by Jim Hutton
When he sent Terry to pay and collect them he proved he’d learnt at least something from me.
‘Don’t forget to ask for a discount!’ he said.
When I moved into my own room permanently I left all the pictures on my side of Freddie’s bed because I didn’t want him to feel that I had moved out for good. The only thing I took with me was a little Cartier alarm clock. As time went on, Freddie started moving some of the photographs into my room one by one.
That move into the Pink Room also marked the point from which almost all normal sexual relations ended between us. It was clear that sex was no longer a pleasure for him but an exhausting ordeal instead. So we settled for the next best thing: gentle kissing and heart-felt cuddles. Those cuddling sessions would be as rewarding in their way as any sex we ever had.
Freddie’s medication for Aids took a new turn when he was fitted with a small catheter on his chest below his left shoulder. It had a small rubber stopper and the whole thing was so small it was barely noticeable. It certainly never interfered when we cuddled up to each other. The catheter made it simpler for Freddie to be given medicine intravenously. More importantly, it allowed him to keep on the go. By slipping the medication in his pocket and hiding the tube leading to the catheter, he could walk around and even go out.
Previously I had helped Joe and Phoebe give Freddie some of his medication. He had to take a white powder mixed with water, so I’d fix those for him or get out his pills. But once he went on to intravenous medication and had the catheter fitted, everything became much more complicated.
It was suggested that I might like to help administer the medicine intravenously, but I asked to be excused. I didn’t want to take on the responsibility. And there was also a risk of infection. My job entailed working outside, often up to my arms in muck in the flower beds or up to my waist in filthy water in the koi pool. The garden was a breeding ground for all kinds of germs. If I was to give Freddie his medication every few hours, I would have to be forever scrubbing up. Even Joe, clean as he was since he was working in the kitchen all day long, spent half an hour each time sterilising his hands and arms. I was worried that I might not scrub up thoroughly enough. It was an unnecessary risk.
Freddie understood entirely and didn’t seem at all put out by my decision.
As Freddie’s health continued to deteriorate, I used to have a quiet word with Mary. I reassured her time and again that I would always be there for her. If there was ever anything she needed she had only to ask.
In the summer, quite out of the blue, Freddie increased my wages from £600 to £1000 per month. Sadly, my wage rise was the reason for an argument between Freddie and Mary.
The accountants were on holiday, so Freddie had to sign the monthly pay cheques. I had never questioned how much I was paid. I knew that Joe and Phoebe were paid more, but they were on duty twenty-four hours a day. I never wanted to know exactly what they were paid; it was none of my business. I was just the boyfriend. I was happy with my lot. I would have tended Freddie’s garden whether or not I was paid. I loved to watch the simple pleasure it gave him.
The day Freddie signed the cheques, I was in the koi pool in my waders. He called me into the house and I went to the front door where I tried to kick off the waders.
‘Oh, leave the bloody things on,’ he said. ‘Come on over here. I want you to give me a big cuddle. I’ve got some news for you.’
So, still in my waders, I walked over to him and we hugged.
He said: ‘You won’t get it this month, but you’ll get it next. You’re getting a pay rise.’
Then Freddie said something which would prove very important to me in the months ahead. It was always understood that ownership of the house once he had died would technically pass to Mary. However, he said he hoped I would stay living there as long as I liked and reiterated that it was my home as much as his. He added that, if I wanted to move out, he had made Mary promise that I could have whatever I wanted from Garden Lodge.
I was very relieved, but I didn’t like talking about such things so coldly.
‘I don’t want to hear about you dying,’ I said. ‘And if you want those wishes carried out, write them down.’
During the year Freddie gave me several things for our retreat in Ireland, which was now finished and ready for decorating. Furniture deemed to be surplus to requirements was stored in the attic at Garden Lodge.
‘If there’s anything you want for our home in Ireland, then help yourself,’ he said. Then he came with me to look. Among other things, we sent back to Ireland his old double bed from Stafford Terrace and two Victorian bedside tables.
Freddie kept many possessions he didn’t have space for in storage. So he decided that summer that it was time to get everything back to Garden Lodge to share out among the family.
When the storage chests arrived at Garden Lodge I was away in Ireland for a few days. They had been spread out on the lawn and Freddie dived into them, deciding who should get what. Joe, Phoebe, Mary and the two maids shared most of the contents, mostly knick-knacks and old designer clothes.
When I got home Freddie told me some of the things he’d come across.
‘I haven’t left you out,’ he said. ‘There’s another trunk which no one has touched. That’s yours.’
When I later opened up the trunk there were hats and ornaments. Then I found the original lyrics for his most famous song: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. They were handwritten by Freddie on a sheet of A4 lined paper. I left everything in the trunk, including the lyrics, and stored it in the workshop for safe-keeping.
I was in the workshop one afternoon trying to mend an antique silver photograph frame treasured by Freddie’s parents when I had an accident with an electric plane. I took a chunk out of my finger and there was blood everywhere. I made for the kitchen where I found Phoebe and Joe. Joe was always squeamish at the sight of blood.
‘Have you got any big plasters, Joe?’ I said.
‘What have you done?’ Joe asked.
When I showed him my finger he gulped. This would need more than a sticking plaster.
‘You’d better go to hospital to have that stitched,’ he said.
I dismissed it as a scratch and Freddie came in.
‘What’s all the noise about?’ he asked.
Joe said: ‘Jim has cut himself badly but doesn’t want to go to the hospital.’
Freddie looked at the wound and agreed with Joe and Phoebe that it needed hospital treatment. When I said it was a fuss over nothing he got annoyed.
‘All right, please yourself then,’ he said. But to save argument I went to the hospital, and ended up having two stitches. It was much more serious than I had thought.
In the end I did finally fix the frame for Freddie’s parents. Around that time I was making another of my tables as a present from Freddie and me to chauffeur Graham Hamilton and his friend Gordon. So Freddie blamed them for my accident!
That summer Freddie and I nearly parted company after a nasty argument about nothing. For some reason I upset Freddie and we had a fight. These things would usually blow over in a day or so, but this time it dragged on for days.
I went to work, as usual, in the garden and during the morning Mary and Freddie came out into the garden and sat talking near the pool. Later, when I went back in the house, the air was decidedly frosty. Freddie kept his distance.
The next day things were no better. I was in the garden and Joe, looking most uncomfortable, told me the news.
‘Freddie thinks it would be a good idea if you left,’ he said.
I was flabbergasted. I still didn’t know exactly how we had come to fall out, but Freddie had the drawbridge up and the portcullis firmly down.
‘Fine,’ I said. I sounded calm but I was really quite distraught. ‘If that’s the way he feels, well, OK,’ I said. ‘But I need time to find myself a place to live.’
The next day I got another message, this time from Mary, that when I’d found myself alternative accommo
dation I would still be welcome to work six days a week as the gardener at Garden Lodge. She told me I could not have the use of the Volvo Freddie had given me for my birthday. I’d be permitted only an hour for lunch and my hours would be 9am – 6pm.
The only thing I could think about was whether I could afford somewhere to live, so I said: ‘When I find my own place, I want my wages reviewed. Gardeners in central London are getting an average of £12.50 an hour.’ I was on about £3.
I found myself a flat, a short six-month lease in Hammersmith Grove, which had been advertised in Loot with the unusual tag ‘To share with Sir Charles’ – a cat. The owners needed references, so I asked Mary whether she would mind speaking for me. That afternoon I was in the conservatory and got word from my new landlord that my references were fine and that I could move in immediately.
Freddie came up to me.
‘You don’t want to go, do you?’ he said. ‘I don’t want you to go.’
‘But I was under the impression you did want me to go,’ I said. I was puzzled.
‘I was just angry over something,’ he said. As we talked it over it became clear that even he didn’t remember how the argument had started and nor did anyone else. What I was so sad about was how my friends at Garden Lodge had seemed quite happy to see me go.
That night in the bedroom, lying next to Freddie, I asked him about the others. ‘Well, whose advice did you take?’ I said. ‘I know they’ve all been giving you advice over the last few days. Who did you listen to?’ I was determined to find out who it was who had been making trouble for me at Garden Lodge.
‘I took my own advice,’ he said and he wrinkled his face as if to say ‘subject closed’. I asked him why he’d let it get so out of control, but he wouldn’t answer. He asked me to forget the whole thing. It wasn’t easy. I was extremely hurt and depressed by what had happened. I couldn’t imagine who would get him so worked up over nothing.
Elton John and Freddie had fallen out with each other years ago, but by Live Aid they were back on good speaking terms. That summer Elton started coming to the house and he became one of Freddie’s few regular, trusted visitors until the very end.
The first time Elton came for Sunday lunch was a day to remember. As we were laying the table Joe told me I was sitting at the end of the table with Freddie on my left and Elton on my right.
‘So don’t put salt on your food!’ he said.
‘Why ever not?’ I asked.
‘You’ll see, Elton will do it for you!’ he said.
Elton wore a tracksuit and baseball cap, which stayed on his head for the entire visit. He was fairly rotund then, but on a strict diet. He didn’t have any meat, just vegetables. Nor would he drink anything but water. When we started eating I soon discovered what Joe had meant. Elton liked his seasoning and he shook the salt so vigorously over his plate that he saved me the trouble of putting it on mine.
In the autumn Freddie told Joe his right leg was playing him up. This was the same leg that had the painful open wound at the side of the calf. It had always been troublesome to him. Before we met he’d broken the same leg larking around in a Munich gay club. Joe went weight-training and suggested some exercises for Freddie to try. I turned on my heel and went off to order Freddie a top-of-the-range exercise cycle. When the bike arrived two weeks later Freddie was still having problems with his leg. Freddie loved it at first, but sessions on it were to be no more than a passing fad. Joe and I struggled to carry it to the minstrels’ gallery, and from time to time Freddie would do five or ten minutes on it under Joe’s supervision.
Freddie’s birthday in September 1990 was a lavish, dressy affair, an haute cuisine dinner party held at Garden Lodge. It was attended by some twenty guests, mostly couples. Mary was there with Piers, Dr Gordon Atkinson with his friend Roger, chauffeurs Graham Hamilton and Gordon, Jim Beach and his wife Claudia, Terry and his wife Sharon, Mike and Linda Moran, record engineer Dave Richards with his wife Colette, Dave Clark, Trevor Clarke, Barbara Valentin, Peter Straker, Joe and his friends Tony Evans, Phoebe and me.
This night was to be the last year Freddie celebrated his birthday with any kind of bang. To ensure it was a night that everyone would remember, Freddie gave each of us a memento of the occasion from Tiffany and Co, a present left on each place setting.
When Freddie penned the song ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’ it was after another through-the-night session with Peter Straker. Freddie explained he had the phrase ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’ on his brain and told Peter what sort of thing he wanted to say in the song. The inspiration for it was the master of camp one-liners, Noel Coward.
Freddie set about with Peter trying to come up with a succession of goofy lyrics, each funnier than the last. He screamed when they came up with things like ‘I’m knitting with only one needle’ and ‘I’m driving on only three wheels these days’. But the master-stroke was: ‘I think I’m a banana tree’. Once that came out there was no stopping Freddie and Straker – they were then in full flow. I went to bed to fall asleep listening to their laughter wafting upstairs.
It was while I was away in Ireland for a few days that Freddie and Peter Straker fell out and the rift was never to be mended. Peter was noticeable by his absence, particularly at weekends when before he would invariably come round for a drink or a meal. I asked Freddie why we hadn’t seen anything of him.
‘He upset me at Joe’s Café one day,’ he said, but refused to say what had happened. So I asked Joe and Phoebe.
Apparently, Freddie had arranged to meet Peter for lunch at Joe’s Café in Knightsbridge. When he arrived, a little late, he appeared to be drunk. The restaurant wasn’t a regular haunt of Freddie’s and he felt that Peter had shown him up in public. Freddie decided he didn’t want to be associated with him again.
But looking back on it, Peter shouldn’t feel too awful about what happened. Freddie’s behaviour at the time was increasingly guided by his failing health. He may even have been a little jealous of Peter, who could still treat life as one long party just as Freddie had once done. It wasn’t only Peter who got the cold shoulder at that time. Barbara Valentin also drifted out of sight, as did Graham Hamilton and Gordon.
Relations cooled between Freddie and Gordon because Gordon couldn’t hold his tongue. Freddie expected total loyalty and discretion from those around him. When Graham or Gordon drove Freddie, they’d drop the names of the other VIPs they had had in the back of their car. Freddie believed that they must also talk freely to their other passengers about him.
The final straw came when I went out for a drink one night to Champions, a gay pub in Notting Hill Gate. Gordon was in the pub and came over to say hello, introducing me to a young friend drinking with him. A little later I left and walked to the nearby Gate Club, a gay club.
After I’d been there about half an hour, the young man Gordon had introduced me to arrived and made a beeline for me.
‘I know everything about you,’ he said. ‘I know you’re Freddie Mercury’s boyfriend.’ He went on to tell me bits and pieces of gossip he’d learnt from Gordon.
I was speechless. He was a total stranger and he knew some very private things about us.
‘Who told you all this?’ I asked, though the answer was obvious. I left the club at once and got home about midnight. Freddie was wide awake in bed.
‘You look livid. What’s wrong?’ he asked. I told him what had happened and he shook his head.
‘Right,’ he said. And we didn’t see much of Graham and Gordon after that.
In November Queen signed a new multi-million-pound record deal which Jim Beach had negotiated in America with Hollywood Records, owned by the giant Walt Disney Corporation. It placed the band in the enviable position of having Disney’s finest animators, using state-of-the-art techniques, at their disposal to help make their videos.
The same month Freddie tried to ban the Sun from Garden Lodge after the headline ‘It’s Official! Freddie Is Seriously Ill’ appeared. The paper reported Brian Ma
y’s remarks that Freddie was sick. ‘I never want to see the Sun in here again,’ he said. But the ban didn’t last. I was the one who bought the newspapers and flicked through them to take out anything I thought would upset Freddie. I’d tell him the newsagent had run out of that particular paper and leave it at that.
The staff party for everyone at the Queen office in 1990 turned out to be the last. The band never showed the staff their videos ahead of their release, but this year they made an exception and showed the extraordinary ‘Innuendo’ video, which had been made with all the latest Disney animation techniques.
The video was the creation of the Torpedo Twins, Rudy and Hans, and the animation had been painstaking and slow. The results were remarkable. It was later deemed too controversial for America, because this was the time of the Gulf War and the record company was sensitive about the song’s pacifist theme. Every day new edits of the video would keep arriving for Freddie to view. Eventually it was re-edited, omitting letters from words in the Koran, the sacred book of Islam.
For Christmas I bought Freddie some antique coloured glass goblets, but I almost blew the surprise. In a shop window I spotted six glasses with clear stems which, when I took a closer look, turned out to be a deep red colour. When I got them back to Garden Lodge I bumped into Freddie. He asked why I looked so pleased with myself and I stupidly showed him. ‘This is your Christmas present. Have a look,’ I said. Then I put them away in a cupboard.
