Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (46 page)

“Whatever it is, I believe that you are born with it. You never lose it. You can’t work on it. You can’t buy it. It is magical. You can’t cut through it—so an ordinary mortal cannot have a successful relationship with someone like that. It’s the primary reason why they have such disastrous love lives. You win the adoration of millions, but you cannot get or retain the love of just one person.

“Freddie and I chatted a bit about Queen’s long career,” said Phil. “We even discussed the structure of his songs. He grew quite animated when he started talking about his music. It’s what defined him, there’s no question. I’d written a few songs in my time, which had achieved chart success. Songwriters are always fascinated by how other songwriters do it. So I had to ask the inevitable: where did he get his inspiration from?

“ ‘The lines just come to me,’ he smiled.

“It was very hard talking to him,” Phil added, “because I knew that he was dying. It hadn’t been announced at that point, but I knew. Jim Beach told me. And I remember thinking that, if you have this aura, it crushes you in the end. It suffocates you. It is a huge cross to bear, and it’s probably the price you pay for genius. Within that aura, you’re only human like everyone else.

“A lot of very talented people die young. Maybe it’s because they reach their creative peak, and they ‘commit suicide’ in some way. Because they can’t handle fame anymore. Although some take their own
lives directly, such as Marilyn Monroe with an overdose, most don’t do that. Instead, they sabotage their existence in some way. James Dean drove a sports car so fast that it was inevitable that he would one day crash it and kill himself. Elvis was only forty-two when he died, but he was wrung out, he had nothing left, and he knew it. Maybe Freddie’s death wish was excessive sex, which, in the climate we were in, was always going to lead to AIDS. It’s a way of relinquishing responsibility for a life that has become too much.”

Their final party over, the band returned to Mountain Studios.

“
Innuendo
was very much made on borrowed time, as Freddie really wasn’t very well,” Roger would reveal after Freddie’s death.

During the last year of his life, hounded by the press, he would return to Montreux as often as his health would permit, at last allowing that peaceful place to become his refuge.

By chance, Freddie’s old college friend Jerry Hibbert found himself commissioned to work on animation for a video to promote
Innuendo
.

“I’d heard all the rumors that Freddie wasn’t well, and of course I was very concerned. So I said to Jim Beach at the meeting, ‘Are we animating these because Freddie’s ill and can’t appear in the video?’ ‘Freddie’s
not
ill,’ Jim said. ‘Where on earth have you heard
that?
’ ”

Freddie’s forty-fourth birthday was by Freddie’s standards a low-key dinner party for twenty at Garden Lodge. Mary came with her then partner Piers Cameron. Jim Beach with his wife Claudia. Mike Moran was there with his wife, alongside Dave Clark, Barbara Valentin, Peter Straker, Freddie’s GP Dr. Gordon Atkinson, and the usual suspects who made up Freddie’s household. It was to be his last formal birthday celebration, and he knew it. He didn’t let the knowledge get the better of him. Generous to the last, he presented each guest with “something to remember me by” from Tiffany, and was delighted, in turn, by his magnificent birthday cake. It was a replica of one of his favorite monuments on earth, the Taj Mahal.

Innuendo
’s title track was released as a single in January 1991. It gave the band their first UK Number One for a decade. The February album,
their fourteenth and final studio effort to be released during Freddie’s lifetime, hit Number One in the UK, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands, and became the first Queen album since
The Works
in 1984 to go gold on release in America. In the video for the single “I’m Going Slightly Mad,” a painfully gaunt, heavily made-up Freddie aped a crazed Lord Byron. “Headlong,” their thirty-ninth single, emerged in May. On a relentless mission now, against all clocks, Queen returned to Mountain Studios to begin work on
Made in Heaven
. The album would not be released until four years after Freddie’s death. Despite his dwindling strength, Freddie drove himself harder than ever, and vodka’d his way through long and arduous studio sessions.

“I think maybe there was a part of him that thought the miracle would come,” said Brian. “I think we all did.”

“Those were very sad days, but Freddie didn’t get depressed,” said Peter Freestone. “He was resigned to the fact that he was going to die. He accepted it . . . Anyway, can you imagine an
old
Freddie Mercury?”

Back at Garden Lodge, Freddie was struck by the urge to pick up drawing and painting again. He had given barely a thought to these skills since graduating from Ealing Art College.

“Jim went out and bought him a watercolor set and some brushes,” recalled Peter Freestone.

“He would sit for hours trying to do a portrait of Delilah, his favorite cat. It proved too much for him. But he did manage a couple of abstracts. That was down to Matisse. We were looking through an auction catalogue one day, and there was a Matisse going for £10,000. ‘
Ten grand
?’ cried Freddie. ‘
I
could do that!’

“He went swish, swish with the brush, and said to Joe and me, ‘There you go, one each! See how much
those
are worth!’ I suppose they could be worth all of that now.”

Life went up a gear. It was going too fast. In August came the news that Paul Prenter had died of AIDS. In the same month, Freddie told his sister Kashmira and her husband Roger the truth.

“We were sitting in his bedroom having coffee when he said
suddenly, ‘What you have to understand, my dear Kash, is that what I have is terminal,’ ” recalled Roger Cooke.

“ ‘I’m going to die,’ he said. We saw these marks on his ankles and knew he was ill. After that, we talked no more about it.”

“We continued to live our life as normally as we could,” said Jim.

“We were in Switzerland just three weeks before he died. While he obviously wasn’t in full health, he was well enough to be there. He was in a recording studio, for God’s sake. We never talked about how long he had left. But I think, if you have a terminal illness, there comes a point when you have a pretty good idea.

“A few of us went out to the Duck House for a break. There was Mary and her baby Richard, and Terry and his family. One day we had to all go and look at this lovely fifties chalet lake house with a garden and its own moorings. It was gorgeous, but it wasn’t going to work for Freddie. What he really needed was a flat. It was Jim Beach who found the penthouse in a building called la Tourelle. It had three bedrooms, for Freddie, Joe, and me, a huge sitting room with vast windows and a balcony looking out over the lake.”

Freddie had longed to spend that Christmas at his new Montreux apartment. Everyone at Garden Lodge now knew that it was not going to happen but kept up the pretense for Freddie’s sake.

“Perhaps it does seem a little pointless now, that he got his own flat in Montreux so near the end,” admits Peter Freestone.

“But Freddie loved doing up houses. The Montreux place was just something else to keep him going. Freddie had all these plans about what he’d do to each room, and he bought a lot of furniture from Sotheby’s for it.

“Freddie knew exactly how he wanted the flat to look, and he chose all the decor and furnishings himself,” said Jim.

“Joe and I were allowed to decide the color schemes for our own rooms—he had pale green while I had pale blue. I was put in charge of creating mini gardens for Freddie on the balconies. He wanted as much
greenery as we could cram in. It was a tragedy that he never got to spend his last Christmas there, or live there in the end.”

On Freddie’s forty-fifth birthday, Jim gave Freddie his final gift to him, a set of Irish crystal champagne glasses intended for the flat in Montreux. Both of them knew that they would never make it out there.

“That birthday was his quietest ever,” remembered Jim. “It was very sad. He was coming to terms with the fact that his life was running out fast, and of course he wasn’t happy about it. By then, he had lost the will to face most people. He didn’t want them seeing how he looked at that stage. How distressed he was. He didn’t want to upset them, and sort of wanted them to remember the old Freddie.”

Freddie’s final birthday cake, created by Jane Asher from photographs taken by Jim and Joe Fanelli, was a replica of his cherished Montreux apartment building, la Tourelle. Also on that last birthday, in the United States, the single “These Are the Days of Our Lives” was released, its video featuring Freddie’s final haunting film appearance. The same single, backed by “Bohemian Rhapsody,” would be released in the UK in December, after his death.

Freddie informed his housemates of his decision to stop taking his medication.

“He stopped everything except painkillers,” remembers Peter.

“He never really talked about being afraid of dying. There was no point in being frightened. He never let the disease take control of his life. As soon as it looked as though that might happen, he took control again.

“
He
was going to decide when to die,” explained Peter.

“For weeks, twenty-four hours a day, the press had camped on his doorstep. He was a prisoner in his own home. Nothing could be done about it, except, perhaps, what he did do—which was to let go.”

He’d had enough. Not only was Freddie losing his sight, but the will to live was ebbing away.

“I think his only regret at the end was that there was so much more music inside him,” said Peter.

“The Show Must Go On,” Queen’s brave, heartrending single, backed by “Keep Yourself Alive,” was released in October. The band, their management, their publicists, and entourage, all sworn to secrecy, continued to contradict rumors. Meanwhile, EMI continued to pump out product—
Greatest Hits II, Greatest Flix II
. With Freddie’s life hanging by a thread, the band appeared more prolific than ever.

“Freddie hated the idea of his family being upset,” said David Wigg, “and of his home being besieged by the media if his illness were made public. That is why everyone close to him carried on denying everything. The show went on, all right.”

Peter Freestone and Joe Fanelli nursed Freddie through the final days.

“I learned to do it. I had to. There was nobody else who could have done it,” shrugs Peter.

“Freddie had now begun to cut people off. He just didn’t want to see certain people. His parents, for example. They had been to the house in those last two or three weeks, and they wanted to come again on the Saturday before he died. But he said, ‘No. I’ve seen them.’ Part of it was, he didn’t want them seeing him as he now was. He’d prefer to be remembered as he had been. That was the reason he turned his back on so many people during the final year. Sometimes it would be a silly argument or something. But he knew the real reason, and so did I.”

A few really close friends were wonderful to Freddie during those final days: “Dave Clark, Elton, Tony King. And Joe and I, who were nursing, had help from the Westminster Hospital where Freddie had been treated: an oncologist who tried to relieve his Kaposi’s sarcoma, and a skin specialist.

“It’s amazing how quickly you learn things you never expected to have to do. Freddie had a Hickman line inserted into his chest, for example, through which we were able to give him his drugs. One comfort is that one of us was with him all the time—Jim, Joe, myself—even
through the night, during those last weeks. Freddie was never once left alone.”

Gordon Atkinson, Freddie’s doctor and friend, made his regular visits throughout the week. Terry Giddings, his driver, still came every day, despite the fact that Freddie wasn’t going anywhere.

“Even though she was seven months’ pregnant, Mary still tried to get to the house daily for a short visit, in order to continue her work. Freddie had determined that business was still to be as usual.”

Later, Peter wrote that Bomi and Jer did visit Freddie during that final week before he died, along with Kash, Roger, and their two children. All had tea together in Freddie’s bedroom.

“With superhuman effort he was able to entertain them for some two or three hours,” said Peter in his memoir. “This was still Freddie protecting them, making them believe that there was nothing for them to worry about. We brought up the tea, which included homemade sandwiches and shop-bought cakes. Little did any of us know that this would be the last time they would see Freddie alive.”

Brian and Anita came, as did Roger and Debbie Leng, his model partner. Neither couple knew that Freddie was so close to death, and that they would not see him again.

“Both visits were fairly short,” said Peter. “Without them knowing it, Freddie was saying good-bye.”

On 23 November, with Jim Beach at his bedside for a long meeting, they agreed Freddie’s last-ever statement, admitting to his fans and to the world that he had AIDS. This would be released immediately by publicist Roxy Meade. It came as a terrible shock to his friends.

“After all the years of keeping this huge secret to ourselves,” said Peter, “it was now going to be broadcast to the world. After discussion, we accepted the reasons behind it. A lot of good could come out of Freddie admitting to having the disease while still alive.”

Twenty-four hours later, Peter Freestone made the call to Jer and Bomi Bulsara with the news they were dreading to hear. Their beloved son, the Great Pretender, was dead.

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