Mercury and Me

by Jim Hutton

  I pinned Freddie into a corner with my arm around his neck. I spat at him: ‘Don’t, on New Year’s morning, fuck around with me.’

  ‘All right, let go,’ he said. ‘I’ve got what I wanted. I just wanted you to show you’re jealous.’

  I let go of him and he marched off. I stayed put and finished my drink.

  When I went to find the others, they were nowhere to be found. They’d left the club – and left me in a right pickle. It was freezing cold outside and I was just wearing jeans and a singlet. What is worse, my jacket and house-keys were in the car they had gone home in. I was furious. It was New Year’s Day and it would be impossible to find a cab anywhere.

  It must have been about five in the morning when I finally got back to Garden Lodge. I pressed the bell and heard Peter Straker’s voice through the intercom speaker saying, ‘It’s Jim!’

  He pressed the gate-lock button and as I walked up the garden path Freddie came out. I began screaming and shouting and went straight upstairs to our bedroom. Freddie ran after me.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you make your mind up. You want me or you want somebody else? Just make your mind up.’

  And I didn’t leave things there. I took Freddie to task for snubbing John: ‘How dare you insult my friends like that!’

  Freddie pinned me on to the bed to try to calm me down. It didn’t take long for me to cheer up. He gave me a winning look which said ‘I’m sorry’, though I never actually heard him say those words to anyone.

  ‘I got the reaction out of you tonight that I’ve always wanted from you,’ he said and slung his arms around me. I squeezed him tight around the waist. We made up properly in the bedroom later when we finally booted out the last few New Year’s revellers.

  Next day I got up and brought Freddie an early morning cup of tea. It was business as usual.

  Three days later it was my thirty-seventh birthday. Freddie decided to give me two new suits and asked Joe to take me shopping in Savile Row. The first suit I bought was a Tommy Nutter, and a sharp contrast with the off-the-peg suits I was used to.

  But Freddie’s plan to throw a birthday party for me at Garden Lodge quickly led the two of us to blows. It was a great party and brought together my friends and Freddie’s for the first time. The birthday cake was a triumph. It was decorated with cat figures, which I then kept in the fridge for over two years.

  But a few days later Freddie accused one of my friends of stealing a small, quite valuable vase from the windowsill in the hallway. I was adamant that I knew my friends very well and that none of them would do such a thing. For weeks the same argument kept coming back. Whenever we were alone in the bedroom, Freddie would niggle away, saying: ‘Someone stole the vase. You and your bloody friends. They’re never coming here again.’

  Finally I snapped. ‘Fine, Freddie,’ I said. ‘I’m going to the homes of all of my friends and if I find the vase I will leave you. You’ll never hear from me again.’

  After a while he lightened up. ‘It’s only a vase, anyway,’ he said.

  Only after Freddie had died did I finally learn the truth about the missing vase. Joe told me it had been broken on the day of the party, before a single guest had arrived. To prevent Freddie hearing about the breakage, Joe buried the broken pieces amongst the rubbish in the dustbin.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell Freddie at the time to save all that hassle?’ I asked.

  ‘We thought it best if Freddie thought it had been stolen rather than broken,’ Joe replied.

  That said a lot about Freddie. He loved beautiful things.

  3

  A RARE DECEIT

  February the 14th 1986 was our first Valentine’s Day together. I ordered two dozen red roses for ‘FM’ to be delivered to Garden Lodge in the morning while I was at work. But Freddie turned the romantic tables on me. The hotel’s florist came into the barber’s shop around noon with a beautiful bouquet of two dozen red roses.

  Maria, my assistant, screamed out in delight: ‘Oh, they’re for me.’ But hers wasn’t the only face which fell to the floor as the florist explained: ‘No, in actual fact they’re for Jim!’ The customer in my chair looked on in amazement as I went bright scarlet with embarrassment. I opened the card and it simply read ‘F’.

  Freddie’s friend Dave Clark, the drumming star of the sixties group the Dave Clark Five, was staging Time, a rock musical, at the Dominion Theatre, starring Cliff Richard and a hologram of Laurence Olivier. Dave asked Freddie to write two songs for the show, one of them the title song, ‘Time’.

  The show was due to open on 9 April and Freddie was invited to the celebrity opening night. He wanted me to go with him. Weeks ahead of the night, Joe was asked to buy smart black dinner suits and shiny patent leather shoes for himself, Phoebe and me.

  Ironically, the opening line of Freddie’s centrepiece song ‘Time’ was ‘Time waits for no man’. But time almost ran out between Freddie and me before we even got to that opening night. I discovered he was being unfaithful again. While I’d be at home most nights, content to watch television and get to bed early, Freddie continued going out alone until late. Some nights he went out and never came home at all. His excuse was that he’d stayed over at Stafford Terrace. I heard different. Friends whispered they’d seen Freddie openly playing the field.

  I was aware that Joe always knew where Freddie was. I woke up one Sunday morning at about nine. Freddie had, as usual, stayed out the whole night. When Joe came down he made straight for the door, and I followed at a safe distance. He led me to Freddie, who was, exactly as he had said, in the flat in Stafford Terrace.

  Joe went in through the front door and, about twenty minutes later, re-emerged with Freddie. But then I noticed a third person, a young guy, slipping out of the door and off down the road. I concluded that the gossip about Freddie was true.

  I dashed back to Garden Lodge ahead of Joe and Freddie. When they arrived I said nothing. This needed a plan. I decided not to try curtailing Freddie’s activities, but to have some fun of my own. I asked Freddie if he’d mind if I went for a drink to my old haunt, the Market Tavern. He said it was fine and arranged for Terry Giddings, his new chauffeur, to drive me over there.

  At the Tavern I had a few beers and got talking to a few old friends. They all said the same – I looked miserable.

  ‘Here, pop this into your mouth,’ said one, passing me something.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘Doesn’t matter what it is,’ came the reply. ‘Just pop it into your mouth. It’ll cheer you up.’ I could do with being cheered up, so without thinking I swallowed the pill. It was a tab of acid. Soon I was quite disorientated. The next thing I knew I’d left the Tavern with my friends and we were in Heaven.

  No matter how much I had to drink, I never lost control of myself. But with acid I completely lost my bearings and turned into a zombie. At Heaven I met an old friend, Jay, whom I hadn’t seen for years.

  ‘What’s the matter, Jim?’ he asked. ‘You look strange.’

  I told him what I could remember, about starting at the Tavern, having swallowed something and now being on another planet. Fortunately, Jay took me under his wing for the rest of the night and made sure I came to no harm.

  ‘You’re not going back to your home tonight,’ he told me. ‘You’ll stay at my place where you can be looked after.’

  The next morning, waking up in Jay’s flat, I had a humdinger of a headache. I assumed that back at Garden Lodge Freddie would be furious with me, so I set off for Mary’s flat, where I figured I could explain what a ghastly time I’d had and why I’d stayed out all night. Mary told me that the previous night Freddie had been on the warpath for hours and stayed up all night, talking with Peter Straker, as he waited for me to come home.

  Then the phone rang. It was Freddie.

  ‘Jim’s here,’ she told him.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘tell him to get back here, pack his bags and get out. He’s to be gone by the time I get back from the studio.’ Th
en he rang off.

  I was homeless again. I left Mary’s flat and stopped at a payphone to ring John Rowell to ask whether I could stay in his spare room again. He said I could, for as long as I wanted.

  I returned to Garden Lodge, went to the bedroom and packed all my things. Then I went to John’s flat. I came to the conclusion that Freddie and I had fallen out for good. A few days later, on the day Time opened, I got home and the phone was ringing. It was Freddie.

  ‘Are you coming home?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘But I want you to come to the opening night of Time with me,’ he said softly.

  ‘Well, you can take your friend with you. The dinner suit will fit him just as well,’ I said.

  ‘Come over,’ he insisted. ‘Let’s chat about it.’

  So I took a cab over and was met by Joe.

  ‘He’s upstairs waiting for you,’ he said. As I stepped into the bedroom Freddie threw his arms around me. Without saying a word we fell into bed and made love. The first thing Freddie said afterwards was: ‘Come on back home.’ So I agreed. Then we got ready to go to Time. Freddie made it very plain it was only me he wanted by his side at the theatre that night, and after that things settled back into a happy routine.

  During the interval at the show Freddie decided he wanted to sell ice creams. But things soon got out of hand and he started lobbing the ices randomly at members of the audience. Freddie was in equally high spirits at the after-show party held at the Hippodrome in Leicester Square where he introduced me to Cliff Richard as ‘My man Jim’. Cliff’s longevity in the music business was something Freddie told me he admired. Even though at the time he’d been in the business seventeen years himself, he still felt like a newcomer next to Cliff.

  When Freddie told Dave Clark how much he admired Laurence Olivier, Dave arranged a private supper with Olivier and his wife Joan Plowright. Freddie told me that over supper the conversation got around to the critics and Freddie moaned about the scathing attacks he often suffered in the press. Olivier’s response had been sublime.

  ‘Fuck the critics!’ he said.

  When Freddie got home that night he was more star-struck than I had ever seen him.

  ‘I’ve met one of the greats,’ he said, beaming like an excited child.

  Another day I got home and Freddie told me he’d had the unlikeliest of visitors who had turned up at Garden Lodge for the unlikeliest of reasons. It was Dustin Hoffman, looking for interior design ideas for one of his own homes.

  The American actor wanted to commission an interior designer whom Freddie had used to carry out some of his ideas at Garden Lodge. He rang to ask Freddie if he could show Dustin some of the rooms he had worked on in the house, and Freddie was delighted. For an hour or so Garden Lodge became a show-house to beat all show-houses.

  Freddie said Dustin was much shorter than he’d expected, terribly polite and rather nervous. But Freddie soon put him at his ease and gave him a tour of his handiwork and they talked about interior design, theatre and rock music. Freddie said he’d been in seventh heaven.

  During the first half of the year Freddie, Brian, Roger and John were in the studio again in London and Munich, putting the final touches to their album A Kind of Magic. They would start around noon and work through for the next twelve hours. Freddie would get home from work at the earliest some time after ten, but rarely later than one in the morning. He’d bounce in and play me a demo tape of his latest song, giving a running commentary about the bits he felt still needed honing or new effects yet to be added. Best of all, some days he came in and played his tape without saying a word – it was finished and he knew it was good.

  The single ‘A Kind of Magic’ came out in March and the video to accompany it was made at the then dilapidated Playhouse Theatre in Northumberland Avenue. I turned up after work one day to watch Freddie and take a look at how the video was getting on. Before long we almost came to blows when Freddie showed his jealous side.

  I got used to hanging around on the sets of the video shoots, and that evening sat alone somewhere towards the back of the stalls to watch Freddie. One of the band’s drivers came over and we got chatting; eventually we went off to have a drink. When I got back to the theatre Freddie was in his caravan, parked in the street near the stage door.

  He looked very angry and I knew it was best not to hang around, so I kept out of his sight until it was time to go home. In the car on the way back to Garden Lodge Freddie turned to me and said: ‘I’m disgusted with you. Who told you to bring your boyfriend in to see the video?’

  I looked at him and burst out laughing.

  ‘That wasn’t a friend of mine,’ I said, ‘It was one of your band’s bloody chauffeurs!’

  Freddie could also show his sense of humour. In 1986 I got a St Patrick’s Day card from Freddie. That evening I was told I wasn’t allowed into the kitchen. Joe or Phoebe passed a cup of coffee out to me to keep me quiet. Then Joe told me dinner was ready. I made for the kitchen, but my way was barred.

  ‘You’re in the dining room,’ he said. ‘Freddie’s given me strict instructions to make a special dinner for you because it’s St Patrick’s Day.’

  In the dining room the table was fully laid for one, complete with lit candelabra. And on a plate was a large juicy steak surrounded by small bowls – spuds prepared in every conceivable way: roast, sautéed, mashed, boiled, croquette, chips, Dauphinoise, baked, and so on.

  ‘Freddie told us to cook every type of potato we could think of,’ Joe said. Freddie always thought that because I was Irish I had to love potatoes. I did. I sat down and ate the most delicious dinner I can remember.

  A few times during the year Freddie took me out for romantic suppers. One night I got home from work and he hugged me as usual.

  ‘Go and get yourself ready. We’re going out,’ he said.

  Terry drove us to one of Freddie’s favourite places to eat, an Indian restaurant called Shazan’s. But we went alone and, unusually, there were none of Freddie’s friends waiting for him. He’d requested the most romantic table in the restaurant, which was in the basement.

  All through dinner he kept touching me, perhaps to see if he could embarrass me in front of the other customers. He’d reach across the table and hold my hand. When the ice cream arrived he even spoon-fed me mouthfuls. His attitude to the looks of disdain from some of the people there was ‘Fuck them!’ But it wasn’t mine. Though he was trying to be romantic, in front of all those strangers I felt very shy and turned bright scarlet.

  When Freddie and I were in private he could be particularly romantic. We never once broached the subject of how long we’d be together. We just accepted that we were and would be. Occasionally he’d ask me what I wanted out of life.

  ‘Contentment and to be loved,’ I’d reply. It seemed like I’d found both in Freddie.

  Another thing he’d often tell me, right up until the night he died, was: ‘I love you.’ And it was never an ‘I love you’ which just rolled off the tongue; he always meant it.

  I didn’t find it so easy to show emotion. I’d lived on the London gay scene for many years and had come to realise you can get hurt very easily when relationships end. Each finished relationship builds up a new barrier and they become difficult to break down. But, in time, Freddie tore them all down.

  I think we both shared a fear of the same thing – loneliness. You can have all the friends in the world around you, yet still feel agonisingly lonely, as Freddie said time and again. We were both acutely aware that many of our gay friends were haunted by the prospect of living out their lives alone, unwanted and unloved.

  Freddie’s next solo release was ‘Time’ in May. The same month Queen headlined the annual Golden Rose rock festival in Montreux. I went with Freddie on the trip and the concert was followed by a party for the band on a boat.

  When Freddie arrived he was asked to pose for the photographers, and I soon realised that he actually did have some power over the press. The photo
session went very well and after five or ten minutes, when they’d got plenty of pictures, Freddie thanked them, said he’d finished and it was time for the celebrations to start.

  He sat down at a table and started chatting intently to singer Belouis Some, who was always changing his name and seeking Freddie’s advice on the subject. A few minutes later a sneaky freelance photographer crept up on them to try for more candid shots of Freddie. But he’d barely fired off three shots before five of the other photographers pounced on him. They dragged him away and a bit of a scuffle followed.

  ‘I bet you won’t see that photo in the press tomorrow,’ shrieked Freddie gleefully. He was right. It’s also just as well that no photographs were taken during the party; what happened on the boat that night doesn’t bear thinking about. It was a riot.

  The Sun did later print a photograph of Freddie taken while he was performing at the festival, which he didn’t appreciate. It showed off “Flabulous Freddie” with a slight paunch, wickedly describing it as his “midriff bulge”. When he saw the picture he looked at me and shook his head in despair.

  ‘It’s typical,’ he said. ‘If I’m slim the papers say I’m too thin and if I put on a little bit of a belly they say I’m too fat. It’s a no-win situation.’

  Freddie joined the band to rehearse for their forthcoming ‘Magic’ Tour of Europe. It was to begin at the Rasunda Fotboll Stadion in Stockholm on 7 June, then continue until August, finishing with the most fantastic of flourishes before Queen’s biggest-ever British audience of 120,000 at Knebworth Park, Hertfordshire.

  As they left Britain in June, the album A Kind of Magic was released, along with the single ‘Friends Will Be Friends’; ‘Seven Seas of Rye’, Queen’s second single from 1974, which had given them their first taste of chart success, was on the B-side. The album rose to the top of the charts in Britain and over thirty other countries.