by Jim Hutton
He took over Henderson’s, a top nightclub in Munich. Then he had it redecorated and refurbished throughout in black and white and decorated with hundreds of black and white roses. Even the seats were re-covered in black and white. The ball was to be recorded for the video of his solo single, ‘Living on My Own’, released that month.
On the day of the party a load of us were flown in from London, including Phoebe, Mary, some of the Queen office workers and Daily Express showbusiness writer David Wigg. David and Queen had known each other for over ten years: he was one of the few writers whom Freddie felt he could trust.
Going through British customs there was a bit of a hold-up. We were bringing with us Freddie’s costume for the ball, which included a pair of braces decorated with mock bullets. The airline decided that the bullet braces couldn’t be allowed in the cabin and had to be put in the cargo hold.
We flew British Airways. As the only one travelling business-class, I had free drinks and better food than the others. Mary suggested that I steal a bottle of wine from business-class and pass it back to them. I did nothing of the sort. It would have been too tacky.
Most of the party were put up at the Munich Hilton Hotel at Freddie’s expense, but Mary was staying with Freddie and me, sleeping on the sofabed in his apartment. By the time Mary and I arrived there was a houseful of guests.
My heart sank when I got to the flat and saw all the expensive birthday presents that Freddie’s friends had provided. I hadn’t been sure what to give him. I didn’t have much money to buy him anything, so I decided I’d give him a pressed four-leaf clover. It wasn’t a real one, of course, but it had been given to me many years ago by a friend’s father who had made it himself.
I was too embarrassed to give Freddie his lucky clover in front of everyone, so I called him into the bedroom.
‘I’m sorry, this is all I can afford to give you,’ I said, passing him a small folded piece of tissue paper. When he opened it up he was thrilled. He kissed me then ran into the sitting room with it.
‘Look at the gorgeous present Jim’s given me,’ he told everyone, and I blushed. Freddie seemed delighted with it because he knew I had given him something from the heart.
At about ten, Freddie and I set off for the party in the limousine. Freddie was wearing his black-and-white harlequin leotard and a wonderful military-style braided jacket designed by the Emanuels, the designers who had made Lady Di’s celebrated wedding dress. And of course he wore the bullet braces which had caused the trouble at the airport. Everyone was dressed in black and white or drag that night – except me. I was in a multi-coloured sequined jacket with tails, borrowed from a former dancer friend. As I was wearing black trousers I argued that I could get away with it – and I did.
Most of the crowd at the bash were German, familiar faces on the Munich gay scene who’d go anywhere for a good party. Some of the costumes were ingenious. Brian May came as a witch; David Wigg wore a fetching frock; Phoebe went as a gypsy; and even Richard Young, a paparazzi photographer, was dragged up to the nines. Reinhold Mack was there with his wife, Ingrid, and so was Steve Strange as well as a number of record company bosses.
Film cameras slipped among us constantly, catching the magic. I spent most of my time around Freddie, but wanted to maintain my anonymity, so whenever the cameras were around I’d make myself scarce. I became quite adept at slipping into the shadows at the first sign of a lens.
During the evening Freddie was presented with an enormous birthday cake in the shape of a grand piano. It was so large that each of the three hundred guests got a slice.
Some hours into the party Joe came to me looking worried. ‘Freddie wants you,’ he said, then went on to explain that Freddie was having some kind of anxiety attack. I found him in the middle of the room, looking totally exhausted. He’d had an argument with someone – who it was and what it was about I’ve no idea. By the time I arrived the drama was over. Freddie wanted me to help him calm down, so I put my arms around him and hugged him. I soon discovered it wasn’t only the argument which had got him into such a state.
All there was to drink that night was champagne, champagne and more champagne. We’d all had a few, but Freddie had had more than he’d bargained for. Drugs were going around and someone had slipped him some kind of drugs cocktail. Although he liked cocaine, he didn’t like experimenting with different drugs. He was quite shattered by the experience.
After a while Freddie felt fine again. We partied on into the night and even went on to the dance floor. It was a night to remember, and we finally crashed into bed at six in the morning. While most of us took the day slowly, the following morning Freddie went back to the club with the video crew and some darling German drag queens, slender stunners, to film more footage of his outrageous video.
When Freddie got the bill for the party he wasn’t too amused. The cost was enormous, about £50,000, because so many people had been extravagant at his expense. He felt he had been taken for a ride.
When the video came out, to my amazement I was included for a brief moment, dancing alone with my shirt off. Freddie was so meticulous about the editing of his videos that he must have insisted I should be included. The video was never released in America because CBS, Freddie’s solo label, believed it was too risque: there was too much transvestism in it for them.
By those happy days the relationship between Freddie and me had deepened. I came to miss him when we were apart; I became upset. And Freddie felt the same way about me. Then one weekend in London he started talking about living our lives together.
‘If I asked you to come and live with me in Munich, would you?’ he asked. I’d never even considered moving in with Freddie until that moment.
‘Yes, I will,’ I said, adding, ‘on one condition. If I move to Germany I must have a job.’ I had financial commitments in Britain, and wasn’t prepared to throw in my job at the Savoy to scour Munich for a job as a hairdresser who couldn’t even speak German. My independence was terribly important to me, and I wasn’t prepared simply to live out of Freddie’s pocket.
Freddie let the matter drop. Then, fifteen minutes later, he said: ‘And if I later decide to leave Munich and come back to London?’
‘Then I would consider what I wanted to do,’ I answered. It was that independent streak in me which caused most of the rows between us, always ending in Freddie screaming: ‘You and your fucking independence!’ In fact, Freddie adored independent-minded people, but he preferred to manipulate people into doing what he wanted if he could.
I was never in any doubt that it was he who engineered the love affair between us. It happened like this. One night in London we went to the Earls Court gay club Copacabana with Joe, Peter Straker and Gary, the chauffeur, among others. We headed to the bar, then strolled towards the pool table. Suddenly Freddie turned and stared at me.
‘Fuck off!’ he said venomously. I was very surprised. So I did. I fucked off. I turned on my heel and made for the door. On the way out I passed Gary, who sensed that all was not well.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s in one of his moods and has told me to fuck off, so I’m going.’ I walked back to Garden Lodge, packed my weekend bag and took a taxi to Trafalgar Square to catch the night bus back to Sutton. I got home, went to bed and fell asleep. At four in the morning I was woken by a furious Ivy Taverner banging on my bedroom door. Unable to reach me in any other way, Freddie had telephoned Ivy and she’d slammed the phone down on him. I apologised to her, but it didn’t seem to help.
I was at least as stubborn as Freddie and had no intention of calling him the next morning. When he did ring, a few days later, I blew him out. ‘Don’t fuck me around,’ I told him. ‘Nobody tells me to fuck off.’
He knew things weren’t over between us. Far from it; the fatal late night phone calls were about to start.
For the next few weeks he took to phoning most nights at three or four in the morning. Eventually I
vy Taverner got so fed up with it that she gave me two weeks’ notice. Freddie’s persistence had made me homeless.
When Freddie came back to London I told him I was being evicted. ‘I’m being kicked out because of your late night calls,’ I said.
‘Well, don’t worry about it,’ he said calmly. ‘Move into Garden Lodge. There’s no one there – it’s empty.’ So I did.
After two years living in Germany Freddie decided he’d had enough of being a tax exile, sticking to a limited number of days he could spend in Britain every year. He wanted to come back to London and take up residence at Garden Lodge. For the time being he planned to keep his flat in Stafford Terrace and move things across to the house slowly over several months.
When I arrived at Garden Lodge, we were not quite alone, Phoebe was already living there, with the cats Tiffany and Oscar. But Freddie’s plans to come back from Munich to London to be with me for my first weekend at Garden Lodge were scuppered.
I packed a few bags at Sutton and was just setting off when Mary asked me to call on her. She told me Freddie was snowed in in Munich; he would not be joining me quite so soon. Then she handed me a note that Freddie had written a week or two earlier to deliver to me.
I still have the small Japanese card Freddie had written: ‘Take lots of care, will see you soon. Tons of love F.’
So I spent my first night in the large master bedroom alone, with Oscar snuggling up on top of the massive bed. I hung up a few shirts and my suit for work, but otherwise I didn’t unpack – I didn’t know where to put my things. Freddie arrived the following weekend and immediately dragged me off to bed. He said he had missed me terribly; I knew he meant it. After he had picked out wardrobes for me to use in the dressing area, he cleared all his things from one of his drawers.
‘That’s for your little bits and pieces,’ he said.
So that’s how I came to move in with him. We lived together for the next six years like man and wife.
Freddie played the groom when he took part in Fashion Aid, the Live Aid fashion show at the Royal Albert Hall in November. Just like the concert, this was a glittering affair with celebrities by the score. Freddie was wearing the jacket he’d worn at his Munich birthday party, but with black trousers. His partner was the actress Jane Seymour. She was modelling a sensational white wedding dress, also designed by the Emanuels. Others who went ahead of them on the catwalk included Boy George and Julie Goodyear, star of the soap Coronation Street; Dempsey and Makepeace couple Michael Brandon and Glynis Barber; Alison Moyet; Shirley Bassey; Lenny Henry; George Michael and his Wham! partner Andrew Ridgeley; and newly dubbed ‘Saint’ Bob Geldof and Paula Yates.
The after-show party was held at the Hyde Park Hotel: Freddie and Jane arrived in their outfits and brought the foyer to a standstill. The place was packed with American tourists who thought the couple were for real. Jane was a big Hollywood name and they recognised her at once. When they discovered her new ‘husband’ was Freddie it seemed so unlikely that they must have thought they were witnessing a real scoop of a story. They even applauded and took photographs.
Like any other couple, Freddie and I got around to the question of the housekeeping money. Thankfully, given Freddie’s ability to spend money like water, I wasn’t the main breadwinner in the family. But we agreed that it was only fair to share the running costs and settled on me paying him a weekly allowance of £50. It represented over half my weekly wage although Freddie never knew that. But I paid it willingly; it went some way to keeping our relationship on a fair footing but later he dropped the idea.
That same month there was a pleasant surprise for me when Queen released their single ‘One Vision’. The final line to the song had been changed to ‘Just gimme, gimme, gimme fried chicken!’ just as I had suggested.
The video for ‘One Vision’ was filmed in Musicland by two gentlemen always referred to affectionately as the Torpedo Twins – director and producer duo Rudi Dolezal and Hans Rossacher. Both were tall, big Austrians. Rudi wore more colourful clothes than his partner, but they were equally jovial and friendly.
As Christmas approached, ‘One Vision’ quickly climbed the charts, and the success put an extra bounce into Freddie’s step. There was no new album for their fans that year, so Queen released The Complete Works, a limited edition boxed set of eleven of their albums. I’m afraid it was probably out of the reach of most fans’ pockets.
A more popular move was the band’s ambitious decision to mount a tour of Europe the following summer. The man who put Queen’s tours together was already on the case: he was Gerry Stickles and I met him one day when he came to Garden Lodge for a meeting. Gerry was the daddy of them all – a plump American in his forties. I took to him enormously. He was a bit of a comedian and had an endless supply of very funny jokes.
What present to give Freddie for Christmas took lots of thought. What do you give a man who has everything? In the end my friend John Rowell came up with the answer. John was a very personable man, the same height and age as me but much slimmer, and he ran Key Largo, a clothes shop in Covent Garden where I’d bought a leather jacket. It had cost me a small fortune at the time – about £200. Freddie admired it a great deal, so John arranged for me to buy a similar jacket for Freddie for Christmas, paying him in instalments.
Then, a fortnight before Christmas, Freddie and I had a flaming row over a stocky little guy nicknamed Danish Bacon. He was from south London somewhere. Freddie would always flirt terribly with other gay men when we went out, but I didn’t worry; I knew I was the one he’d end up in bed with later. I instinctively knew he had messed around with other men a number of times before and it made me feel terribly jealous, though not possessive. That night when he flirted with Danish Bacon I decided I’d had enough.
I dragged Freddie up to the bedroom in Garden Lodge and confronted him about it. I told him he had to make his mind up about what he wanted – me or another guy. Then I walked out.
I phoned John Rowell, who lived between Vauxhall and Clapham in south London, to explain the situation and he instantly offered me his spare room. I packed enough clothes for work and left Garden Lodge. If Freddie wanted to play the field, I wasn’t going to get in his way.
A few days later, Freddie rang me at work. He asked me to go to Garden Lodge when I had finished at the Savoy to talk things over.
‘I’m sorry about what’s happened,’ he said. ‘Come on home.’ So we kissed and made up. I moved back in the week before Christmas and found myself frantically running around buying presents for Freddie’s inner circle. I could hardly afford to buy any, as I’d spent so much on Freddie’s jacket.
That first Christmas at Garden Lodge we had a decorated tree in the lounge, but for some reason we didn’t get round to decorating the rest of the house. On Christmas Eve we went to Heaven and got home legless in the early hours. When Freddie and I woke up together for our first Christmas morning, we kissed and said ‘Happy Christmas’. We got up and headed downstairs to get everything ready for lunch with a handful of close friends – Joe and Phoebe, Trevor Clarke, Mary and Peter Straker.
Ten of us sat down to roast turkey, pork and ham that first year. We pulled crackers, donned crepe paper hats and tucked into the feast. Three hours later, we settled down in front of the Christmas tree to open our presents. Someone dived into the mountain under the tree and threw presents out in all directions. Freddie got up himself to find his present for me and brought it over. Then I found my present for him.
Freddie gave me a Cartier lighter. And with his Christmas card to me was a cheque. My eyes popped out of my head. It was for £1000. I was astounded.
Freddie gave everyone close to him a Christmas present and a cheque with which to buy something they really liked. It was his way of thanking everyone for all the hard work they had put in over the year. He gave everyone the same amount except Mary, who would perhaps receive a little more.
When I gave Freddie my present he immediately tried it on. It fitted perfectly. B
ut, while he was clearly pleased at the time, he didn’t really like it. He only wore it once more.
That day I got to know Peter Straker a lot better. He became one of Freddie’s closest friends, until it all ended in tears. At earlier meetings I couldn’t work out what to make of Peter but I soon took to him. I decided I liked him and I think he liked me. Phoebe, however, loathed him.
Peter Straker was one of the few people guaranteed always to make Freddie laugh. He was a singer, which meant that, like Freddie, he rarely had to get up early in the morning. That gave them the excuse to stay up together all night long, watching videos and listening to music. They both shared a great love of gospel music, but could never manage to listen to it quietly while the rest of us were asleep.
On Boxing Day Garden Lodge played host to thirty friends. Freddie’s hospitality, like his festive spirit, flowed freely. Then New Year’s Eve there was another party to which I invited my ex-boyfriend John Alexander. He knew no one, so I found myself spending a lot of my time keeping him company. On the stroke of midnight we ran around in all directions wishing each other Happy New Year and kissing one another. I was saddened to see that, rather pointedly, the only person Freddie didn’t wish a Happy New Year was John. I said nothing.
Most of us moved on to Heaven. John came along, too, and once inside the club drifted away from the group. A little later I realised I hadn’t seen Freddie for a while. I took a look around, but there was no sign of him. Then I asked Joe if he had seen Freddie.
‘On the dance floor,’ he said. There I noticed Freddie dancing with a guy I didn’t know. I just watched for a while. Then I saw that Freddie was going a bit far with his dancing partner. I watched a little longer until I could bear it no more and staggered into action. I stumbled my way across the packed floor and grabbed Freddie.
‘I want a word with you,’ I yelled at him, whisking him towards the wall. His new-found friend, who I later learned was called George, started to follow, but I swung around and threatened him. ‘You keep your fucking nose out of this,’ I growled.
