Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (34 page)

The relationship had its compensations.

“It was the only time in his adult life that Freddie knew what it was like to live a relatively ordinary life with another man,” Peter Freestone said.

Much later, their relationship over, Freddie had gone for good, and Winnie descended into madness, the HIV virus having claimed his mind as well as his body.

“At the end I found him starving in his apartment,” sighed Barbara, “the cat eating its own fur to survive. I got him into hospital and paid his medical bills, but it was far too late to help him.”

In their heyday, however, Winnie, Freddie, and Barbara had been a trio around town to be reckoned with.

“One night Freddie and I wound up having a drink together in a rowdy club, adjourned to the ladies’ toilets where it was quiet enough to talk, and it went from there. He told me all about Zanzibar, the boarding school, the father, the mother, how he didn’t believe they’d ever accept him as gay—although I later got the impression that they had come to terms with it. At the end of his life, certainly, they were close. But they liked Mary. Freddie said they always expected that she’d have his baby. He told me about his sister Kash, and the kids Natalie and Sam who she and her husband Roger had adopted. He said he didn’t usually
talk about such things, not even with friends, but that with me it was easy.”

In fact, Freddie had always maintained a “remotely close” relationship with his sister, her husband Roger, and their children, just as he had with his parents. He never denied their existence, nor turned his back on them. He saw them infrequently, but always lovingly. He simply saw it as his duty to protect them from his own wild lifestyle, as well as from the public gaze.

“We never really went to ‘those parties’!” Freddie’s brother-in-law told the
Mail on Sunday
in November 2000, nine years after Freddie’s death. “Only to family gatherings. Freddie kept his life strictly in compartments, and they rarely overlapped. We used to celebrate our kids’ birthdays at Freddie’s. He’d always have a massive cake or Easter egg for them. He never had any kids of his own, so I guess he liked the novelty, but I think he would have liked to have seen our children grow up.”

*   *   *

That Munich night, Freddie and Barbara couldn’t bear to tear themselves away from each other.

“He laughed so much at me, usually putting his hand up to his face to hide his teeth. But when he got drunk, he’d laugh openly and loudly.”

While brave enough to acknowledge that they were now on a dangerous treadmill, Barbara insisted that she and Freddie did derive enjoyment from the mad Munich lifestyle they lived to excess, and which they went for so shamelessly and deliberately.

“It was the best defense. From what? I can’t tell you. A number of things. Every day, something new. Freddie and I were always up against it for one reason or another, but at least we had each other. We would never let anyone else see when we were wounded, but we’d show each other. We both had things to hide from our families, for example. Freddie was protecting his parents and sister, and I certainly did not want my children to know everything about my lifestyle. Now and again it might happen that I’d run into my son at a disco and I’d go, ‘Oh my
God, wrong disco!’ Freddie and I became each other’s second family. We always left our private family sides private.”

On 26 November, Winnie’s birthday, Barbara, Freddie, and Winnie found themselves in bed together.

“We are all stark naked and the doorbell goes, seven o’clock in the morning: tax police! ‘Come back later!’ yells Freddie. ‘If you don’t let us in, we’re breaking the door down now!’ they yell back. Freddie was frantic. He came screaming back into the bedroom crying, ‘Get up! Get up!’ The next minute, the police were inside and stationed in every room. There was Freddie, naked except for a little towel around his waist. We three were told to stay exactly where we were. They tore the place apart. Finally Freddie says, ‘I really need to take a piss, guys.’ So they let him go. And suddenly, the policeman beside the bathroom recognizes him: ‘It’s Freddie Mercury!” Freddie got cheeky then. Being Freddie, he couldn’t resist. He said to the policeman, “If you’re nice to my girlfriend, I’ll sing a song for you. Come on, mate, let’s have a glass of champagne together.” It was still not even eight o’clock, and the policeman sheepishly said, ‘Sorry, we’re on duty.’ ‘OK then, go fuck yourself!’ Freddie retorted. ‘You’re all too ugly to be sung to anyway!’ ”

Barbara claimed there was no question that she and Freddie were passionately in love.

“Quite possibly, yes,” agreed Peter Freestone. “They were very close. I liked her enormously. They had a lot in common: status, fame. Barbara didn’t care. She had that wonderful take-it-or-leave-it attitude which Freddie found so refreshing. They had similar tastes, and were both very classy. Barbara was very, very important to Freddie.”

Freddie talked to Barbara constantly about Mary Austin.

“Apparently he had once promised to marry her. Because of that, he felt guilty. He was dutiful and had a deep sense of obligation. It had been expected of him, and he’d gone back on his word. The guilt never went away . . . although I wondered how much of that guilt she herself made him feel. It wasn’t Freddie’s fault that he turned out to be mostly
gay. That’s life. Still, he couldn’t get over the way he had let her down. He said that he hadn’t been gay, not in the beginning, but then he just turned around, flipped out completely, and started to live a gay life. It was a choice, not a biological thing, with him.”

“That is absolutely true,” agreed Peter Freestone. “Freddie was very emotional at that time.”

Although Mary often came to stay in Munich, the two women never grew close. “She was cool, and quite wary of me,” said Barbara.

“Not that she wasn’t nice. She
was
, extremely. But it was reserved and polite, not warm. We did at least exchange Christmas presents. One thing I must say for her is that she always had Freddie’s best interests at heart.

“Once, she phoned me from London to say that one of Freddie’s cats had died. ‘You break it to him, Barbara,’ she said, ‘but go gently, find the right moment.’ I agonized, and finally told him. He broke down uncontrollably, and said, ‘We’re flying to London right now.’ ‘Freddie,’ I said, ‘the cat is dead.’ But he wouldn’t hear otherwise. Back to London it was.”

Homosexuality was a role he chose to play, Barbara believed.

“He
was
the Great Pretender. It excited him, because it was forbidden fruit. While all this was going on, he and I were lovers in the truest sense. We did have sex together regularly. Yes. Yes. It took a while. When it happened, it was beautiful and innocent. I was completely in love with him by this time, and he had told me that he loved me. We even talked of getting married. Of course, he’d still pick up dozens of gay guys and bring them back night after night, but I didn’t mind. Sounds insane, doesn’t it, but that’s the life we were living, and I couldn’t stop him even if I wanted to. I continued to take lovers myself. To a certain point I was allowed. Then Freddie started to show off and would kick them out.”

In the end, said Barbara, Freddie didn’t care about sex.

“He’d get together with people just for tenderness, affection. His
longings had nothing to do with the body anymore. He was like a little child. He’d cry like a baby. He’d say to me, ‘Barbara, the only thing they can’t take from me is you.’ ”

Whether by “they,” Freddie meant the Queen machine, the wider music business, the fans, or even the all-pervasive Jim Beach, Barbara never knew.

“It all sounds so far-fetched when I talk about it now. You had to be there to make sense of it.

“Sometimes I’d say to him, ‘Darling, there’s more to you than your prick, you know.’ He would say to me often that he didn’t enjoy sleeping with all those guys. But Freddie wouldn’t be told by anyone what he could or couldn’t do.”

The single most lethal threat to Freddie’s sanity was his dependence on other people, Barbara perceived.

“He didn’t know the difference between one Deutschmark and a thousand dollars. Money meant nothing to him. He was terrified of planes, and of getting stuck in elevators, and more afraid than anything of being alone. He couldn’t go anywhere by himself—not even to the toilet. I always had to go with him. Wherever Freddie was, there was a mess. But he was perfect at delegating people to clean up.

“We were both trying far too hard to be happy,” she admitted. “Because we were
not
happy. You get drunk, you take blow, you play the monkey, you lay as many people as you can, all as if you are daring your body to stay alive. It is a sort of death wish. In the end it just makes you
more
lonely,
more
empty. Freddie and I were both as bad as each other. We identified with each other. In the end, we were the only one that each of us could turn to. If he hadn’t had me, and I hadn’t had him, I think that we would both have been dead much sooner.”

18

I’m very happy with my relationship at the moment, and I honestly couldn’t ask for better. It’s a kind of . . . solace. Yes, that’s a good word. We won’t call it menopause! I don’t have to try so hard. I don’t have to prove myself now. I’ve got a very understanding relationship. It sounds so boring, but it’s wonderful.

Freddie Mercury

Freddie was the love of my life. There was no one like him. He always said that you must get on with life. I know that when I die, Freddie will be on the other side, waiting for me.

Jim Hutton

J
ohn Travolta
had a hand in it, when he made an unlikely hero of blue-collar Tony Manero in
Saturday Night Fever
. The 1977 film, based on a
New York
magazine feature conjured by Britain’s original rock journalist, Nik Cohn, told the tale of a teenage Italian American who found refuge from grim reality in a neighborhood disco. The Bee Gees’ album became the biggest-selling sound track of all time. Disco fever was born, and New York City was at the vanguard. Studio 54, Le Jardin, and Regine’s were
the
hot spots, to which every imaginable freak pitched up nightly. It was the heyday of playboys, supermodels, stretch
limos, champagne, and cocaine, with Halston, Gucci, and Fiorucci thrown in. City clubland became an outlet for sexual emancipation and reflected the decadent gay scene better than a mirror.

Midtown’s Le Jardin, on West Forty-third Street, attracted the coolest crowd: Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Liza Minnelli, Lou Reed. The bars boasted mirror tiles for chopping “blow,” black lights flared down on white sofas fringed with palm trees, and its rooftop featured waterbeds where clients reclined, inhaling outlawed substances while gazing across Times Square.

By comparison, London’s gay scene was still waiting to go on. It offered little beyond “a few grubby pubs and some tiny basement coffee bars” when Jeremy Norman came down from Cambridge in the late seventies to work on
Burke’s Peerage
, the definitive guide to British royalty and aristocracy. Norman heard about the new wave of discos flooding New York’s gay and club scenes, and paid a visit. At Le Jardin he met club promoter Stephen Hayter and they returned to London together to launch the Embassy Club on Old Bond Street. There, Hayter reigned supreme as “Queen of the Night,” boasting that he kept his press cuttings in a bank vault in Switzerland and disapproving vociferously of “screaming queens” who had “a regrettable tendency to call each other by girls’ names.” He would become the first high-profile club owner to die of AIDS.

The Embassy was a revelation: a sexually ambiguous fantasy realm which attracted all comers and which served as both antidote to and distraction from the high inflation and government corruption of the era. Suddenly, folk were dressing up to go dancing again. But not just any old folk. Transsexuals, rock stars, divas, drag queens, European crown princes, millionaire counts, and Page Three popsies. Waiters wore jaunty red and white satin shorts modeled on those worn by the boys in Studio 54. Poseurs simulated sex on the counters while the hard-nosed did it for real behind bathroom doors. Cocaine and amyl nitrate were ingested in brain-blasting quantities. Strobe lighting, dry ice, and a
silver disco ball gilded the effect. The club could draw the in crowd like no place else. Pete Townshend, Mick Jagger, Marie Helvin, and David Bowie were regulars. Even cool New Romantics would divert from the Blitz Club to take a twirl on the Embassy floor.