I’ve already dealt with Freddie’s relationship with his parents and his sister, with whom he was always very guarded as he wanted to protect them from things which they either would not understand or would not accept. Also, he felt the less they knew, the less they could tell. Let me explain. He never wanted his parents to be door-stepped or trapped by a member of the media who might badger them with questions which they were afraid of answering. If they knew nothing, they could in all honesty and integrity say nothing. The Bulsaras were a very traditional Parsee family and Freddie instinctively knew the limits to which his family could go in being modern. He was very sensitive to them and never wanted them compromised. Also, by maintaining a distance from them, he was also able to protect himself from some of their censure.
Strangely, Freddie was very ageist in his way. Things had to be brand new or antique. Same with people. He wasn’t one for getting on with or meeting his friends’ parents. Having said that, he did send my mother the most massive, beautiful bouquet of flowers when she was taken into hospital but he had no interest in people’s families as a matter of everyday moment. It was almost as though he had no other relations than his immediate nuclear family and even their presence often proved too much for him to be able to handle. Talking to him it was almost as though he had never had a childhood. It was never a topic he talked about and he never referred to life other than as a late teenager in London and even then very little about the time he spent at Art School.
Life seemed to have begun at Victoria Road, London W8, for there, away from his family, he could at last start to be himself.
It was as though he had only ever been a butterfly. He had never been a chrysalis and certainly had no repeatable memory of the caterpillar days. He would have hated being an old man and this was one reason, I think, why he never reacted more strongly when he discovered he had Aids. And, as far as the idea of children was concerned, Freddie only had one real opinion, “Fried or boiled?”
While he had very strong opinions about Mick Jagger and Elton and The Who still performing at such advanced ages, I rather think that however much he would have disapproved he would not have been able to stop himself and escape doing the same thing. As it was, he was spared at least the indignity of appearing as mutton dressed as lamb. He never looked his age except when very ill and certainly, ‘til that point, had aged so much better than any of his peers.
His view of women was that he really liked them but he always liked them more if they had that certain capacity to be ‘just one of the boys’. He didn’t specifically categorise human beings as men, women, children… He saw them all as people who he liked or didn’t like to be with. He gave no special dispensations to man, woman or child for either gender or age. He never preferred to be in the company more of men than women. That just wasn’t an issue.
I feel, oddly, that somehow there ought to be more which has to be said on this subject but there really isn’t anything more to tell. Freddie was what he was and therefore what he was in some respects prescribed the company he kept but provided that the company entertained him in whatever frame of mind he was currently enjoying, Freddie set no specific store as to who that company was in the way of gender or sexual preference. He assumed that everyone he associated with was an open book and had no hang-ups or no-go areas in their personality. Because he couldn’t be normal with his family, he had to be normal with his friends. And he was normal. Not tortured, not stressed, not torn… He was never anything but absolutely what he thought of as normal.
As to his other friends, significantly and in no special order, his friendship with Dave Clark started with a professional relationship, namely Freddie’s involvement with recording the soundtrack for Dave’s show Time. Freddie had always thought a lot of Dave because of Dave’s own business acumen in the way he had managed his recording career. Dave had a real business brain, had never had a manager and Freddie admired that enormously. Dave was a real self-made man. One of the originals from the Sixties, especially in rock’n’roll. And what’s more, Dave had not only kept the money he’d made but he’d amassed more and more and Freddie did find that praiseworthy. On several occasions Freddie said that had he had a brain more like Dave Clark’s, he would have been so much richer. However, for Freddie, given his circumstances, it was enough for him to know that he wasn’t being ripped off. Being lied to, being stolen from and being taken advantage of… these were his nightmares and worst fears in both his business and personal life.
But from Freddie’s first association with Dave Clark developed their particular friendship. For Freddie it was an opportunity to talk with someone who was ‘in his position’, having to live a life constrained by his job and, therefore, by his celebrity. They could talk as equals and indeed they behaved as such. If anything, Freddie found life easier to cope with than Dave and this was what Dave found so interesting about Freddie; that Freddie was a modern, up-dated version of him. They did grow very close in Freddie’s last year as Dave was one of the few people whom Freddie permitted to see him deteriorating. Dave would sit with Freddie while the blood and plasma transfusions were being administered and that was a long, arduous and stressful process, believe me.
It was through Dave that Freddie was able to enjoy what he counted as one of the most momentous evenings of his life – an invitation to dinner chez Lord and Lady Olivier. That’s Olivier as in Laurence and Joan. Because of the excitement, none of us at the house ever really found out what went on. That he had a wonderful time was not in doubt but he couldn’t repeat any of the conversations or say who did what or when although I don’t think there was a lot of dancing on tables.
However, for Freddie, who must have listened at school to many of this famous actor’s recordings of Shakespeare plays, it was a night to remember. Perhaps because it was such a special night, he wanted to keep it private, personal to him alone. The more people you tell, the faster the specialness falls away.
A lot of Freddie’s friends were turned away in the last year or two. It must have been very difficult for them to know what was going on and yet at the same time be unable to mention it as they were not supposed to know because Freddie hadn’t confided in them directly. It’s a testament to all of them that they still respected Freddie’s friendship and said nothing publicly to anyone, so proving that Freddie was generally a pretty good judge of character even though they must all have felt slighted at being kept at arm’s length.
It would be more than fair to say that Freddie had love affairs with cities and countries as much as he ever did with people. The very early Eighties was definitely his New York period, followed from 1983 to 1987 by his German period, most notably Munich. Prior to New York, I suppose one could say that the world was his playpen as he spent the years before my working with him travelling round the world both recording and touring. He worked a lot more in the years before I joined him, work as defined by the number of days and hours on stage or in the studio.
In New York, other than Thor Arnold, Freddie’s immediate ‘family’ included Lee Nolan, John Murphy and Joe Scardilli who deserve to have more said about them. Although they all knew each other separately in the way of casual friendship, it was Freddie who cemented the mutual bond and made their individual relationships so much more important. Tall and dark-haired, Lee worked as a waiter in an Italian restaurant. We were all much of an age, mid-twenties, early-thirties. Lee was always full of life and very much the joker. He came from out-of-town but had settled into the gay Manhattan lifestyle of the Eighties, he was always ready for a party. Joe and John were already firm friends as they often worked together as cabin crew for American Airlines. Because of their work schedule, their joining Freddie’s little parties was more intermittent but when they were in town, they joined in with gusto.
So came about the existence of Mother’s Club in New York, a tight-knit group of like-minded men, all breathing the heady air of liberation which was an overpowering aroma in the New York of the era. For a man like Freddie, br
ought up in repressive boarding schools and families and having had his wings clipped for so long for the sake of Queen, this was a space in which Mercury could really go into orbit. I have never seen any repetition of the intimacy of his relationship with Thor and Lee. To Freddie, these were two very special people and Freddie always had to mark specialness, like a big cat marking its territory. There were always little presents bought to celebrate and somehow make real this group solidarity. Probably unconsciously, the giving of a gift to a friend meant for Freddie that what existed only as a feeling was made physical reality. On one occasion, for each of them Freddie had bought small silver pill boxes from Tiffany’s so that each of us had our own place to stash the happy pills which stoked our weekends on the town.
The Munich years were characterised by two friendships, one with Winnie Kirchberger and the other with Barbara Valentin. We were staying at the Munich Hilton and one night Freddie had gone out with a very pleasant man called Horst who eventually became Joe Fanelli’s boyfriend and it was from Horst that Freddie got the brown cowboy hat that he was sometimes seen wearing.
A couple of nights later, Freddie met up with Winnie in one of the gay bars, probably the New York. The following day, we were due to return to England and I’ll never forget Freddie saying to me, “Well then, which one should I choose for when I come back?” So, the topic of conversation on the flight on the way back to London was the settling of the pros and cons of whether Winnie or Horst?
With Barbara Valentin on the other hand, there was no choice involved. Freddie and Barbara had many things in common from the word go including a mutual sense of fun. Life was also much easier with Barbara because of her command of English. There were many long nights when we would stay up drinking and laughing, sampling the many delights which were quite substantially available in Munich. Freddie liked Barbara’s attitude towards being a star, for in Germany Barbara was at the zenith of her celebrity. Freddie loved the way she would deal with her adoring public even after the point where her tolerance would give out and on the umpteenth approach, she would simply snap, “Fuck off! You’re a nobody!”
There were many occasions when Freddie would have loved to have behaved with the same high-handed regality but he could never bring himself to do so.
Freddie loved Barbara’s straightforwardness although unlike Freddie, Barbara expected to be treated like a star whenever she was out in public. And yet, conversely, like Freddie, who was actually an internationally recognised star, when Barbara was outside her own country, she didn’t expect or look for star treatment. Their relationship worked so well and was close enough that they decided to buy an apartment together in Munich. Initially, when the place was a shell, Freddie was horrified to see the evidence of the down-and-outs who had been camping there. His comment was, “They must recognise something. There’s tramps living here even before us tarts move in!”
In the event, Freddie never actually lived there although Barbara fulfilled a huge role in Freddie’s life at that time. Being a star, she, like Dave Clark at a later date, could understand what Freddie went through in his day-to-day life. She was always there for Freddie and understandably was very hurt when Freddie turned his back on her. Whether the events had happened or not, Freddie became very disillusioned when with more and more frequency articles were appearing in the German press’s gossip columns such as in the Evening Times about the relationship between him and Barbara. One of the load-bearing factors which worked against Barbara at this point was that in the past she had often commented that she knew the gossip columnist concerned.
After one article claiming to have knowledge of him and Barbara getting married, Freddie decided that enough was enough and fuelled by others whispering in his ear, he concluded that it could only be Barbara who was providing the information.
There were those who said that because her own star was on the wane, this being three or four years after they had first met, Barbara was hitching her fortunes now to Freddie’s. There were always people around Freddie who were not content to merely wait to take advantage of situations but who actually created circumstances themselves in order to get closer to Freddie. It was a situation which had surrounded him ever since he became famous. There were always people behind the scenes trying to manipulate Freddie’s life and then claiming the credit. Not that Freddie was ever easily manipulated but it was like the old adage about saying something often enough, the words become believable. He couldn’t bear people close to him gossiping about him.
Winnie won the toss in the game of pros and cons and became the significant other. I think Freddie was rather drawn to being involved in Sebastian Stub’n, Stub’n being the Bavarian term for a neighbourhood restaurant serving typically Bavarian food which was Winnie’s business. Dishes like Schweinhax’n (pigs’ ankles), Kartoffelknudel (Freddie described these as, ‘Fucking footballs’), various Bratwurst and the inevitable cabbage. Generally, what Winnie provided was hot, filling and tasty and Winnie himself was dark-haired with a moustache, some five-feet-ten in height and somewhat chunky in the usual Freddie mould.
How this relationship ever really got off the ground I think must be down to Barbara Valentin in that Freddie had about as much German vocabulary as Winnie had English. By that you can deduce that the relationship was largely based on sex. They both made as much effort as the other – like, none – to learn each other’s languages so the eventuality was much ‘pidgin’ and waving of arms from both parties. Freddie was an expert at waving his arms.
But the relationship lasted with Barbara as the indispensable go-between and interpreter, throughout the Munich period. While Freddie was officially contactable via Musicland or via me at The Munich Hilton or the Arabellahaus Hotel, it wasn’t long before he had moved into Winnie’s apartment. The relationship ended because Freddie’s in-loveness with Munich was waning and being replaced by his passion for his new house in London and, concomitantly, with Jim Hutton. All Freddie’s lovers had very unsophisticated roots. All had country origins but Freddie’s own acquired sophistication, he also being a country boy although he would be loathe to admit it, always rubbed off in varying degrees.
Peter Straker was a huge part of Freddie’s life for a very long time. They were already great friends before I started working for Queen and Peter was the first of Freddie’s longtime friends who I met. Peter was a laugh. He also was present through all Freddie’s various emotional and life situations. He was someone, being an artist himself although not in the same league as Freddie, who could understand and share the pressures. Peter was a shoulder for Freddie to cry on, an arm to comfort him and a companion to share the good times. There were many occasions that Freddie, Peter and myself solved the problems of the world from dusk to dawn. I can see us now sitting in Garden Lodge. Freddie would be on the three seater sofa, Peter would be generally in the arm chair near the kitchen door and I would be in the one on the opposite side.
I often wonder, now, why we sat in this position when it would be me who went to the kitchen to get the champagne from the fridge to fill the glasses. When it got to the point of the vodka and the brandy, I would leave the bottles on the coffee table for us each to fill our own. To help lubricate our thoughts, here is an idea of the drinks on hand – two or three bottles of champagne, Cristal for special occasions, Moet for every day, half a bottle of brandy, Remy Martin, a bottle of vodka, Stolichnaya, all the various mixers, tonic for Freddie, Coca-Cola for me as well as the ubiquitous ice bucket.
A typical subject which would start these evenings might be Fergie’s bows, for example. Everyone had an opinion. A monumental crisis could be made out of the fact that the newly ennobled Duchess of York wore a bow on everything. The old saying, ‘Making a mountain out of a molehill’ had nothing on us but in the course of an hour or so, we would have solved the purely hypothetical problem which was to us as real and important as the next glass of champagne and thus the madcap Duchess would end the evening thoroughly de-bowed.
Nothing of ea
rth-shattering importance was ever talked about. Nothing of real significance. If a serious topic was introduced by anyone, it would have lasted about five minutes before being discarded. These nights were not the nights for serious conversation. On another occasion, the subject of the evening was a new song Freddie was tinkering with in which he wanted to introduce the sound of a thigh being slapped. We spent, the three of us, two or three hours slapping our thighs to absolutely no avail. However, when we awoke the following morning it was to bruised thighs and palms that really stung.
Straker helped relieve the pressure for Freddie. He was always there with a ready laugh. On a deeper level, it was as though they had a brotherly conflict as the fundament of their relationship. There was a competitive streak in both of them. While they never came to blows over petty disagreements – because they cared too much for each other for that – there was a sort of one-upmanship which characterised their life together. Freddie’s contacts with his rock – he hated being thought of as a pop star – cronies and Peter’s ongoing ability to be able to introduce Freddie to ever more famous members of the acting and theatre fraternities proved of great interest to us on the periphery of their relationship.
In the twelve years I knew Freddie it was only Peter who had this relationship with him. A lot of the friendships which Freddie made in the latter part of his life were through Peter who effected Freddie’s introduction to Susannah York, Pam Ferris, Anita Dobson, Stephanie Beacham, Anna Nicholas and the list goes on.
It does seem strange that in his final year both Barbara Valentin and Peter Straker who were amongst the most important figures in his life were sidelined. There are reasons that I know of for this. There could be many more.
Freddie Mercury: An intimate memoir by the man who knew him best Page 26