Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (47 page)

We’d spent so many years making sure that Freddie was presentable before he left the house. The last thing I could do for him, in preparation for his final departure, was to make everything as perfect as I possibly could.

Peter Freestone

Every generation discovers Queen and makes them relevant in some way. Brian and Roger understand their legacy, and have been really clever with it. Queen is now a massive business venture. They are bigger today than they were during Freddie’s lifetime. They are laughing all the way to the bank, and good on them. Plenty of people think they’ve sold out, that they’ve compromised their art—but why should they care? They are rolling in it. As Roger Taylor says, “Fuck ’em if they don’t get it!”

Richard Hughes, producer, Transparent Television

Z
oroastrians take
an optimistic view of death, which they regard not as the end, but as a beginning. Earthly existence is thought to be merely a prelude to the afterlife, where many blessings await. Holding fire, earth, and water sacred, Parsees are neither cremated, interred, nor buried at sea.

With the body perceived as an empty vessel, it is not preserved but is committed for “celestial burial” and laid within “Towers of Silence” beyond city walls. There, at the mercy of the elements, it may also be consumed by birds of prey. Not even for a superstar could this process happen in England.

“It had to be cremation, and it had to take place as soon as possible after death,” confirmed Peter, who signed Freddie’s death certificate himself, giving cause of death as “a. Bronchopneumonia. b. AIDS,” as confirmed by Dr. Atkinson.

Having been attended round the clock by doctors, a postmortem to determine cause was not required. Peter Freestone consequently made rapid funeral arrangements, consulting with Freddie’s parents.

“They had to be considered. We were burying a rock superstar, but they were burying their son. Naturally they wanted things done according to their Parsee tradition. Their requests were all taken into account.”

“When he died, Freddie said to me, he wanted to be taken straight out,” said Jim.

“He wanted it all to be over as quickly as possible, with as little fuss as possible. Had we been able to arrange it, he would have liked to be cremated the same day. Get it over and done with, so that everyone could get back to normal . . . Freddie never wanted people to go around tearing hair out or gnashing teeth. Get on with life. That’s what it’s for.”

*   *   *

Freddie was cremated at West London Crematorium, Kensal Green, at ten a.m. on Wednesday, 27 November.

“It was all perfect, just the way Freddie would have wanted it.” Peter smiles. “There were five Daimler hearses for the flowers alone. Freddie was in a Rolls-Royce hearse, with four cars following that. His simple, pale oak coffin with a single red rose on top was carried in by pallbearers to ‘You’ve Got a Friend,’ sung by Aretha Franklin. We all followed. There were some fourteen on the ‘friends’ side, and about thirty relatives on the ‘family’ side.”

Elton John arrived in his green Bentley. Brian came with his on-off
girlfriend Anita Dobson (now his wife). Mary Austin, pregnant with her second son, Jamie, arrived with Dave Clark. Jim Callaghan, Queen’s faithful security guard, stood silently at the door of the chapel, waiting to greet Freddie’s parents and escort them in.

“When the coffin disappeared, we played a recording of Verdi’s “
D’Amor sull’ali rosee
,” an aria from
Il Trovatore
—sung, of course, by Montserrat Caballé. That had been Freddie’s favorite musical of all. He’d often go into the studio, put it on, and turn it up to such a volume that you could hear the musicians turning the pages of their music, and even moving their chairs. It was incredibly moving,” said Peter, “and I was rather upset. I needed to be on my own. My mother is buried at that crematorium. I remember running down to where her ashes are buried and asking her to look after him.”

Freddie’s floral tributes covered more than a quarter of an acre outside the crematorium. From his parents, white dahlias and lilies bearing the message, “To our very beloved son Freddie. We love you always, Mum and Dad.” From David Bowie, yellow roses. From Elton John, a heart of pink rosebuds with the words “Thank you for being my friend. I will love you always.” Boy George’s tribute read simply “Dear Freddie, I love you.” Mary Austin’s wreath was a pillow of roses in yellow and white, with the note “For my dearest, with my deepest love, from your Old Faithful.” A wreath from her little son said “To Uncle Freddie with love from your Ricky.” Roger Taylor’s carried the moving farewell: “Goodbye old friend, peace at last!” All flowers were later donated to London hospitals.

Back at the house, and finding that he could not handle the crowd inside, Jim wandered alone into the garden.

“I had lost my father years earlier,” he told me, “but I wasn’t in Ireland when it happened. So you could say that Freddie was the closest person to me who died. It hit me very hard.”

Jim would become incensed over the weeks to come by the words and deeds of others. The press reported that Dave Clark had said he was the only person in the bedroom when Freddie died.

“He was
not
the only person in the room,” stated Jim. “But it was quoted all over the place.”

The error must have perturbed the sensitive and caring Clark, for on his birthday, Jim received a beautiful card from him.

“The inscription he wrote inside read ‘You
were
there.’ I don’t know why people would say otherwise. Dave was brilliant when Freddie was ill. He would come round to the house all the time and muck in. Yes, he
did
sit by Freddie’s bed for hours on end, to give us a break. Dave
was
in the house the night Freddie died. But it wasn’t how he said.

“Freddie’s favorite cat Delilah hadn’t been on his bed all day long, I noticed, which was strange. That was where she slept. It was where she lived, practically. That evening she was at the foot of his bed, on the floor. I picked her up. Dave was holding one of Freddie’s hands at the time. He stroked Delilah with it. There was a glimmer of recognition from Freddie as Dave did so. Then Freddie expressed a wish to go to the toilet. I flew downstairs to get Peter to come up and give me a hand, Freddie wet the bed, and we had to change the sheets. For the sake of dignity, Dave left the room. It was then that Freddie passed away.”

Jim would never truly recover from the loss.

“There are still times when I can be pottering around in the garden, and Freddie’s facial expression when he died will come into my mind,” he told me in Ireland. “I can blank out what happened consciously, but not subconsciously. It is impossible to forget. I learned so much from him, not least a positive outlook. Freddie’s attitude was always, ‘But you can, don’t you see? You
can
do it. Put your mind to it, you’ll see what you can do.’ That was one of the loveliest things about him.”

Jim died from lung cancer in Ireland in 2010.

*   *   *

In Munich, poor Barbara Valentin was forced to deal with her grief alone. She’d gone out and bought “the black outfit,” and had booked and paid for her plane ticket. She was about to leave for the airport when the phone call came, commanding her to stay away. She would not say who had made the call, and Peter Freestone told me that he did
not remember. The likelihood was that it was one of Jim Beach’s team. Mary Austin was to be “the widow” that day, and Barbara would not be welcome.

“I couldn’t even be there to bury him,” she wept. “After all we’d been through. The pain was terrible. I have never got over it. The love I shared with Freddie I had never had before, and I’ve never had it since. Not that I’ve gone looking. Once was enough. He was the greatest love of my life. He still is. Twenty women would each have to live a hundred years to have what I had. It’s better to stop at the right time. I guess that’s what he did, too.”

At least Freddie got to do what he always said a star should do, she went on: “He quit while he was ahead. He used to tell me that you can never afford to fall from the top, be not as great as you once were. Fame had made him the loneliest person in the world. To compensate for this, his life became wilder and wilder, until it controlled him. He was overcompensating for his loneliness: Freddie did everything to extremes. The price he paid was the most terrible. I know he wouldn’t have planned it like that. But he got his way. Immortality was what he wanted, and immortality was what he got.”

Barbara died of a stroke in Munich in 2002.

*   *   *

Garden Lodge never did “get back to normal.” As Mary prepared to move in, she gave the impression that she wanted the others out. Jim thought that he would be allowed to stay as long as he wanted. In the event, he was asked to leave immediately.

“And me. And Joe,” remembered Peter Freestone sadly. “We didn’t have anywhere else to go, and needed a while to sort things out. We would have left soon enough . . . Mary’s behavior was certainly baffling.”

“How on earth could the three of us be treated the way we were, after all we had been through with Freddie?” said Jim. “It didn’t make sense. I left that house with nothing, not even my own things.”

The legal and financial wrangling that ensued left Freddie’s former
carers in limbo and Barbara Valentin almost homeless. With the help of her friends at Garden Lodge, she successfully contested the opposition. Freddie’s will raised countless questions, some of which would never be resolved.

Jim Hutton later explained that it was anger, not money, that prompted him to write his memoir. He wanted the world to know the truth, and could see no other way.

“I think Jim Beach was angry that my book ruined ‘the myth of Freddie,’ ” reckoned Jim. “All it did was return him to his original status of human being. It told the truth. Beach wanted fans to believe that sweet Mary Austin was the love of Freddie’s life, and what a great, tragic, romantic tale it all was. I believe that the fans don’t give a monkey’s whether or not Freddie was gay. I also believe that fans prefer to know the truth—good and bad.”

Peter Freestone also thought that. Freddie would have been horrified to see the people he loved and cared about falling out after he had gone.

“Those concerned have to live with themselves. Mary once said of Jim [Hutton] that he had ‘a very vivid imagination.’ I knew Jim a very long time, and never knew him to be anything other than totally honest. Jim’s conscience, like mine, was always clear.”

As for his ashes: Were they scattered on Freddie’s “Swan Lake,” in Montreux? Preserved in an urn on his parents’ mantelpiece? Had they been returned to a beach in Zanzibar to be offered to the ocean, sent for safekeeping to his aunt Sheroo in India, or buried beneath a cherry tree in the grounds of Garden Lodge—as Jim Hutton maintained? Could they even be concealed within the grave of some anonymous deceased, in Surrey’s Brookwood Civil and Military Cemetery, which has a dedicated Parsee plot? Freddie’s old schoolfriend Gita Choksi from St. Peter’s, Panchgani, believes so. On her first-ever visit to her own father’s grave at that cemetery, Gita ran into a caretaker in the grounds, and the pair got chatting. “The rock singer Freddie Mercury’s ashes are buried over there,” he told her.

“I was completely shocked and overcome,” Gita said.

“The caretaker obviously had no way of knowing anything about my connection with Freddie, and had no apparent reason to lie. I had not seen my old schoolfriend all those years, and here he was, his ashes buried just a few feet from my own father’s. I am absolutely sure that it is the truth. I don’t think the caretaker would tell me, a Parsee like Freddie, such a thing if it were not true. It was the most extraordinary thing to happen to me in my life. But I was grateful for it.”

Could the man not have been mistaken? It is possible. Bizarrely, though, when I visited the Brookwood Parsee plot myself, a caretaker told me the same thing. It crossed my mind that this could be a deliberate ploy, to throw fans off the scent. Surely not . . .

While not surprised to hear Gita’s story, Peter Freestone was unable to confirm it. “I simply don’t know. I suspect that his ashes were divided, and that perhaps the parents got some, and Mary got some . . . but who’s to say? Only they know for sure.”

*   *   *

“Bohemian Rhapsody” was rereleased as a Christmas 1991 single, soon after Freddie’s death. It raced to Number One, raising more than a million pounds for the Terence Higgins Trust AIDS charity. Queen’s signature single was also rereleased in America, with profits shared among AIDS charities across the States through the Magic Johnson Foundation.

On 20 April 1992, the band were ready to give Freddie his rock ’n’ roll send-off—with a concert that would subsequently be voted the greatest live rock event of the nineties. Brian, who described Freddie’s death as “like losing a brother,” stressed that the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert at Wembley Stadium on Easter Monday that year “is not Queen,” although most of those who took part would perform Queen songs. On the day of the concert’s announcement, 72,000 tickets sold out within two hours, even though no lineup had yet been agreed. The event would be broadcast on radio and TV to seventy-six countries and filmed for a documentary by David Mallet.

The dazzling show kicked off with recorded footage of Freddie
doing vocal scales. Annie Lennox and David Bowie sang “Under Pressure,” Roger Daltrey “I Want It All.” Extreme did “Hammer to Fall,” George Michael and Lisa Stansfield duetted on “These Are the Days of Our Lives,” and Elton John tackled “Bohemian Rhapsody” with Axl Rose. Seal chose “Who Wants to Live Forever.” Mick Ronson and Ian Hunter, of Mott the Hoople, veered from the basic format, to offer a moving tribute with Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes.” So did Robert Plant, with the Led Zeppelin number “Thank You”—although he also sang “Innuendo” and “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” But it was Liza Minnelli who blew them all off the stage, brilliantly, with “We Are the Champions.”