Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (38 page)

Another memorable moment during the recording of
The Works
was Freddie’s thirty-seventh birthday party at his rented Stone Canyon Road house, a gorgeous mansion in the Hollywood Hills that had once belonged to Elizabeth Taylor. Freddie had the palatial house filled with intoxicating starburst lilies for the occasion. He also decided that he wanted his old flame Joe Fanelli to do the cooking, and flew him out
from London. When Joe arrived, the pair kissed and made up, if not as lovers, and prepared together a menu of Freddie’s favorite dishes, Coronation Chicken and Prawn Creole among them.

The lesbian waitresses in white shirts and black slacks were provided by a female Elektra Records executive whose gay lover was the cleaner at the Stone Canyon house.

“It was a magnificent scene in the lush outdoor gardens of the estate,” recalls Eddie, who attended the party alongside Elton John, Rod Stewart, Jeff Beck, and John Reid. There were relatively few famous faces among the hundred guests, most of whom were Freddie’s cherished anonymous friends. Freddie’s partner for the night was Vince the barman.

“There were servers, bartenders, magicians, and classical musicians,” remembered Eddie. “A grand time. The night flew by quickly until it became apparent that the after-party crowd was one that I didn’t particularly fit in with”—Eddie being as straight as Freddie and his acolytes were gay.

The first single release from the album was Roger’s “Radio Ga Ga” in January 1984. Originally entitled “Radio Caca,” reportedly after a lavatorial remark by Roger’s young son Felix (whose mother Dominique is French), it reached Number Two in the UK, Number One in nineteen other countries, and was one of Queen’s smartest compositions yet. Within its bland, pop-chant lyrics lurked a thinly disguised snipe at pop radio, for having sold out. Its image and function were now deemed to be hugely at odds with what it had once represented. The epic record required equally epic visuals to promote it. Produced by Scott Millaney and directed by David Mallet—whom Freddie referred to as “Mallet B. DeMille”—it featured scenes from Fritz Lang’s 1927 sci-fi film
Metropolis
, as well as a photo album depicting frames from earlier videos such as “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Flash.” With the help of the Queen fan club, 500 disciples descended on London’s Shepperton Studios, donned silver boiler suits, and stood in straight lines, where they clapped and raised their hands to the beat of the chorus line. The sequence would
soon be mirrored by Queen fans at gigs the world over, and was to become an indelible image of their Live Aid performance the following year. Their most expensive promo to date, it was one of the most impressive videos Queen had ever attempted.

“David [Mallet] and Freddie would spend hours thrashing things out,” recalls producer Scott Millaney.

“ ‘Darling, just make it better than Elton’s,’ Freddie would say. ‘I want the best.’

“I’d do the budget, send it to Jim Beach, he’d say, “No, that’s too much,’ and I’d say, ‘No, you don’t get it, that’s
Freddie’s
budget.’ ”

Millaney and Mallet were also responsible for the video for the more controversial track, “I Want to Break Free,” in which all four band members appeared in drag. The video also incorporated a forty-five-second ballet sequence, inspired by Claude Debussy’s
Prélude à l’Après-Midi d’un Faune
, in which Freddie danced with the Royal Ballet corps.

“Freddie was beside himself with excitement about that video,” remembers Millaney. “He was all ‘Well, darling, we’ve simply
got
to dress up in drag, and I have to shave off my moustache.’ David said, ‘NO! You have to keep it on, because that’s the
point!
’ Freddie was never happier than when he booked the Royal Ballet and could dance with them all day . . . he even got to writhe all over them!”

Makeup artist and body painter Carolyn Cowan, responsible for the human paintwork on the video, developed such a close relationship with Freddie on the shoot for “Break Free” that she was booked for several videos in succession.

“I wasn’t a normal makeup artist and Freddie wasn’t a normal rock star, if there is such a thing, so we met in the middle,” Carolyn tells me.

“We were both very strong, and I could defuse his mood in an instant. In return, Freddie always looked after me. It was a very symbiotic relationship. We liked each other, to put it simply.

“The makeup room is a sacred place. People are naked, and allowing you to see them as they are. This requires a huge degree of trust, and Freddie got that. I paint a body quickly. I’m fast. You have to be.
People get cold; they get bored; they fidget. They remember to be self-conscious. You have to capture the moment, and simply get on with it.

“I remember arriving at Limehouse Studios to do ‘Break Free,’ and clicking immediately with all of them.

“I was doing massive amounts of booze, cocaine, and marijuana at the time, which may have helped [she was rescued by David Bowie in 1991].

“Like Freddie, I have a highly addictive personality. I think he recognized that in me. I had long dark hair in those days, and looked like Charles II. Short skirt, long boots, an anything-goes kind of attitude. I suppose I just fitted in with the band’s general eccentricity.

“I made them all up in drag, in that
Coronation Street
style, and the results were incredible. Freddie had such a great face anyway. Everything came together that day. It all worked. I had to do pointy wax ears on the ballet dancers. They were all so badly behaved that the makeup kept getting fucked and I had to keep doing it all again. Meanwhile, Freddie was all, ‘Give me another line of coke, darling, please!’ It was all outrageous. I remember we got through these incredible amounts of drugs.

“You have to remember,” Carolyn says, “that we were inventing an art form. We were under pressure because of that. Even so, I got on well with all the band, collectively and individually. They hadn’t yet got tired and bored and pissed off. They were still loving the madness and freedom and hedonism of it all. And it
was
fun. Freddie’s energy was extraordinarily creative, and he had a better sense of humor than anyone I’ve ever known.”

But that video proved another nail in the coffin of Queen’s reputation in the States. The cross-dressing was deemed too excessive for MTV.

The channel exerted such control over the music industry and popular culture during the eighties that decisions not to play certain artists’ videos had devastating effect. The tongue-in-cheek element and
Coronation Street
send-up was lost on Queen’s American fans, who found
it offensive and unfathomable. The video was even banned by several local affiliates. The band were speechless.

“We had done some really serious, epic videos in the past,” said Roger, “and we just thought it was time we had some fun. We wanted people to know that we didn’t take ourselves too seriously. That we could still laugh at ourselves. I think we proved that.”

“Middle America felt that Freddie might be gay, and Middle America was very important,” said former journalist and EMI PR executive Brian Southall.

“You could be terribly arty in New York or Los Angeles, but don’t try it in Kansas.”

The band were unrepentant, and refused point-blank to make an alternative promo for the American market. Hubris had kicked in yet again. It killed them in America.

“When Queen did ‘Break Free,’ that was a problem here,” agrees Peter Paterno, the US entertainment lawyer turned record company president who would later sign Queen to Disney’s Hollywood Records.

“All the miniskirts and the makeup. It offended a lot of people. And ‘Ga Ga’: radio stations in the United States took big offense. ‘We won’t play those guys’ music if they’re making fun of us, why should we?’ was the consensus. Queen went off the boil here overnight.”

The Works
would struggle to Number Twenty-three in the States, and “Ga Ga” to Number Sixteen.

“Also,” adds Paterno, “they had reached a point at which they were at odds with the image. The typical hard-rock fan here back then was a macho guy, he didn’t look like them. For me, they were still making really great music. I was a fan. ‘Hammer to Fall,’ Brian May’s anti-nuke number, went on to feature on the sound track of the
Highlander
movie. It is an amazing song which got no traction in the US at all. It didn’t exist here. It was the beginning of the end for Queen in America at that time.”

Capitol Records’ dispute with independent radio promoters didn’t help. Neither did the strange attitude of Freddie’s personal manager,
Paul Prenter, who appeared to be singlehandedly responsible for Freddie’s ever-increasing taste for sordid behavior, namely rent-boy sex and drugs. It seemed to some as though egging Freddie on to ever deeper depths of danger and depravity satisfied Prenter’s own lust for extreme decadence.

“He was a very bad influence on Freddie” commented Roger, “and hence on the band.”

Little did Freddie or his friends suspect how ruinous his relationship with Prenter would eventually prove.

In February, as EMI were preparing to launch
The Works
, which would become their biggest album to date, despite leaving the States lukewarm, Queen joined Boy George and Culture Club, Paul Young and Bonnie Tyler for the San Remo song festival. It was a gauche fiasco for veteran performers, but a fun few days off in Italy’s Bournemouth . . . and good for promo, despite Brian and Roger being at loggerheads throughout, arguing about everything from the set list to the stage set.

Interviewed during the festival, Freddie opened up about his friendship with Michael Jackson.

“Michael and I have grown apart a bit since his massive success with
Thriller
,” he confessed. “He’s simply retreated into a world of his own. Two years ago, we used to have great fun going to clubs together, but now he won’t come out of his fortress. It’s very sad. He’s so worried that someone will do him in that he’s paranoid about absolutely everything.”

John and Roger embarked on a whistle-stop promotional tour of Australia and the Far East before vanishing on holiday. Brian went off to guest on a track for American rocker Billy Squier’s new album, while Freddie returned to Munich to live it up, venturing from time to time into the studio to continue his solo work.

May 1984 took them back to Montreux to mime for 400 million TV viewers at the Rose d’Or festival. From there, Queen announced their next European tour, commencing in August. Roger then turned to some solo recording, releasing a widely ridiculed single and album the following month. Freddie raced back to Munich. In June, the band regrouped
in London to receive a special Silver Clef Outstanding Contribution to British Music award from the Nordoff Robbins Music Therapy charity.

July saw the release of the single “It’s a Hard Life,” which hit Number Six in the UK and gave the band their third Top Ten single from
The Works
.

“It’s a Hard Life” was Freddie at his huge, heartrending best, resuming the half-exuberant, half-tragic theme of “Killer Queen” and “Play the Game.” The track’s opening lyric and melody both echo “
Vesti la giubba
,” the most famous aria from Ruggero Lenoncavallo’s opera
Pagliacci: “Ridi, Pagliaccio, sul tuo amore infranto!
” (“Laugh Pagliaccio, at your broken love”). Freddie may also have had Smokey Robinson in mind when he wrote “Hard Life.” In “Tears of a Clown” from the Miracles’ 1967 album
Make It Happen
, Smokey compares himself to characters like Pagliacci, the clowns who hide hurt and anger behind vacant smiles. Robinson had deployed the sad-clown comparison before in his composition for Motown’s Carolyn Crawford, “My Smile Is Just a Frown (Turned Upside Down).” Similarly harking back to “Play the Game” and the frequently futile quest for true love, Freddie’s “Hard Life” was an impassioned take on his real-life dilemma. He was blessed with greater material wealth than most mere mortals could ever dream of. But it wasn’t enough. This was “money can’t buy me love” territory, famously visited by the Beatles twenty years earlier. As Paul McCartney put it, “The idea behind (that song) was that all these material possessions are all very well, but they won’t buy me what I really want.” Freddie had to learn the hard way how true this was.

That Freddie felt cursed by a lack of true emotional and romantic fulfillment was an open secret among his closest friends, who had watched over Freddie and mopped his tears throughout an epic march of disastrous relationships down the years. It was also obvious to his fans, thanks to the many heartrending songs he wrote on the subject.

“His lyrics reflected his life,” says Frank Allen of the Searchers. “ ‘I Want It All.’ ‘Somebody to Love.’ ‘Don’t Stop Me Now.’ ‘Who Wants to Live Forever’ all illustrate some aspect of his hopes and desires.
Naturally a songwriter expresses his ethos and personality in his lyrics, and as Freddie became more comfortable with his sexuality, it gave him the freedom to open up to the world. I would venture that his involvement with women boosted his confidence. Within most people there is an element of bisexuality. Very few come to terms with it. The guilt and the consequences, even in these so-called liberated times, are too great.”

Millions loved Freddie, but from afar. Few got close. I believe that those who did, and who were admitted to his inner circle, needed
him
too much. Their adoration of Freddie spoke more loudly of their own desires and dreams than of his. Freddie’s exuberance and “gay abandon” was a foil to throw the outside world off the scent, concealing a growing spiritual despondency. In his heart, he feared, he would never find that truly special “somebody to love”—another reason why he clung so tenaciously to Mary.

Referring to “It’s a Hard Life,” on which he worked tirelessly with Freddie, Brian said, “This is one of the most beautiful songs Freddie ever wrote. It’s straight from the heart.”

The lavish video for the single was filmed by director Tim Pope in Munich. It featured many of Freddie’s clubland cohorts, including Barbara Valentin, and left the band both ruffed and ruffled. All of them looked distinctly uncomfortable in their medieval troubadour getups. Freddie’s own skintight, eye-studded scorcher, in homage to risqué French
fin de siècle
singer Mistinguett, raised further eyebrows across the pond. So did a mostly unexplained leg injury, serious enough to require plastering, which he claimed to have sustained during a contretemps in a Bermuda Triangle bar.