Mercury and Me

by Jim Hutton

  Freddie asked me to join his crowd of friends, who were grouped in the middle of the bar. Joe Fannelli was there, and Peter Straker, the singer, with a couple of others. Joe was fair-haired, worked out and was in his thirties, with a cautious approach to people and life. I haven’t got a clue what any of us talked about that night; I let them do most of the talking.

  A little later Freddie whispered in my ear: ‘Come on, let’s go and dance.’ We made straight for the dance floor. I was a bit of a raver in those days, if sufficiently well oiled. I’d get up and dance even by myself if the mood took me – tearing the floor to bits along with anyone unlucky enough to be in my way. For a few good hours I threw Freddie across the floor. I think he admired my unselfconscious, bullish dancing.

  By about four in the morning Freddie decided he’d had enough and we were all invited back to his flat at 12 Stafford Terrace, Kensington. I sat next to him in the back of the car.

  Freddie’s home was the lower part of a house conversion. The hallway and dining room were on ground level and the kitchen on the mezzanine. In the basement were the bedrooms – Freddie’s facing the street and Joe Fannelli’s at the rear – and a large sitting room looking out on to a small, patioed garden.

  Outside, the dawn was almost up, but everyone in that flat was in the mood to keep partying. At one point Freddie offered me some cocaine, but it wasn’t my scene. ‘No, thanks,’ I said. ‘I don’t touch the stuff.’ I’d had the odd joint of cannabis in my time, but never anything harder.

  Anyway, I was already happily tanked up and more interested in playing with Freddie’s two cats, Tiffany and Oscar, than putting anything up my nose. Despite a room full of noisy people, Freddie and I flirted all the time. There was a lot of eye contact with the odd wink, or nod, or touch.

  Eventually Freddie and I fell into his bed, too drunk to do anything more than fumble about with each other to little effect. Freddie cuddled up to me affectionately. We both nattered away until we finally flaked out. Next morning we lay entwined, carrying on talking where we’d left off. When we got around to discussing what each of us did for a living, I told him I was a hairdresser. He said, ‘I’m a singer.’ Then he offered to go and make me a cup of tea.

  Later, around noon as I was leaving the flat, Freddie gave me his telephone number. ‘Fair dues,’ I said. ‘Here’s mine.’ I didn’t hear a word from Freddie after that night, and thought no more of it.

  Then three months later, in the early summer, he did get in touch. I got home on a Friday and started cooking bangers, mash, marrowfat peas and fried onions. I’d just put the potatoes on to boil when the phone went downstairs in the hall. Mrs Taverner answered it and called up for me.

  I trundled down and the voice at the other end simply said: ‘Guess who this is?’

  I tried a few names without success.

  ‘It’s Freddie,’ he said. ‘I’m having a little dinner party. Come over.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I replied. ‘I’ve just started cooking my dinner.’

  ‘Well, turn everything off at once,’ he demanded insistently. ‘Come over. You’ll have a good time, I promise.’

  So I turned off my bangers and set off for Freddie’s flat. I had no bottle of wine to offer my host but felt I should take something along, as a present, so when I got to Victoria Station I bought Freddie two £1.99 bunches of freesias.

  Then I caught a bus to Kensington High Street and walked towards his flat. ‘This is silly. I’m going nuts!’ I thought to myself. I’d never taken flowers to a guy before and had really surprised myself when I bought them. Besides, they looked half dead. As I turned into Stafford Terrace I spotted a bin and, embarrassed by the flowers, threw them in. Little did I know that freesias were one of Freddie’s favourite flowers. If I’d actually given them to him that day, he’d have gone crazy.

  So when Freddie opened the front door to me, I just gave him a big smile. We hugged and went downstairs to the sitting room to meet his other guests. There were about six of them.

  I felt apprehensive about meeting Freddie’s friends. As we were going upstairs to the dining room, one of the guests put his hand on my shoulder and acted hurt.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Ignore me.’

  ‘Jesus!’ I said. I had to look twice. It was Peter Freestone, a former colleague from my pre-Savoy days at Selfridge’s, the Oxford Street department store. In those days I was working as a hairpiece sales assistant while Peter managed the ground floor Orchard Room restaurant. Later he worked at the Royal Opera House as a dresser. Now he helped Freddie manage his life and was constantly on call.

  Peter was in his early thirties. Well over six feet tall, he towered over everyone, large and stocky. He had a chubby face and a warm smile. I could tell there wasn’t a bad bone in his body.

  Freddie and the others always called Peter ‘Phoebe’. Freddie loved finding nicknames – usually gender-swapping ones – for those around him. His own was Melina, after Melina Mercouri, the volatile Greek actress and Joe was Liza, as in ‘Liza Fannelli’. (Although I’ve called my book Mercury and Me, I only ever called him Freddie all the time we were together.)

  At supper I sat next to Freddie. He had hit the cocaine again at some point, and couldn’t stop talking. He was buzzing so much he could have talked to the wall.

  After supper we headed out to Heaven for a few hours, then, exhausted, we went back to Stafford Terrace. All Freddie’s other guests, especially a guy called Paul Prenter, were trying to find out what they could about me.

  I didn’t feel at all at ease with Prenter. He was a slight man with a moustache and glasses. His eyes constantly darted around the room, watching everyone around him and everything going on. He didn’t miss a trick. He was very talkative but also had a bitchy streak in him.

  There was a lot of bitchiness among Freddie’s friends. They seemed to compete constantly for his attention. None of them had ever seen me out on the gay scene. Unlike most of Freddie’s previous boyfriends, I was a total stranger. And I remained a tight-lipped mystery to them. They knew my name, where I lived and what I did for a living, but no more. When they asked questions, I was as evasive as possible. It was none of their damned business!

  Freddie didn’t ask any questions. We picked up exactly where we’d left off three months earlier. I hadn’t heard from him in that time, and that night he explained why it had been so long. After our previous liaison he’d gone back to his flat in Munich. It was his real home, because at the time he was living out of Britain as a tax exile. He’d also been on a tour of Australia, New Zealand and Japan with his group, Queen.

  In January Queen had headlined the world’s biggest rock festival, Rock in Rio, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. By all accounts the trip had been a riot for Freddie. He told me he had travelled everywhere in an armoured car with police outriders, sometimes speeding the wrong way down one-way streets. One policeman kept trying to make him laugh – by shoving his loaded gun down his trousers. And when Freddie slipped from the hotel with Joe to go shopping they were mobbed by fans and locked in a shop for their own safety until security men could spirit them away. Even the great South American footballer Diego Maradona turned out to be a Queen fan, and when he met Freddie he gave him his football shirt.

  At the Rio concert Freddie almost made a terrible mistake when he made his entrance to sing ‘I Want to Break Free’ in drag with huge plastic breasts. Brazilians had adopted the song as their liberation anthem and took offence at what he was wearing. Things began to turn nasty until he quickly whipped the outfit off.

  One tune I recognised was Freddie’s solo debut single, ‘Love Kills’. It had been a huge hit in the gay clubs in London at the end of 1984. He had just released his first solo album Mr Bad Guy, dedicated to his cats, and his second single ‘I Was Born to Love You’.

  While Freddie told me the story of his life that summer we discovered there was a special chemistry between us. I fell in love with so much about Freddie, regardless of what he did for a living. He
had big brown eyes and a vulnerable, child-like persona. He was quite the opposite of the sort of man I’d ever fancied before: I liked big men with stocky legs, but Freddie had a waspish figure and the thinnest legs I’d ever seen. And for all that he had apparently achieved, he appeared to be remarkably insecure. He seemed totally sincere, and I was hooked.

  Freddie said he had taken a shine to me when he’d first seen me because I reminded him of a favourite pin-up: Burt Reynolds! He liked his men big and strong, as long as they were softies at heart.

  After three months’ silence, we were ready to begin our affair. I think I must have seemed something of a challenge to him: he was one of the biggest rock stars in the world and I didn’t seem impressed by any of that side of his life.

  We spent that night together. I left in the afternoon, before Freddie was driven to Heathrow to take a flight back to his home in Munich. My life went on in London, unchanged. I strolled down to Kensington High Street to wait for a bus to Victoria. I walked with my head bowed towards the ground as usual. But it wasn’t because I was sad or miserable. Quite the contrary.

  Freddie’s car zoomed by, but I didn’t notice. He told me later that he had spotted me and thought I looked downcast and it had made him upset. He’d said to Joe and his driver: ‘There goes my man. Doesn’t he look miserable?’

  I wasn’t miserable, I was just being me. All the same, Freddie said he’d been tempted to turn back and cheer me up.

  The next day I was back at work at the Savoy and my life carried on as before, totally without incident. Then, on the Friday I got a call in the barber’s shop from someone in the ‘Queen Office’, saying Freddie was expecting me to go to Germany that night to be with him. His chauffeur was being sent to pick me up from the Savoy after work to drive me to Heathrow. I panicked. I was completely broke.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said apologising to the stranger at the other end. ‘I can’t afford it. I can’t afford fares like this.’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about that,’ came the response. ‘Your ticket has already been paid for.’

  That night, after I had locked up the barber’s shop at the Savoy, Freddie’s chauffeur handed me a Lufthansa air ticket and I was soon flying off to Munich.

  The flight was pretty special. It was the first time I’d ever travelled first-class and I had the compartment to myself, with four young attendants waiting on my every whim.

  My feelings about the weekend were rather mixed. Although I was thrilled that he’d bought me a ticket I was a bit annoyed with him because I always like to pay my own way and remain under no obligation to anyone. For the first time I couldn’t afford to be independent. I was a hairdresser on £70 a week.

  When the plane touched down at Munich Airport, Freddie was waiting. He was with Joe and Barbara Valentin, a German actress who in her day had been Germany’s answer to Brigitte Bardot and was now a cult heroine because of her work with the fashionable German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

  Freddie grabbed and hugged me. Such open affection embarrassed me dreadfully. That day the British tabloid press missed a fabulous photograph to throw over their front pages, but Freddie didn’t care who saw him throw his arms around me. He felt that in Germany people were more tolerant and certainly no one at the airport batted an eyelid.

  From the airport we drove the half-hour journey through the darkness to Freddie’s apartment. As soon as we arrived he jumped on top of me. He hardly gave me time to put down my overnight bag before we made love and we continued for half an hour or so. I would learn that he was very impulsive about sex which, fortunately, we both enjoyed thoroughly. When he got the urge for sex there was no stopping it – he wanted it at once. He was a very sexy man and I think I partly fell in love, much to my own surprise, with his amazingly slender body. His waist was just twenty-eight inches. The sex we had was raunchy but very gentle – nothing too acrobatic. Freddie could be either active or passive, but tended to be the latter throughout our relationship; it depended on the time of month! I think Freddie thought of it as making love in those early days, but I don’t think it would be called lovemaking until some time later. For the time being it was just steamy sex.

  When we re-emerged from the bedroom, Freddie showed me the rest of his flat. It had two bedrooms and was on the third floor of a four-storey block. It was bright and spacious, and sparsely but tastefully furnished. The dinner table sparkled, laid ready for supper. Before long Freddie’s guests arrived, mainly English-speaking German friends. After supper we left for the gay bars in Munich’s bohemian ‘Bermuda Triangle’ district. And finally we ended up in a wonderful club, New York New York.

  Freddie was the club’s regular star and one corner was exclusively reserved for him and his inner circle, who were reverently referred to as ‘The Family’. Freddie had been at the cocaine again and by New York New York he had caught his second wind. As soon as I had had a few drinks and became a bit merry, I grabbed him and recklessly headed off to the dance floor.

  That night Freddie made a great fuss of me and showed me off to his friends. I was surprised to discover that I lapped it all up. Doors had been opened for me to a completely new world.

  Despite the late night, I woke up early on the Saturday morning and left Freddie sleeping. I went into the kitchen, made myself a cup of coffee and gazed out of the bedroom window. Eventually the flat started to stir. Freddie got up in the middle of the morning and Joe went out to buy some provisions. For the first time on that trip Freddie and I were together, alone. We cuddled on the sofa, talking about anything which came into our heads. Before we knew it, the day had flown by.

  After supper, we ventured out to the pubs and clubs. I discovered that I had become known as the mystery man on Freddie Mercury’s arm. Most of Munich’s gay society were wondering who the hell I was. Freddie would only introduce me as ‘My new man’. We laughed and danced all night before falling back into bed.

  The next day, Sunday, I had to leave for London at the end of the afternoon. I was very sorry to say goodbye to Freddie. As a friend drove me to the airport, I started getting myself ready to return to my quiet, modest life in Sutton and devote myself to the daily routine of the Savoy barber’s shop. I was thrilled about the weekend with Freddie but didn’t dare tell a soul where I’d been. I simply carried on with the haircuts ahead of me, happy inside to have found Freddie.

  I wrote to thank him for the wonderful weekend and included a picture of a big ginger tom cat called Spock I used to have. I was thrilled when Freddie rang during the week.

  The next weekend I was back on my own in London. On Saturday night I headed back to the Market Tavern for a few beers. On Sunday I treated myself to a lie-in, then tackled Mrs Taverner’s garden, which I enjoyed. Gardening has always been a joy for me and I could dig and prune all day.

  One of the lines from Freddie’s song ‘I Was Born to Love You’ was: ‘It’s so hard to believe this is happening to me, an amazing feeling coming through.’ That summed up just how I felt about my affair with Freddie. The next time I saw Freddie was when he invited me to watch the making of the video for that very song at a studio in the East End of London. In the video, two Dutch dancers were doing a sultry bar-room routine of a Frenchman and his sexy partner. Late into the evening disaster struck. The Frenchman threw his girl across the stage but she slipped and smashed her head. Freddie stopped everything and took her to hospital, where he waited in the corridor while she was examined. Even though it was late at night, Freddie’s visit caused a stir and soon he was signing autographs for excited young nurses and insomniac elderly patients.

  The following Friday an air ticket was again waiting to fly me to Munich for the weekend and, very nearly, my first fight with Freddie. This time I declined his generous offer of a chauffeur to drive me to Heathrow. It all seemed a bit daft: he had to drive from West London to the West End then back out to Heathrow. I got the Tube instead. Again I was flying first-class.

  Joe met me at the airport, but Freddie
wasn’t with him. Joe said he had some long-standing engagement. Joe usually knew every single move Freddie made – he was told everything – but that night he said he didn’t have a clue where Freddie was. He wasn’t even sure that Freddie would be home that night.

  On Freddie’s instructions, Joe took me to the Bermuda Triangle bars and we ended up again in New York New York. When he decided he’d had enough and wanted to go home, I still wanted to stay. So he left me in the capable hands of another ‘Family’ member, a fellow Irishman called Patrick.

  When New York New York closed I went to Patrick’s flat for a drink and then he walked me back to Freddie’s. Freddie had made it home by then and, I thought, was sound asleep. I quietly undressed, got into bed and cuddled up.

  ‘Where have you been to at this hour in the morning?’ he snapped.

  ‘Out with Patrick,’ I answered.

  He remained silent all night. The following morning we didn’t say a word to each other for hours. Finally, Freddie broke the ice and apologised for not having been at the airport when I arrived.

  I’m not sure why, but I had the distinct impression that Freddie had another boyfriend in the city somewhere. I thought back to my arrival a fortnight earlier and realised why Freddie probably wanted me there so desperately. I was just part of a game between lovers. He wanted to flaunt me so that his boyfriend would see or hear of me and be jealous. Freddie had managed it all very successfully.

  Again that night Freddie and the Family ended up in New York New York. There I caught a glimpse of the opposition. A German boy was pointed out to me by Barbara as Freddie’s lover. He was quite different from me in many ways. Freddie liked his boyfriends fairly big; you could say he was a bit of a ‘chubby chaser’. Although this guy, called Winnie Kirkenberger, was fairly plump – perhaps because he owned a restaurant – and like me he had dark hair and moustache, unlike me he looked very aggressive.