchildren, and of Freddie, and heaving with Queen and Freddie Mercury videos and CDs, which she said she could never bring herself to watch or listen to. Tarzan, the sixteen-year-old “child” (cat) which she shared with Freddie, lay snoozing on a plump armchair.

Barbara had endured a lengthy and bitter legal battle with Queen’s management to retain the apartment after Freddie’s death. She was consequently nervous about revealing too much, and it took several months to persuade her to talk to me.

“Other people have to live on,” said thrice-married Barbara, who would die of a stroke in 2002, aged sixty-one. “I don’t want to hurt anybody by talking about Freddie. Let Mary Austin be the widow, I’ve always said. I have refused to talk about Freddie until now.”

Well into her fifties when we met, she retained the allure that Freddie must have fallen for. A heavy-boned, big-breasted former baroness by marriage, she filled the room. The one-carat diamond stud in her right earlobe was the first present Freddie gave her, she said. On the street, the well-known actress still turned heads.

What Freddie saw in Barbara was a woman who could not have been less like Mary Austin if she tried: a strong, determined female in charge of her destiny. Like him, Barbara was a mass of contradictions. Her imposing image concealed an intense sensitivity and fragility. Perhaps for the first time in his life, Freddie connected with another human being with whom he felt able to be himself, warts and all. They had no secrets. He did not feel any need to protect her from aspects of his personality and behavior, the way he did with Mary.

Barbara understood. She was the same way herself, never caring what others thought. Her attitude towards people, life, and the world
in general was a breath of fresh air to Freddie. She looked pneumatically all-woman but she acted like a man, thinking nothing of knocking people out of her way and causing even bodyguards to retreat. Freddie was intoxicated by Barbara’s ferocity and majesty. They responded to the longings of each other’s souls.

That Barbara was willing to relinquish a potentially lucrative theater career to be with Freddie, and the fact that he allowed her to do so, was, by her reckoning, the ultimate proof of undying love. She would accompany Freddie on Queen and private business, to Rio, Montreux, Ibiza, and Spain. She stayed with him in London “forty or fifty times,” and was given her own bedroom at Garden Lodge.

“I used to see him out with his cronies in the Munich clubs, mostly the New York disco, night after night,” Barbara recalled. “I vaguely knew who Freddie Mercury was, but to be a famous rock star was no great shakes in Munich. I was probably more famous here than him. He always had an entourage, he was an industry all by himself. Freddie even had his own little corner in the club: ‘the Family Corner.’ He was with Winnie then. They were living together at Winnie’s place. They had quite a long relationship, with several breaks. They couldn’t keep away from each other. They made an unusual couple, and would have terrible fights. Each would pick up unsuitable guys to make the other jealous.”

At the time Winnie owned a simple rustic restaurant, Sebastian Stub’n’, where customers were always complaining about the food. After the place burned down, its renovation was partly funded by Freddie, who seemed always to be investing in the dreams of friends.

“Winnie was a tragedy to Freddie,” said Barbara. “They were undoubtedly in love, but they were always fighting each other, hurting each other. It made me think, why do lovers have to hurt each other? To me, it is one of the greatest tragedies. He was very simple in his mind, Winnie, you know. Not much education, no decent school, whatever, and I think he had a chip on his shoulder about that. There were times when he obviously felt that he really wanted to show Freddie: ‘Who
cares that you’re a stupid rock ’n’ roll star? I’m Winnie Kirchberger, the macho shit.’ He would show him up dreadfully in public, treat him badly, do stupid things, terrible things, just to hurt Freddie and put him down. It occurred to me that Freddie adored Winnie
because
he was so awful to him most of the time. Freddie couldn’t just have Winnie’s approval and adoration the way he seemed to get it so easily from the rest of the world, and that made Freddie work all the harder to get him. Perhaps Winnie, in his simple way, understood this: that the only way he could keep hold of Freddie Mercury was to treat him like shit and pretend he didn’t want him at all. Whatever it was, it worked. Freddie went back to him time and time again for more.”