Is This The Real Life? (54 page)

F
reddie Mercury died barely two miles from where his hero Jimi Hendrix’s body had been found twenty-one years earlier. Back then, Mercury and Roger Taylor had closed their stall at Kensington Market in Hendrix’s honour. In 1970, it would have seemed inconceivable that Mercury’s own death would eclipse that of Hendrix, but on the morning after his demise, the
Sun
’s front page was a photograph of the singer, a Union Jack flag fanned out across his shoulders, with the headline ‘F
REDDIE IS
D
EAD
’. Tabloids, broadsheets, television and radio reports alike treated the story with a mix of gravitas and prurient fascination. It was a very twenty-first-century affair, a portent of the celebrity culture to come.

Despite almost fifty journalists and photographers camped outside Garden Lodge, the news of Mercury’s death was not made public straight away. On Sunday evening, his doctor Gordon Atkinson had told his friends that the singer’s death was imminent, but that he was likely to survive for another few days. Just minutes after Atkinson left, Mercury died. Joe Fanelli ran from the house to flag down Atkinson’s car, unintentionally alerting the press.

On the certificate, signed by Atkinson, the cause of death would be given as ‘Bronchopneumonia b.AIDS’. Peter Freestone had filled in the rest of the document. Tellingly, he wrote the singer’s name as ‘Frederick Mercury otherwise Frederick Bulsara’. There was no mention of his real birth name, Farrokh.

In his own account of that night, it was also Freestone who broke the news via telephone to Mary Austin, Mercury’s parents and Jim Beach, who had flown to Los Angeles a day earlier. Another decision was taken: a statement announcing Freddie’s death would be released by the Queen office, but not until midnight. Freestone’s father was a funeral director in nearby Ladbroke Grove, and arranged to collect the body. The police were told what had happened, and a temporary roadblock was set up to delay the press for a few vital minutes while the undertaker’s van made its getaway.

With his family and closest friends already informed, Mercury’s bandmates were told. ‘I was numb the first night after it happened,’ said Brian May later. ‘We all met and talked. Then the next day I fell to pieces completely; couldn’t do anything; crying.’ Sure enough, Mercury’s droll quip to the guitarist that his death would be good for business came to pass. EMI held off for a few days before releasing Brian May’s new single ‘Driven By You’, a song that had first soundtracked a TV ad for Ford cars. It went to number 6.

At the agreed time, Queen released their statement to the press: ‘We have lost the greatest and most beloved member of our family. We feel overwhelming grief that he has gone, sadness that he should be cut down at the height of his creativity, but above all, great pride in the courageous way that he lived and died … As soon as we are able we would like to celebrate his life in the style to which he was accustomed.’

Peter Hince was now a photographer, and had taken pictures of Mercury for his solo albums. Unaware that Freddie had AIDS, Hince had been considering sending the singer a jokey card (‘Hurry up and get better, you old bastard … or something like that’) on the night he died. He’d last seen Mercury at Queen’s twentieth anniversary celebrations. ‘Freddie was two people,’ he says. ‘You could only get so close to him, and he never let his emotions overtake him. When I worked with him, it would get through to me from other people, “Oh, he’s so happy with you, he’d never go on tour without you.” But he’d never tell me that to my face. But when he died it was a huge part of my life gone.’

For those that had known Mercury when he was still Fred
Bulsara, it was a curious experience. ‘There was always that feeling,’ says one old friend. ‘Should you have made the phone call? Should you have tried to stay in touch? But life gets in the way, and his life was so different from ours. You don’t want to be the hanger-on. There were times when I saw him on TV and wondered if he was the same person I had known all those years ago.’

In one of his usual glib exchanges with the press, Mercury had said that after his death he ‘wanted to be buried with all my treasures, like Tutankhamen’. In reality, Mercury told his friends that he wanted to be cremated. The singer had abandoned his Zoroastrian faith, along with his birth name and so much of his past, but in keeping with Parsee tradition and with his parents’ wishes, a service was arranged as quickly as possible for 10 a.m. on Wednesday, 27 November in West London Crematorium, Kensal Green.

The day before the funeral, the
Daily Mirror
ran a front-page story from Dave Clark, under the headline ‘F
REDDIE:
T
HE
L
AST
M
OMENTS
’. Inside, Clark was pictured in the doorway of Garden Lodge, surrounded by bouquets of flowers from grieving fans. The story claimed – untruthfully, said others – that the singer’s bedroom had been fitted with an oxygen tent and that round-the-clock nurses had been hired to ease his suffering. Alongside Clark’s story was another from Mary Austin, the woman who, said the
Mirror
, ‘regarded herself as Freddie’s wife’. Mary revealed the singer’s physical decline during his final hours: ‘He couldn’t even speak, and his sight faded fast …’ She also explained that she had been the one that had broken the news of his death to Mercury’s parents. Aspects of both stories rankled with some, not least Jim Hutton. Yet there would be more disagreements and contradictions to come.

The complex nature of both Mercury’s private life and Queen’s relationship with the press was highlighted on the day of the funeral. Queen may have complained that the press had hounded Mercury in the final weeks of his life, but the Queen office had still arranged for the celebrity photographer Richard Young to take pictures before and after the service at Garden Lodge; a decision that irked Hutton (‘Our last private moments were taken from us’). Young was one of the few photographers the band trusted,
though Brian May complained after he had sold a photo of May with Anita Dobson at one of Mercury’s private parties.

Instead of Hutton, Mary Austin requested that Dave Clark share the first funeral car with her. Hutton, Freestone and Fanelli would be relegated to another vehicle. Barbara Valentin, the only other significant woman in Mercury’s life in recent years, had been told not to attend, and stayed in Munich at the apartment she and Mercury had bought together.

Around forty-five guests made up of Mercury’s bandmates, family and friends, including Elton John, gathered for the service. Outside, the grounds of the crematorium were covered with a carpet of wreaths and bouquets from Queen fans. Inside, two Parsee priests, chanting prayers in Avestan, an ancient language used in Zoroastrian scriptures, conducted the twenty-minute service. As one newspaper pointed out, under Parsee law, a dead body would ‘traditionally be left to be picked clean by vultures’. Less dramatically, Mercury’s coffin was carried into the crematorium to the sound of Aretha Franklin. He exited to a recording of Montserrat Caballé performing ‘D’Amor Sull’Ali Rosee’ from Verdi’s
Il Trovatore
. ‘I’ve lived a full life and if I’m dead tomorrow, I don’t give a damn,’ Mercury had once told an interviewer. ‘I’ve lived. I really have done it all.’

The day after the funeral, the
Daily Mirror
’s firebrand critic Joe Haines wrote a column denouncing Mercury as ‘a man bent – the apt word in the circumstances – on abnormal sexual pleasures, corrupt, corrupting and a drug taker’, before concluding that ‘his private life is a revolting tale of depravity, lust and downright wickedness … For his kind, AIDS is a form of suicide.’

Queen had optimistically hoped that Mercury’s death would help raise understanding of the illness. But there was still too much of a stigma, too much fear, for that to happen so easily. In the days that followed, Brian May took great exception to the press’s claim that AIDS was exclusively ‘a gay disease’. ‘They were saying things like, “Fred got AIDS because he was promiscuous, the rest of us needn’t worry,”’ he complained. ‘To print this stuff is going to make a few kids think, “I’m OK”, and the next day they’ll be HIV positive.’

May’s frustration was behind his decision to be interviewed in the week after the funeral. May and Roger Taylor appeared on the breakfast show GM-TV, fielding questions from presenter Mike Morris and looking as if they were still struggling to make sense of what had happened. ‘We get very angry about how he is represented in the tabloid press,’ protested May. ‘He wasn’t wildly promiscuous or consumed by drugs.’ Their task of convincing the world was made more difficult by Freddie’s own fabulous bon mots (‘I‘m just an old slag who wakes up in the morning, scratches his head and wonders who he wants to fuck’), many of which were gleefully reproduced in the newspapers. Mercury had worked so hard at creating his persona that many in the outside world struggled to equate the larger-than-life presence they saw onstage with the ‘shy, kind, gentle person’ May was trying to describe.

May and Taylor were adamant that Mercury wanted the world to know he had AIDS to raise awareness; both took the time to condemn the homophobia in much of the press coverage. But it was also obvious how much pressure Mercury’s earlier need for secrecy had placed on his bandmates. ‘Freddie made a decision very early on in his life that he was going to do things his way,’ said May. ‘We respected he would handle his own life. But we were gagged by that, and so you find yourself not being able to talk about that to friends …’ ‘You give the impression none of you really knew him,’ ventured Mike Morris. Taylor’s answer summed up the Queen mindset: ‘He was a mystery … but we feel absolutely honour-bound to stick up for him.’ To his credit, May also made clear that Mercury had been in ‘a stable, loving relationship … and had three guys who were very caring who were with him until the very end. But nobody mentions that.’ It was a rare public acknowledgement of his friends and carers at Garden Lodge.

The interview offered one moment of dark comedy, when the cameras panned back to reveal the show’s other guest, TV magician Paul Daniels. ‘Were you a fan of Queen and Freddie Mercury, Paul?’ asked Morris’ co-host Kathryn Holloway rather earnestly. ‘Er … no,’ he shrugged, before launching into a rambling explanation of how most pop music had passed him by.

As well as righting the wrongs of the press, May and Taylor had
also appeared on GM-TV to promote ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Queen’s most famous single had been re-released with all proceeds to be donated to the Terrence Higgins Trust. It would reach number 1, raising £1 million for the AIDS charity. Before long, ten of Queen’s studio albums would also be back in the UK Top 100.

In America, there was now speculation that Hollywood Records had known about Mercury’s condition before signing Queen. Interviewed by Bruce Haring for his 1996 book,
Off the Record: Ruthless
Days and Reckless Nights Inside the Music Industry
, Hollywood’s then label president Peter Paterno admitted that he had been aware of the rumours about Mercury’s health but insisted that Jim Beach had never told him outright that Freddie was sick. ‘He [Beach] said that Mercury would not tour. He made that absolutely clear that Queen would not tour,’ said Paterno. ‘Honestly, I felt the catalogue was good. So you sit there and go, “Okay. It’s something I believe in musically, and there’s two possibilities: either he isn’t sick, in which case maybe I can convince them to tour, which means I will sell some records; or he’s really sick and he may die.” I was willing to take the risk one way or another.’

Hollywood had begun reissuing Queen’s back catalogue on CD in February 1991, believing that that they needed to sell 2.7 million Queen albums to break even on their $10 million deal. By the time of Mercury’s death, they were on target with 1.1 million units sold. As Paterno told Bruce Haring: ‘When he died, sales accelerated to the point where it became clear that within three years we were going to get our money back.’

Christmas 1991 brought a victory, albeit a hollow one, with ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and
Queen’s Greatest Hits II
both at number 1. Before long, the single’s B-side – the wistful ‘These Are the Days of Our Lives’ – was being played on the radio more than its A-side. It seemed more appropriate than the endless ‘Bismillahs!’ and ‘Galileos!’ ‘It was a very strange time for us,’ recalled Taylor. ‘We hardly noticed what the record was doing.’

For Freddie Mercury’s former friends and employees, the end of the year brought the realisation that everything in their lives had now changed. Hutton, Fanelli and Freestone were remembered in Mercury’s will and received a tax-free sum of £500,000 each, and
Mercury’s driver Terry Giddings was given £100,000. Mercury had already bought Fanelli a house and Hutton a plot of land in Ireland. The gardener’s relationship with the singer had lasted for over five years, but Hutton had always known that almost everything else would be left to Mary Austin.

In the end, Mary inherited Garden Lodge and a fifty per cent share of Mercury’s estate (valued at approximately £10 million) and his future income. The remainder of his estate was split evenly between his parents and his sister. Initially, Hutton had been told it was Mercury’s wish that the three friends stay on at Garden Lodge for as long as they wanted. However, Mercury, it seems, neglected to write this into his will. With Mary inheriting the house, Hutton and the others were asked to leave.

Peter Freestone would train as a nurse, before moving, for a time, into the hotel industry, and since becoming a regular at Queen fan club conventions. Seven years after Mercury’s death, he published a book,
Freddie Mercury: An Intimate Memoir
, about his time working for the singer. Joe Fanelli returned to the United States, but died of AIDS in 1992. The disease would strike down many of Mercury’s other friends, ex-lovers and associates. Jim Hutton moved back to Ireland and published his own book,
Mercury and Me
, in 1994. It included a highly dramatic account of his ex-lover’s dying days, and was not uncritical of Mary Austin, Dave Clark, Jim Beach and others within the inner circle. To the end, Hutton insisted that Mercury had never consented to news of his disease being made public. Ultimately, Jim’s experience seemed to underline the impossible nature of Freddie’s relationships. Hutton was the man with whom Mercury had shared the last years of his life, but he could still never compete with his lover’s ex-girlfriend from years earlier. Although he had tested HIV positive in 1990, advances in AIDS medication allowed Hutton to enjoy the years denied to Mercury and Fanelli. He died of lung cancer on New Year’s Day 2010.