Chapter Six
Sometime in September 1991, Joe and I had been given British Telecom pagers so that we could keep in constant touch all the time we weren’t together in the house. For example I might be out shopping and Joe could be at the gym and we could maintain the secure knowledge of being in touch should anything untoward happen at home and we were needed immediately. The pagers were never actually needed but for our peace of mind and for Freddie’s, they were worth their weight in gold. He was visibly deteriorating. Just a little piece of plastic with a couple of microchips made all the difference.
From about the end of September onwards, it must be remembered that Freddie’s eyesight was failing. It was why he hadn’t been going out quite so frequently. At Bonhams one day, where there was a flight of white marble steps leading to the street in Montpellier Square, he missed his footing and only just in time grabbed hold of my arm. It was the first time he realised that he couldn’t gauge the tread of the step. His sense of perspective had gone. I suppose it takes something unexpected like this incident for a person to be pulled up sharply and forced to evaluate the extent to which their own physical decline had progressed. For Freddie, part of the great joy of being alive was being able to see. This was a major setback in his will to carry on. He knew he was never going to beat his disease but he was determined to fight it with all his strength.
Freddie had flown back from Switzerland on Saturday, November 9, 1991, having made up his mind that he was no longer going to take any of the drugs that were keeping him alive. He was not going to have any more of the Gancyclovir, Septrin and all the others. He accepted that he would have to continue to take the painkillers. Up until this point, he had been on Dihydrocodeine (DF118) but the doctors, after discussion, considered he would be better off having Diamorphine as he needed it. After the first dose, Freddie found that he was extremely nauseous and so an anti-emetic was also prescribed. Again, Joe and I were taught the amounts and frequency of the doses. The anti-emetic worked up to a point but right until the end, Freddie had difficulty tolerating the morphine.
Some months prior to this date, Freddie had been admitted as an overnight patient to the Cromwell Hospital in Cromwell Road just around the corner in order to have a Hickman line implanted. This simple operation involved a canula being inserted into a vein in the neck. Then the rubber tube at the head of the canula is implanted under the skin and emerges through the skin on the upper left pectoral to which can then be attached an infusion valve. The only physical evidence of the presence of this canula is a tiny scar on the lower part of the neck in the clavicle region. This insertion facilitated easier administration of the medications. It solved the problem of having a nurse on hand to insert venflons every time access to a vein was required. At this time, such access was at least twice a day. No patient’s vein system could tolerate this invasion for long. This Hickman line access point could remain in situ for any amount of time up to a year. Extreme care was needed where hygiene was concerned as any stray infection had an open access to the body. Such stray infections could cause radical reactions even in a matter of seconds.
Without unwarranted blowing of our trumpets, I think great credit is due to Joe and myself for keeping the access line clean. It can never be fully sterile once it has been opened. In later experience, I came across patients whose lines didn’t remain in place for more than two or three weeks at a time due to infection. When you consider that Freddie’s bed was literally crawling with cats and that all this was taking place in a domestic – not a hospital – environment, he was very lucky.
There was talk of connecting Freddie’s Hickman line to a Diamorphine pump but Freddie vetoed this because of the nausea this drug left him with. Towards the end, he asked for the Diamorphine less and less and at the end relied solely on orally ingested analgesics.
The reason he stopped the life-sustaining drugs was that he had been made a prisoner within the walls of Garden Lodge by virtue of the fact that the press were now outside the gate permanently, thus preventing his ever leaving the house or his friends gaining entrance to the house without being pestered.
For the first week or so following this decision, it seemed to make no difference to his condition. He was obviously getting weaker because one of the drugs that he was taking was to boost his appetite and after declining it he was eating and drinking a lot less. He’d still be able to take scrambled egg, occasionally rice – fried of course not boiled – and he’d drink water and Earl Grey tea with milk. He’d only ever had hot lemon and honey when he knew he would be singing or when he’d had a cold or bad throat. We used to make up fresh fruit drinks with the juicing machine and tried to get his taste buds going with fresh pineapple or mango juice. He loved fresh fruit salad and we always ensured there was a large variety of fresh fruit like star fruit, kiwi fruit, cape gooseberries and passion fruit in the house. All the exotic varieties.
He was determined that while getting weaker, it should be business as usual as far as possible. This was carried out from the grand bed which, as previously mentioned, had been made specifically for the room and in which he would spend a great deal of his time surrounded by his beloved cats.
Freddie had many cats throughout his life and it is no mere silliness when I emphasise that he placed as much importance on these beloved animals as on any human in his life. Tom and Jerry were the start of Freddie’s live-in feline loves. They lived with him and Mary at 100 Holland Road and then moved with him to Stafford Terrace but ended their lives in Mary Austin’s flat on the corner of the terrace. With Tony Bastin came Oscar, the big ginger tom who became the tribe’s patriarch but yet who, in the end, must have felt so intimidated and thus displaced by the continual arrival of the latter youngsters, he inevitably left the nest and effectively went to live with someone else on the other side of the Garden Lodge wall. Then the long-haired blue point Tiffany, a gift from Mary and the only one of Freddie’s cats apart from little Lily not brought in from the Blue Cross sanctuary. While Freddie adored Tiffany, he hated the idea of such constant in-breeding with any animal, Tiffany being a case in blue-point where some of her vital organs failed because of her in-bred lineage.
Delilah – his favourite cat of all – and Goliath came next. While some might think this an odd pairing of names, Freddie took great pride in telling everyone that he wasn’t going to fall into the expected trap of calling his great black new love, Samson. Actually, Goliath wasn’t a very apt name because the cat in question never grew very big. But he made up for this by being incredibly loving and dribbled his adoration at the slightest excuse. After that came Miko, who was a tri-coloured tabby. She arrived after one of Freddie’s Japanese shopping sprees and was duly christened.
Next was a cat found by Jim and dubbed Romeo, a white-faced masked tabby. Why Romeo? Who knows? Last but not least was Lily, a mainly white cat with a touch of the tarbrush, little patches of black dappling the petals of the lily. One way of telling that Delilah was Freddie’s favourite was that she was the large one who did only as she pleased. He was so enamoured of his feline brood that Freddie commissioned paintings of every single one of them from Ann Ortman, one of which of Oscar he sent to be auctioned at one of the Queen fan club conventions.
Freddie only ever personally fed his cats from the dinner table or by means of running snacks, elevenses or afternoon refreshment available at whim in the form of dried nugget food. Otherwise it was one of our jobs to feed the feline ménage. In the mornings they would get tinned food, either Sheba or Whiskas. In the evening they would get fresh food, poached fish or chicken. Something strange about the animals – if Freddie had scrambled egg for breakfast, each of them would enjoy being given a little egg, a little sausage but on two or three occasions we tried to entice them with their own fresh-cooked scrambled egg with a little sausage or bacon and they turned their noses up at the slightest hint. Obviously it was the illicit thrill of the dinner table which was the great lure.
One thing that did annoy him was
if any of the cats ever ‘sprayed’ on the soft furnishings. He could never understand why when they had all the gardens and as much roaming space as possible that they felt the need to protect and mark their territory indoors as well but I suppose that there was little wonder when you consider how many males and females there were in the ‘family’ at anyone time. However, you would often find either Joe, Jim, Mary or myself scrubbing at the moire silk which had suffered a fresh stain and Tiffany’s object of defecation, namely the kitchen toaster, just had to be thrown away when she refused to be deterred, the turd in question being quite vile.
This time it was me who was not amused!
Considering their environment however, I suppose they were reasonably well-adjusted animals. The cats of course had their own Christmas presents. Freddie would send Jim out to complete Christmas stockings for all of them so that each cat might find a couple of cat-nip toys, some little nibbles and various other little ‘cat things’ each Christmas morning.
While living in Munich, Freddie was actually given a kitten but he knew because of his peripatetic existence, it would be very unfair on the animal for him to keep it. He therefore asked two friends of his, a young Irishman called Patrick who was living with a waiter nicknamed Polder in Winnie’s restaurant, to be foster parents. That way, the cat, immediately called Dorothy, would always have a home but Freddie could have free acess at any time. Freddie never had cats anywhere other than where he knew his real home was. Deep down, he knew that home was where the cats were.
One thing that I didn’t miss on leaving Garden Lodge was the constant barrage of telephone calls. There were six of us around the house during the course of the day. Multiply one average person’s telephone calls by six and then add a factor of increase to cater for Freddie being a star of worldwide artistic and business significance and perhaps you have some idea of the bells, Esmerelda, the bells! The one instrument whose bell was not connected was the one at the side of Freddie’s bed. The phone system in Garden Lodge was based on an office or hotel switchboard system where any extension could pick up an incoming call although internal calls could be made by dialling a specific extension.
We could always call Freddie on the internal line which would activate the bell but no external calls were heard. Every extension other than the main receiver in the kitchen was of the old-fashioned, dial-face variety. He felt they worked better! His natural curiosity always rose to the surface. If he had been in the sitting room and the telephone had been answered in the kitchen, he couldn’t resist asking, “Who was that? Should I have spoken to them? What did they want?”
It must have really got to him not being able to answer the phone because he loved the telephone. But not answering it personally was the only way he could protect himself from the unnecessary and sometimes distressing intrusions of the outside world. All Freddie’s telephone calls were screened. They always had been. While Joe or I would answer the phone, we had a list of people whom we knew he didn’t need or want to talk to. We were able, through the internal exchange system, to check with Freddie whether the caller was someone he wanted to talk to.
As September drew into October, if he felt like a change of scenery, he’d make his way downstairs in one of his many dressing gowns to sit for an hour or so in the sitting room. Someone would always be with him just to ensure his safety. He tended to get out of bed less after ‘the decision’ but it still didn’t stop him looking at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction sale catalogues, his usual reading material. I would get up at about eight o’ clock in the morning, cross the garden and go into the main house from my bedroom in the mews and wait for him to wake up. We’d set up an intercom between his room and the kitchen although if he needed anything at any other time, he’d use the telephone system to call us in whichever room we happened to be. However, it was easier for him just to press the intercom’s buzzer.
I’d take him a cup of tea and, if he felt like it, sit and chat about how he was feeling, whether there was anything he wanted done, anything that came into his mind. At that point, I’d also try to persuade him to take some nourishment. A slice of toast, maybe. But, more often than not, it was refused. He used to get annoyed with me as I continually badgered him to try and eat something because while we always had a large stock of various food items in the house, you could guarantee that when he did want something to eat it would be something we didn’t have. As far as he was concerned, there was no point in eating any more.
That he was going to die he had only to acknowledge once when he came off the drugs and there was no need to speak of it again. Similarly, although he was not at all without faith, he never spoke about what was going to happen to him after death. He was of the opinion that that was a question one worried about during the years of life. With the closeness of the inevitable, there was little point in thinking about it. Whatever was going to happen was going to happen and he knew he didn’t have long to worry about it. In my later experience and having had time to reflect myself, it seems that life does prepare a person for death. When the end is in sight, you think back, not forward. You think about what you have done, on the good times.
So, conversations were not deep and meaningful. Just easy communication to pass the time. I’d rearrange the pillows and cushions and then leave him propped up in bed watching the television screen. The television was mainly left on because it was company which wouldn’t talk back and which he didn’t have to entertain. At this point, the company he enjoyed most was that of Oscar, Delilah, Goliath, Romeo, Miko and Lily. He would never refuse them entry to his bedroom, unlike us humans when the mood took him. I’d spend the next few hours hovering in the kitchen because that was the easiest place for Freddie to get in touch with anyone if he wanted anything. The kitchen was also the place for fulfilling the housekeeping role that I was employed to do, making sure that everything was in its place for his next visit downstairs. How often had he walked into a room and rather than say, “Oh, that looks good!” instead would say, “Where’s the ashtray!”
He was always very particular and to the last noticed every new scratch and stain. He pronounced famously about Mary Pike, one of his cleaners, “If she’d been around in Louis The Fourteenth’s time, there wouldn’t be any antiques today!”
In her undoubted eager thoroughness, Mary was famous for taking chips and chunks out of the most expensive of Freddie’s antique furniture with her most modern vacuum cleaner.
We may have had to tolerate it, but we were never amused!
As I’ve said before, everything had its place in Freddie’s life.
As beautiful as the kitchen was, all that ox-blood, black, white and green, I often felt a need to get out. Anywhere. It wasn’t that I was going to be disloyal to this man who was always so very loyal to his friends and I wasn’t going to run out on him now but I often felt the need just to breathe empty air.
Once refreshed, it would, however, be a real joy when the buzzer on the kitchen intercom sounded because it was a sign that Freddie wanted something, that the lethargy had lifted for a while. I always ran upstairs hoping that the summons was to do with food and occasionally I was rewarded, though most of the food was fed into the mouth of whichever cat happened to be with him.
This whole cycle of waiting for his finger to find the buzzer would carry on throughout the day. I would probably see him maybe a dozen times from perhaps two minutes to an hour. In between summonses, I would often go upstairs and peek round the bedroom door just to check he was all right. Often he’d be dozing which led me to believe that his nights must have been very, very long. I’d stay in the main house until about ten-thirty, eleven o’clock, checking on him one last time before I would go to bed.
Very rarely would he call for either Joe or myself during the night. Although he could be a tyrant, a demanding, unreasonable prima donna, underneath the façade he had one of the softest, kindest hearts imaginable. He realised the need for our rest so that we would be able to take care of him as he knew we wa
nted to during the day.
Thinking back, his nights must have followed the same pattern as his days, that of dozing and waking and having all the time in the world to think of what was happening to his body as a result of his decision to abandon the drugs. He had always made a point of finding out what each drug was for and what it would do. That way, he had his own control over the course of his illness. There were times when the doctor suggested something, but it would always be Freddie’s choice as to whether the treatment was carried out.
Throughout his life, Freddie realised more and more the need for personal control after taking into account the times when his inexperience and naiveté had let him down in his younger days. I don’t think being in charge had ever been more important to him than in his last weeks.
Having taken his decision, I have to stress that in no way had he ever considered suicide. That was something that other people might have done. Instead of seeing suicide as the ultimate choice, Freddie would have seen it as a loss of control. In his ideal world, he would have gone to a clinic to be put down, with an injection like his beloved Tiffany.
I find any description of both my own feelings and the atmosphere in the house during these last two weeks of Freddie’s life very difficult to express and however I contrive to relate them will not do the reality full justice. The situation brought about contradictory feelings. Not only did we not know how long Freddie’s dying would take but we also, perhaps selfishly, didn’t know for how much longer we ourselves could keep up the brave smiling faces.
But Freddie was determined that life was to continue as normal. Every day we went shopping. Every day, Joe went to the gym. Every day, Jim worked in the garden. Every day the cleaners came in but they never went anywhere near Freddie’s bedroom.
It was as though the house was encased beneath a huge, invisible glass bell jar, like the ones that covered the works of Victorian clocks. I heard clocks everywhere in the house, ticking away, ticking away, each minute being part of a countdown whose length we didn’t know. Each tick counting away the moments of Freddie’s life. Everything outside the glass jar carried on as normal but we inside, it seemed, had always to be active, always straightening a book, replacing an ashtray, plumping a cushion, anything which might indicate that Freddie was expected to come downstairs again momentarily and he would see that his house was still perfect, just as he wanted it.
Freddie Mercury: An intimate memoir by the man who knew him best Page 29