Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (15 page)

“Mary was undoubtedly a mother figure,” agrees consultant psychiatrist Dr. Cosmo Hallstrom.

“More to the point, the
idealized
mother figure: representative of precisely what he considered a woman should be. Freddie was highly sexual, and not too bothered about who he had sex with. He could have loving sex with her, but also rush off out there and have a lot of clandestine and raw encounters elsewhere. Those relationships were
notoriously fragile and ephemeral. It was to her that he always returned. And she of course was always waiting for him”—keeping herself only unto her man.

“She looked after him, mothered him, dealt with the good side of Freddie. She was his base and his strength. What he had with her enabled him to go off and have his flirtations. She thus became the long-suffering wife as well as the matriarch, putting up with all kinds of nonsense. But she served a fundamental purpose: the misery his guilt caused him, at the way he behaved when not with her, was the key to his creativity. A happy person doesn’t feel the need to do anything, to create anything. Happy people are content with their lot, with the way things are. Freddie was perennially anguished. The way he felt about Mary was the cause of that, but was also an inspiration for his work.”

Some described Mary’s feelings for Freddie as “Mother Love.” No surprise that this would eventually become the title of a plaintive track sung by Freddie and Brian on Queen’s
Made in Heaven
album, released four years after Mercury’s death in 1991.

“I’m a man of extremes,” was how Freddie once described himself. “I have a soft side and a hard side, with not a lot in between. If the right person finds me I can be very vulnerable, a real baby, which is invariably when I get trodden on. But sometimes I’m hard, and when I’m strong, no one can get to me.”

Mary also knew that Freddie had suffered, since childhood, something to which he rarely admitted: a persecution complex. That is, he worried that people were making fun of him behind his back, and that he was indeed ridiculous. It was to remain one of his fiercest inner demons until his death.

The fear may not have been so irrational, either. According to Peter “Ratty” Hince, a long-serving Queen roadie who works today as a photographer: “To be honest, everyone thought that Freddie was a bit of a wally. Even though it was glam, Freddie was over the top even for that. All that flowing costume stuff. I didn’t think he was particularly the strongest then. They were all very much a unit.”

Perhaps frustration at this complex was what caused him to boil with rage at times. Freddie would flare in inexplicable bouts of bad temper, which could cause him to be unkind and even cruel, uttering withering put-downs and gratuitously spiteful comments. While it has been suggested that Mary developed a defensive streak to protect first Freddie and then herself from the media and hangers-on, and that she could be untrusting and suspicious, could she really have been protecting them both from Freddie himself?

As much as their union was a meeting of heart, mind, and soul, the body in the equation could not be ignored. Freddie’s sexual relationship with Mary lasted for six years. That is a relative lifetime in one’s early twenties and demonstrates true commitment. They soon began living together, in a cramped, shabby £10-a-week bedsit in Victoria Road, just off Kensington High Street—the London neighborhood to which Freddie would always return. Today, the street is officially the most expensive for property in England and Wales, the average residence having an estimated sales value of £6.4 million.

Two years later, the couple would move to a larger, self-contained but ruinously damp apartment in Holland Road, costing £9 a week more.

“We grew up together. I liked him and it went from there,” Mary would recall. “It took about three years for me to really fall in love. I’ve never felt that way before or since, with anyone . . . I loved Freddie very much, and very deeply.

“I felt very safe with him,” she later told David Wigg.

“The more I got to know him, the more I loved him for himself. He had quality as a person, which I think is rare in life these days . . . We knew we could trust each other . . . and that we would never hurt each other on purpose.

“One Christmas he bought me a ring and put it in the most enormous box. I opened the box, and inside was another box, and so it went on until I got to this very tiny box. When I opened it, there was this beautiful Egyptian scarab ring. It’s supposed to bring good luck. He was very sweet and shy about giving it to me.”

“Whatever else was going on,” says Mick Rock, “Freddie was living this sweet little domestic life with Mary, and it was all very cozy and charming. Freddie was always in his dressing gown and slippers, whenever I went round there. We’d sit and talk for hours.”

Mary has mostly made a point of declining to discuss even mundane aspects of their life together. In occasional interviews, however, private details have emerged. For example, during their years living together, whenever Freddie felt the rush of songwriting inspiration in the middle of the night, he would pull his piano next to the bed and carry on composing. The average woman would not have put up with that for very long.

If she had her misgivings about Freddie’s sexuality, Mary tried to dismiss them at first.

“I once said to her ‘Surely you must have questioned that Freddie might be gay,’ ” said David Wigg. ‘But everywhere we went, girls were going crazy for him,’ she said. ‘When he came off stage, they were all over him.’ After one particular concert when he was mobbed by women, she actually started walking away, thinking, Freddie doesn’t need me anymore. He spotted her leaving, and ran after her. ‘Where are you going?’ ‘You don’t need me,’ Mary said to him, ‘you have all this.’ ‘I do need you,’ Freddie told her. ‘I want you to be part of it.’ ”

“Later he started coming home quite late in the evenings, and I started thinking, This is it,” she told David.

“Mary told me that at first she thought he was seeing another woman. She said, ‘I thought he doesn’t want me anymore. He’d always have an excuse: “we’ve been recording, darling,” or “we got carried away, sorry I’m so late.’ ” Nothing else seemed to be wrong between them, she said, except that he kept coming home so late at night. Well, eventually he came in one evening and said, ‘Mary, there’s something I have to tell you.’ She was still convinced there was another woman, and braced herself. But to her great relief, he simply said, ‘I think I’m bisexual.’

“ ‘No Freddie, I don’t think you’re bisexual,’ she said to him. ‘I think you’re gay.’

“Freddie was mortified in a way, she told me. But he did accept it from her, almost immediately. He told her ‘I want you always to be part of my life.’ When eventually he moved into Garden Lodge in Kensington, he bought her a little flat round the corner, where she could see his huge house from the bathroom window.”

She then became, in a way, the matriarch of Freddie’s “family,” a largely gay entourage of employees who doubled as friends.

“Freddie had the open and honest relationship with Mary which, because of the family religion, culture, and so on, he could never have enjoyed with his birth mother,” affirms Wigg.

Mick Rock remembers Freddie being “beside himself” over his issues with sexuality.

“This was before he finally came out of the closet. He definitely was gay, but not exclusively gay, and that screwed him. He was torn. It was almost as if he had to know whether he was one thing or the other for sure, but he was caught in this middle ground, in a kind of no-man’s land. He loved women. He enjoyed their company immensely. Later in life it may have been predominantly men for sex . . . he may have been more promiscuous with men, but he loved to get with the girls. Mary, of course, was the love of his life . . . the closest emotional bond he had ever known. The greatest irony of Freddie’s life is that, though he was essentially gay, his most meaningful relationship was with a woman. Perhaps that had more to do with the woman in question than sexual preference. There was a real true love there between him and Mary. The sexual thing wasn’t nearly so important as their emotional and spiritual bond.”

Freddie was soon taking male lovers, though he never took them home to the bedsit he shared with Mary. He behaved discreetly at first, maintaining the façade of his heterosexual domestic relationship. Hoping that it was just a “phase,” Mary indulged him and turned a blind eye.
As time went on, however, it became obvious that he preferred his own gender. In the end he could conceal the truth no longer, and confessed.

“I could see that he felt uncomfortable about something,” Mary told David Wigg. “So it was a relief to hear it. I liked the fact that he was honest with me. I don’t think he thought I’d be supportive, but I couldn’t deny Freddie the right to be at one with himself.”

It says much about the woman that she parked her personal grief over broken dreams and allowed their relationship to metamorphose into a deep, platonic friendship. From then on, she was Freddie’s Girl Friday, and spent at least part of every day with him. She described herself as his “general dogsbody.” Freddie called her “Old Faithful.”

Mary was now free to seek another partner. It would be a long time before she did so.

She couldn’t let go, even allegedly suggesting to Freddie that they have a child together—to which he reportedly retorted that he would “rather have a cat.” Mary would later give birth to two sons: Richard, to whom Freddie was godfather, and Jamie, born just after Freddie died. But many of her relationships with men seemed doomed to failure: perhaps because Freddie cast long shadows and was forever under her skin. Even the boys’ father, interior designer Piers Cameron, came and went.

“He had always felt overshadowed by Freddie,” Mary explained.

As for Freddie, there would be other affairs with women, despite the endless stream of boyfriends. Because she had chosen to remain an integral part of Freddie’s life, Mary could only accept this. Most people who knew them both believe that no other woman ever replaced Mary in Freddie’s affections. The fact that he left her his home and most of his fortune probably proves this.

“Mary’s nothing short of a saint,” explains Mick Rock. “She’s fabulous. Terrific. Very loyal. Unpretentious. Unintrusive. A good person. One of the best people I have known in my life. After Queen had made it and I’d moved to Manhattan, I’d often see Freddie in New York. We’d hang out and talk. On one occasion years later when I was in London, I had tea with Mary, and she said a very strange thing. I didn’t
understand it at the time, but I think I do now. She said: ‘First my father, then Freddie, now my sons. It would seem that I was put on this earth to nurture men.’ She seemed to be saying that’s her lot in life. A strange life, when you think about it. But it makes sense.”

Rock was relieved that Freddie treated her decently.

“He was unique, a one-off, and anybody would have had trouble dealing with that. Also, he was more into his work than anything else. To compound the problem, he’d have these inexplicable crazy moments. He must have been a nightmare to work with and to live with. He knew that. He wasn’t stupid. What Mary had to put up with was more than most people could take, but she never stopped loving him. Not to this day. You could say that she gave her life for him, and what she’s got in return is nothing to what she gave, believe me.”

As Mary would later explain, “He widened the tapestry of my life so much by introducing me to the worlds of ballet, opera, art. I’ve learned so much from him, and he’s given me personally so much. There was no way I’d want to desert him, ever.”

None of which made him any easier to be with. Not only did he make a drama of every crisis, but things had to be exact. Even vases of flowers around the home had to be arranged just so, or he would throw them outside in disgust.

“This was all to do with his style,” Mary said. “He wanted things done his way, and he could be very difficult. We quarreled a lot. But he liked a good row.”

Years later, long after his death, Mary would come to terms with the fortune Freddie left her, and found happiness again in his magnificent Georgian home. This was with Nick, the London businessman whom she married quietly on Long Island in 1998, with only her sons as witnesses.

“I think Nick was very brave to take me on really,” she said to David Wigg. “I come with a lot of baggage . . . As life unfolds . . . I can appreciate what I had, and what I now have, and move on with my life.”

Adds her friend Mick Rock, “Some people criticized her for the way
she hung in there, and they all questioned her motives. But I can tell you she was not there for the fucking money. I’d stake my life on that.”

People could say what they liked. Those who counted knew the “his” and “hers” of the scenario (there being at least three sides to every story). For twenty-one years, Mary kept her own counsel. As far as Freddie was concerned, her loyalty spoke for itself. Why did she never face the truth, leave town, and start a new life? Could her deepest fear have been that without him she was nothing?

“That she hung on in a situation from which most women would have bowed out to find a heterosexual milieu . . . is a feat both of perseverance and, it has to be said, of acting,” commented Freddie’s close friend and confidant David Evans.

“I honestly believe that she never was at ease in the gay company with which Freddie surrounded himself,” he revealed in his 1995 memoir
More of the Real Life
.

“I could sense her unease, and—as far as I could—compensated for it, consciously toning down some of my own behavior to accommodate her essentially heterosexual femininity. Mary was never ‘one of the boys’ as so many of the women were in Freddie’s life. She appeared not to have that glorious, ebullient self-confidence of a Barbara Valentin . . . or Anita Dobson or Diana Moseley . . . all wonderfully talented and strong women who were not threatened by Freddie’s outrageousness one bit. In fact, they were validated by it.

“Mary was always remote, removed in spirit and in flesh from The Real Life [as Freddie’s household setup was referred to by insiders].”