Freddie Mercury: An intimate memoir by the man who knew him best

by Peter Freestone

  For example, there was the Actresses’ Dinner…

  I had once bought Freddie a book from Aspreys in which chronicles of dinner and lunch parties could be entered. On one side, there were the guests, the menu, the flowers, the wines and the required dress. On the other side, the table plan. This book comes in handy when you don’t want to give the same guests the same meal three times in a row which, as Freddie always wanted his favourite meals each time, so often became a problem as the guests too were often the same. The Actresses’ Dinner involved Freddie, Straker and amongst the guests were Anna Nicholas, Anita Dobson, Carol Woods and Debbie Bishop. It was an idea cooked up between Freddie and Peter for the camp of it … Having lots of actresses round one dinner table was an irresistible whim. Freddie, being Freddie, could fulfil it. I wish I had the dinner book to show you. I only made fleeting appearances in the dining room but I’m sure that everybody got on well with each other. There were gales of laughter emanating from the room into the kitchen where Joe and I were sitting. I must admit that this wasn’t as impromptu an occasion as most and needed some organisation as each of the girls involved had a heavy schedule, especially Anita who was still up-to-her-neck in drink and ‘Den’ as Angie in East Enders.

  Freddie would always inspect the table to ensure that everything was as he wished. While I might have set the table as to the demands of etiquette, he would merely just make sure that all the cutlery, place settings and table furniture were where he thought they should be.

  A lot changed over the course of the passing years. Earlier on, he would only have a light lunch and so our main meal would be in the evening. I suppose that was to fuel him for those many hours spent out on the town. In the last few years, this habit was turned on its head and he preferred having larger lunches either indoors or in restaurants followed by a lighter supper at home in the evening. Talking of the earlier days, for example, at the time he moved into Garden Lodge, he had a wide-ranging taste as far as food was concerned. He was always fond of stews in one form or another, whether Irish stew a la Jim Hutton with potatoes and dumplings or boeuf bourgmgnon, served often by itself or with plain boiled rice, always on a dinner plate. He loved my version of the classic boeuf stroganoff which I remember making for band meetings in Pembridge Road and also once in Musicland studios when Freddie was expecting Roy Thomas Baker. I had to ensure every ingredient was perfectly prepared: “Do you realise Roy knows everything about food!” And so I peeled the mushrooms precisely, removed the stalks exactly, chopped them absolutely evenly…

  Lamb hotpot and chilli con carne he also adored and he loved unusual and different things as much as he did his mother’s version of chicken pie which contained sausages and baked beans as well as chicken in a white sauce under a wonderful golden brown crust of puff pastry. He also thoroughly enjoyed fish pie, either with a potato or pastry crust and traditional steak and kidney pie. Vegetables such as fresh boiled beetroot, scattered with fresh-squeezed lemon juice and cumin. Roasted parsnips with parmesan. He loved this dish. I would boil peeled parsnips for about five minutes, then drain them and while they were still steaming roll them in a plastic bag containing flour, salt, pepper and grated parmesan before roasting them in a hot oven until crisp and golden. As far as salads were concerned, if there was a salad presented he would merely pick over it. In the hot climates where he was brought up, salads were just never on the menu where everything had to be cooked to destroy bacteria.

  One thing above all, he insisted on fresh food. While he appreciated the quality of Marks and Spencer, he fully believed that it didn’t bear comparison to the real thing. He adored osso bucco, chicken dhansak, prawn creole, chilli con carne, lamb à la Madhur Jaffrey and every Sunday of course there had to be the traditional roast – pork, lamb, beef or chicken and at Christmas absolutely, always and only turkey. Pork was always served on Boxing Day.

  We always used the same butcher, Lidgates on Holland Park Avenue and I was usually the shopper, driven by Jim Hutton who enjoyed these outings to shops and supermarkets as it gave him an excuse to drive his Volvo, the third greatest love in his life – Freddie, Garden, Volvo. I got on very well with the butchers and even now when I go in, I am still recognised. We always paid cash or cheque. We never had an account.

  We would always have a tasty cheddar cheese in the house because, once again before he became ill, Freddie liked an assault on his taste buds but in the last few months I suppose it was one of the symptoms of his disease that he could not tolerate intense flavours. He suffered from a kind of retching, choking feeling in his throat and from then on he would subsist on a bland diet of soups and ordinary scrambled eggs. As far as cheese was concerned, it didn’t figure highly as a course on a menu, the occasional Welsh Rarebit or a lunchtime piece to snack on was as far as it got. Of course in the climates and cultures in which he had grown up, cheese was not a healthy thing to have around.

  He was never over-fond of desserts. Once a week I would have a bake-in and one of his favourites was an almond and cherry cake which I found in one of my mother’s old recipe books where most of the flour content was replaced by ground almonds, thereby making it an extremely moist cake. You could even store it for a week and it would still be perfectly fresh although when on the day it was baked it rarely lived to see the dawn of another.

  In Freddie’s household, there was always a lot of food on stand-by. Ingredients almost never went to waste as we would always find a way of using them and Freddie did not approve of throwing away food. But every so often, Freddie would find something new he wanted, ask for it at half-past-ten at night when it was unobtainable. We therefore learned and kept a stock.

  He loved picky foods. On every trip to Lidgates, I would buy anything that looked vaguely interesting such as their sausage rolls of which he was a big fan. They always had something fresh, new and home-made on their counters; pates, small meat pies made of, for example, lamb and leek as well as standard quiches and cheeses. An average weekend’s butcher’s bill would be something in the region of £100, including, of course, bacon and sausages.

  Indoor suppers tended to be anything ‘light’… Light to Freddie meant something different from what light might mean to the rest of the world. Light also meant smaller than lunch. We often made Welsh Rarebit or a pasta, spaghetti with a little fish sauce. He was very fond of an original recipe which came out of our kitchen where we would buy three different colour pastas, white, red tomato and green spinach. We would then play around with sauces invented for each colour. The white lent itself very well to a smoked salmon, cheese and cream sauce. The green worked quite well with an ordinary bolognaise and the red we would team up with a prima vera variety, using any of the baby vegetables which were currently available, carrots, sweet-corn, mangetout. Another of his light favourites was angels’ hair pasta with garlic, chilli and parsley quickly fried in olive oil and then mixed with the pasta. Delia Smith, eat your heart out! I must admit I would have been totally lost without her and her books and Freddie’s culinary intake would have been greatly compromised. Towards the end of life as we knew it at Logan Place, with both Joe and Freddie ill, it fell to me to assume the chef’s role as well as my other chores and duties.

  Conflict for the sake of love, I’ve tried to tell you about that. Conflict for the sake of peace, that too. It was what Queen was all about. Conflict for the sake of life… This is what this section is partly about. Freddie hated yes-men; yes-persons to be PC. If you hate yes-persons, you therefore must openly invite the possibility of no-persons, people who say no. Either no, thank you or no, fuck you! Freddie liked people ultimately to be their own people and he craved friends and associates who would resist him because only in that way, through a conflict of sorts, could he realise what he really felt or thought about a situation. I think that’s the reason why all of us stayed with him and he stayed with us for so long. To give an idea of the longevity of staff with Freddie, I was the junior member after seven or eight years until Terry joined the troupe.r />
  And it was indeed a sort of troupe for it often felt when we went out in public that we were some top-of-the-bill variety turn.

  In a way, Freddie was one of the lucky ones. Most of us take each day as it comes, taking things as they happen. Freddie, not because of who he was but because of the kind of person he was, mapped out and planned his whole life. Everything he wanted in absolute detail.

  If he went out to lunch, it would generally be to the Italian restaurant opposite the Coleherne pub in Brompton Road. Pontevecchio has now metamorphosed into Tusk. In the days when Meridiana was open, he loved going to the talkative, airy restaurant on the site where now stands the jewellers Theo Fennell in Fulham Road. Meridiana had always been a favourite of his even when he would only go there to dine in the evening.

  After lunch, if there was any shopping to be done, Harrods was a favourite stopping off point. There was always the variety of goods to catch and please his eye and all under one roof. He loved buying colognes for people and he made at least one specific expedition and bought some of each house’s fragrances and gave presentation packs to everyone he knew. He always included everyone, even his cleaners, Gladys, Mary and Margie in these gestures. If he saw something he liked, he would of course buy it while out on these trips but day-today toiletries and soaps, bath oils, shower gels and hair shampoos would usually be in our realm to buy. He loved bath oils which gave a nice smooth feel to the skin.

  If he was specifically shopping, for example, for someone’s birthday present, the Lalique shop on New Bond Street was always a place where he could find something suitable. While in that area he would often stop off at Tiffany and Cartier and there was also Sotheby’s to be explored. When he spent a morning at Sotheby’s he would usually go to Richoux in South Audley Street and have a light lunch there, something like their Welsh Rarebit or one of their specials of the day with rice and often, if later in the afternoon, sandwiches and Earl Grey. It was a habit he had picked up when Queen were managed by John Reid whose office for a long time was next door at number forty. Always, when he left any of the Richoux establishments, he would pick up two or three of their selections of Godiva Belgian chocolates. I think he liked the packaging as much as the chocolates and when the boxes were empty, everyone having been pressganged into eating the contents, he would of course keep the boxes, some even on display. There was something about Freddie and boxes…

  He was very keen on presentation and appreciated and understood its importance. He realised that part of the mystique of food was the way it looked. While he didn’t particularly like the food which was presented as nouvelle cuisine, he adored the patterns the food made on the plates. It is after all only another expression of artistic flair.

  At both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, Freddie found many interesting and absorbing people amongst the auction house experts. There were two people with whom he particularly got on, one being Christopher Payne from Sotheby’s in the furniture department who helped Freddie acquire many pieces of his nineteenth century French furniture collection. The other was Martin Beisly from Christie’s who was in charge of the Victorian paintings section. Basically, when Freddie moved into Garden Lodge, he wanted something different to put on the walls and that was when he became more and more interested in Victorian art. Before then, his taste had been much more avant garde by way of prints of works by Dali, Miro and Chagall.

  His main reading material, particularly in the last two years, was in fact a constant diet of auction catalogues from all over the world, including New York from where I bought one day on the telephone a painting of a gypsy girl. Freddie happened to be away in Switzerland and he had given me a rough guide as to his price ceiling. It didn’t take us long to work out a system of pricing in his absence and he always trusted me. Very roughly, I would be prepared to go to double the bottom estimate price. If he wanted something desperately, I would then use my discretion. You can tell when you’re in the auction room whether other people bidding against you are prepared to go to the outer limits. I must admit, I loved going to the auctions. It gave me such a buzz. Freddie only went very rarely to attend the actual auction although he would always investigate at the viewing.

  The system was that I would pick up catalogues of items in which he might be interested and we would look through the catalogues together and he would pick out specific lots which looked appealing. I would then go and view the pieces and mark down whether it would be worth Freddie’s while coming to see them. While I was walking around I would also look for anything else which we might have missed when reading through the catalogue. I would then report back to Freddie on the condition of the items and on anything else that I had seen. He would decide whether it was worthwhile paying a visit himself. If he went, we would inspect all the items to ensure that my summary had been accurate. We would tick the pieces he wanted in the catalogue and then go off to lunch at Richoux.

  He would put the matter out of his mind and try to think afresh when we returned home having put some distance between him and temptation. So many of his purchases had been impulse buys and because he had bought so much, Garden Lodge was beginning to look a little full. But that never seemed to be an argument when he saw something he really liked!

  Whenever furniture was bought, I always had to have a van on stand-by almost in the street outside the auction house. Freddie hated the prospect of having to wait until the day after the auction to see his purchase. He would have already signed a blank cheque that morning which I would have taken with me and merely filled in the amount to ensure that the purchase went straight onto the van. Because the auctioneers knew Freddie and were familiar with his whims, I was able to expedite matters. The same principle applied to the buying of paintings except that with a painting, I could always carry it home myself in a taxi.

  Freddie’s friend Francesca Thyssen came with me on one of my first jaunts to the auctioneers when Freddie wanted me to bid for his Chagall print which used to hang above the fireplace in the sitting room at Garden Lodge. We sat right at the front under the auctioneer’s desk and when we bought it I think it was the most expensive single item that I had secured for Freddie. It was over thirty thousand pounds. The only time when Freddie came along personally to an auction was for a decorative arts sale and because he was there in person, the Lalique vase which he was determined to buy went for a vastly inflated price, some thirty-five thousand pounds. But it did look lovely in situ in the sitting room window!

  Freddie wasn’t the only person who would send out his agent to do the bidding. Understandably, whenever a ‘famous face’ appears at an auction, people think that there’s money to be thrown around so when someone unknown like me shows up, no one pays much attention.

  The only time when he was very disappointed that I didn’t come away with the goods was on yet another occasion when he was in Switzerland and he wanted me to bid for a work by the Catalan painter Joan Miro for whom, as I have already indicated, he had a great admiration. When he saw it hanging in the viewing gallery, he decided he wanted it and at that point said he would go to two hundred and thirty thousand pounds. By the time he’d left for Montreux, the ceiling had been raised to allow me to spend two hundred and fifty thousand. On the morning of the sale I had a phone call from Freddie giving his final decision, “Two hundred and eighty thousand BUT NO MORE!!”

  There was a free-far-all in the bidding up to about two hundred thousand pounds which was when I entered the fray and from thereon there was only a telephone bidder and myself. The bidding increased in tens of thousands. I put in the bid at two hundred and eighty and the phone bidder immediately came back with two-ninety. I thought, “Should I? Is it worth it?”

  I went to three hundred. My rival came back after a moment’s hesitation at three hundred and ten and so I thought, “What the heck!” I went to three-twenty.

  It took a little bit longer but the phone bid was upped to three thirty and I then dropped out.

  When I told Freddie, I said that I was ve
ry sorry but that I had been unable to secure the painting. Immediately he asked, “So how much did you go?”

  “You know you told me two hundred and eighty,” I gulped. “I actually went to three-twenty.”

  “Oh,” was all he said and because he was in Switzerland and I couldn’t see his face, I didn’t know whether it was a good or a bad ‘Oh’. “Well,” he concluded, “you should have gone more. You knew I wanted that painting!”

  Whether he meant it or not, we shall never know although he had saved many thousands of pounds that day. A saving which, after all, he could spend at another auction.

  Freddie was never a great shopper for clothes. Generally if Joe or I were out and about and something caught our eye clotheswise which we thought he’d like, we would buy it and present it to Freddie. Jackets, shirts, jumpers… We would also go to Marks and Spencer whence came most of Freddie’s socks although his underwear was usually Calvin Klein. This wasn’t a specific request from Freddie. It was just what Joe thought appropriate. There were, however, several occasions when Freddie shopped for clothes, notably in Ibiza when he went shopping not only for himself but for everyone else in the entourage. Black shirts with Indian patterns, bright floral shirts as well as shorts… A must! Also, on returning from a trip to Japan where he had bought suits and shirts both for himself and everyone else, he brought me back a wonderful red woollen jacket with black leather patches. It sounds naff but it looked sensational.

  He had an assortment of suits made for him by David Chambers but in private life, Freddie was not particularly sartorially minded. He was very happy to slop around at home in a sweat shirt and track pants. Whereas he had a very clear idea of the stage image he wished to project and had always dressed that part, especially in the early days when his private life clothes were basically no different from his stage attire, he was no dandy. He never felt the need to dress in the height of fashion and he also never wanted to create a fashion. He was into comfortable clothes.