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

by Peter Freestone

  It was one of the two occasions in my life when I ended up a victim of sunstroke. I didn’t realise I was ill until we got back to the apartment where I found myself shivering and feeling horribly nauseous. Serves me right, I suppose.

  On nightime excursions, Freddie and I would go into the New York bar or club on our own and only inside would we usually meet up with the people whose own lives dictated their own schedules. The bars could be Uncle Charlie’s in Greenwich Village or The Works on the Westside or perhaps even The Eagle or The Spike, both of which were down on the lower Westside by the old piers. Most Wednesdays we went to The Roxy to rollerskate. The usual coterie would arrive and Freddie would routinely change into rollerskates. However, he would spend the whole evening sitting on the bench and would never join in the antics of the rink. Odd? When the time came to leave, he would remove his skates, put on his shoes and hand the skates back in at the counter. It was his way of ‘joining in’.

  Of course, many of these excursions were fuelled by artificial stimulants of which one such was a ‘downer’. He was persuaded to take a quaalude by ‘a friend’ as we were about to enter the River Club on Manhattan’s Lower West side. Everything seemed to be going fine until David Hodo, another of Freddie’s friends who is the Construction Worker character in The Village People, walked round a corner only to find Freddie planted in the middle of a large black bin half-full of thrownaway beer cans, waving his arms and shouting, “Ooohh! Look! I’m trash. Trash!”

  Nearly every night we ended up at the Anvil, the infamous club in the middle of the old meat market district where the trucks would still load and unload their cargoes of real beef. This was also the club where Felipe Rose, the Red Indian character in the Village People, was discovered as he danced on the bar. While the Anvil had a sleazy reputation, the music was brilliant and one could drink there until well after dawn had broken. It had a backroom but no one forced you into it and generally, the clientele and atmosphere were quite superb where anyone could feel quite at ease. Freddie also enjoyed the Anvil’s cabaret, in particular the guy who dressed up and looked amazingly like the disco diva Grace Jones belting out ‘Pull Up To The Bumper, Baby’! The punters always tucked bills into convenient folds of the performers’ outfits. The impersonator who recreated Candi Statton’s ‘Don’t Stop The Train’ was another of Freddie’s favourites.

  The doorman at one of New York’s clubs called The Works became Freddie’s bodyguard for a time. Freddie arranged through Gerry Stickells to have this man, barrel-shaped, blond and bearded, taken on as his security for the continuation of The Works tour. Was that name a coincidence or what? The guy proved useless in a very short time. He had built his past up to be quite impressive but after one long night in Canada, we caught a plane down into the USA. As Freddie and I were disembarking, the cabin crew would permit the accompanying security to get to Freddie to be at his side when he left the plane and went through the terminal. We were on the point of leaving and Freddie asked one of the flight attendants whether they had seen his bodyguard. The reply was that the guy was asleep. Freddie was incensed and said, “Well, just leave him there. If he wakes up in the next city, then that’s his fault!”

  We left plane and the security guard behind. It was the last we saw of him. The first thing I had to do on arrival back at the hotel on the West Coast of America was to call Gerry Stickells and ask him to arrange some new security.

  The Saint was another club which Freddie frequented. It was an old theatre on the Lower East Side which was the state-of-the-art nightclub for gay New York. (I was able to get an honorary membership as an out-of-town resident so that Freddie’s name didn’t appear on the books.) Getting a membership was easy but to get the all-important locker, you had to join an ever-growing waiting list. The locker was necessary so that you could change from street clothes to fetish clothes and dancing gear as well as to stash your night’s supply of drugs. A quick rundown of the acquisition of those drugs goes like this… Friday afternoon was time to go shopping. I would be dispatched to see our friendly neighbourhood dealer who had an apartment on the Lower West Side. The earlier I got there, the less of a queue there was.

  The dealer seemed to run his retail operation like a supermarket. Through the door there was a table on which sat two workmen’s expanding metal workboxes. In each of the sections he would display supplies of different pills, powders and potions, each one named and priced. The only thing that wasn’t supplied was a supermarket-style mini-wire trolley. I moved further along the table, selecting my requirements which I had written on my ‘shopping list’ which would include enough supplies for Freddie and whoever he was partying with that weekend. Pills for this, powders for that and the potions were of the ethyl chloride variety which when doused onto a knotted corner of the ubiquitous coloured pocket kerchief and when sucked and inhaled would basically freeze the lungs and provide a huge high when dancing. Something definitely on the ‘Things not to try’ list. At the end of the table, the check-out point, the only thing missing was a till. The dealer ran through everything and told you what the damage would be and of course there were discounts for quantity and for cash. Shopping would, of course, be done alone and you would let the next person in on your way out. By Friday evening, in the summertime, the dealer would be well on the way to Fire Island and a whole other clientele.

  Back at the Saint on Saturday night and duly stoked and fuelled up, the timetable which dictated the schedule of what drug to take and when was dutifully followed. Uppers were taken between eleven p.m. and four a.m. and then when the down music started on the dance floor, the downers were taken until it was time to go home, usually half past eight or nine o’ clock on Sunday morning.

  Sometimes, we went on to ‘continuity’ parties in people’s private homes where at the door ecstasy tablets were handed out and where, if you did not immediately consume them, you weren’t allowed the opportunity to take them later. That way the host ensured that everyone would be in the same frame of mind. I have to say that Freddie’s generosity in sharing his drugs was always reciprocated by his friends who supplied him with his drinks. His New York coterie of friends never exploited him.

  There was much less formality round Freddie in a New York bar and over there he never felt the need for a large group to always be around him. It was a much more relaxed atmosphere due in part to there being more celebrities per capita living in New York. The clubbers were more used to seeing a famous face in their midst and Freddie didn’t feel threatened when people would good-naturedly come up to talk to him.

  Meeting people as he always did in bars and clubs of course resulted in many sexual liasons and here I would like to say something about Freddie’s ideas of love as I interpreted them. That there is love in all his songs is undeniable; in fact, love is what Freddie was all about and so I think it’s worth a few words about how Freddie perceived love.

  Take the pick-up situation outlined above, one of which involved a boy called Charles, a Quebecquois from Montreal in Canada whose smattering of English Freddie couldn’t understand any more than he could Winnie Kirchberger’s. Exit Charles for there was no local version of Barbara Valentin to translate for them! Although – as in the case of Charles who was flown both to New York and to London – some of these meetings were longer than mere one-night stands, the sex that these meetings engendered certainly had nothing to do with love in Freddie’s mind. In fact, I don’t think the words love and sex could be used in the same sentence as far as Freddie was concerned. Sexual pleasure was a physical outlet for him, a displacement activity as usefully useless as smoking or travelling. Because he was generally a hyperactive person, he always wanted to be doing something. I remember him saying that he considered sleep to be the biggest waste of time in any twenty-four hours. He hated time being wasted but he never considered sex to be a waste of time because for him the only outlet for his energies other than work was sex. He was prepared to work twenty-four hours a day when the occasion demanded and often did, bu
t he – indeed anyone – was physically unable to do so without a break on a continuous basis.

  Sex was what he did when he wasn’t working. Sex was fun, sex was a good time and while doing it he didn’t have to waste any of the precious emotion that otherwise went into his work.

  The love he wrote about in his work was a totally different kettle of fish. Did he experience this precious emotion himself in real life? I actually don’t know.

  What is ‘love’? I think it is something different for each person of course but I can assert that the in-love ‘love’ for Freddie started with him feeling comfortable in the company of someone to whom he was going to commit. He would then start to find out things about his intended, a gradual process perhaps lasting some weeks. Strangely, if he found something that was unpalatable in the person’s character, he would often dismiss that information and forget it because he could balance it up with the good things he was discovering.

  I don’t think he ever fell ‘in love’ at first sight or anything like that. He loved people, sure, but each person received a different facet of the total love he bore. No one person exclusively received that total love. Ever.

  I know he loved me. I know he loved Mary but in a completely different way and certainly never in the standard issue boy-meets-girl way talked about in the newspapers to try and make it easy for the public to understand.

  Love is very difficult to understand.

  Freddie’s love started with trust. I think that was the only thing that was common to everyone he loved in whatever way. When he stopped trusting someone, he stopped loving them. Oddly, he only ever counted the good things about people, his friends. I think it’s why he spent so much time with people whom we on the inside saw on the outside as having a lot of bad points. Freddie wouldn’t see these.

  I don’t even think that Freddie ever had an idealised view of love. Those first wonderful feelings most of us get from falling in love, Freddie would get from a song that he’d written. The love he wrote about and therefore achieved in that song would be the requiting he required to be able to go on loving. He got so much love from his friends and this was commuted into the emotion which Freddie needed in order to write about love in his songs. His main emotional outlet was the writing. Conflict was again a part of this relationship for someone who stood up to him, said ‘No’ but who went on loving him, often gave him the impetus he needed to create. Of course, when he had created in a song the feeling of perfect love, why risk not being able to recreate it in real life when by keeping all the different loves and sex in different compartments, he would remain invulnerable? He knew he could so easily be let down as had happened so often.

  Freddie needed love as much as the next person but, to emphasise, he had to know that the love came from a source he could trust. Because of his unconventional upbringing, he didn’t start off with conventional love. Not having his relatives and parents around for so much of his childhood, constantly being there and loving him consistently, he perceived love in a different way from those with contrary family backgrounds. Most people, in fact. No doubt his parents loved him from afar. He wasn’t to know that that wasn’t normal but he compensated for the distance involved by seeking out love from sources he always knew were going to be there. Sources of his own creation. Within his control.

  He got his love in non-sexual ways and in non-sexual situations. He loved his friends. It was that simple. An easy way to understand this was that whereas sex was fun, loving one person singly and solely to the exclusion of others could and had hurt. In his experience either lovers had left him of their own volition or he had worked it so that he made the lovers leave him. There is indeed a huge difference between lust and love and these feelings should not be confused with ‘that loving feeling’ of which the Righteous Brothers sang. That ‘feeling’ was one which I contend that Freddie never had in the first place to eventually lose. It’s a phenomenon which is particularly relevant to gay men. Gay men don’t necessarily have to have love and sex from the same person in the same, ongoing relationship. Gay men find that they can derive all the love they can possibly need from their good friends.

  Sex…

  Well, as Boy George said, “I’d really rather have a cup of tea.”

  Earl Grey was Freddie’s preference but unlike George, Freddie was always ready for both sex and tea, with the tea, preferably, coming afterwards.

  The importance of friends was one reason why he was so incredibly generous to them all and why parties and entertaining his friends were so important to him. Gifts and gift giving were ways for Freddie to repay the friendship he received.

  For one birthday party he threw, forty people sat down at the same table created from several separate tables in the sitting room at Garden Lodge. Although it was his birthday and people brought him presents, he in turn gave all his guests presents. I was dispatched to Tiffanys in Bond Street and picked up an assortment of gifts suitable for both men and women, costing about fifty pounds each. I think that here it is useful to stress that at no time on any occasion, including the wonderful Hat Party, was there anyone remotely resembling a dwarf carrying anything remotely resembling a bowl of cocaine. There. Bang. Another myth exploded.

  At another festive occasion, this time one of his famed Christmas lunches, everyone present received a glittering brooch from Butler and Wilson, Straker’s being, I remember, a fizzing champagne glass, so there are many bits of Freddie still around in people’s lives. The small treasures that he gave and took such delight in giving are in fact huge treasures to those of us who cherish them still. I received an Afghanlike dog in the form of a lapel brooch.

  And speaking of Christmases, wherever he was in the world, whether New York, Munich or London, he was always one for the traditional. He insisted on a Christmas tree although very rarely when abroad did he manage to secure the size of the ones we had in Garden Lodge. He had a certain ideal view of what Christmas should be. Whether Zoroastrians celebrate Christmas I don’t know but Freddie had picked up the notion somewhere along the line. Christmas as he celebrated it was a very British thing and he was drawn to what he perceived were traditional British roots.

  His active part and involvement in the proceedings was telling everybody else what to do and where to put things and how to hang decorations. At Garden Lodge, Jim always arranged the table centrepiece and kept it a secret until the last minute. A mixture of seasonal flowers and fir cones and Christmas baubles – Blue Peter and its yoghurt pots, loo roll cores and sticky-back plastic had nothing on what Jim Hutton came up with.

  Not that Freddie would even wrap presents himself. Most of them came pre-wrapped and packaged from the shop because Cartier, Tiffany and Lalique do that kind of thing. Christmas cards he chose from the selection which I would go out and buy but he would always write the cards himself. He would go through his own address book and write the envelopes although these would frequently not be posted as inside many of them he would also include a cheque. It was how we in the household always received our Christmas bonuses.

  The cast list for Christmas day’s lunch would start being prepared at the beginning of December with a basic list being added to, subtracted from and generally changed and swapped around daily. It almost became a tradition that on Christmas Eve he would have open house; Mike Moran would, latterly, always be there to play the piano and everyone would gather to sing carols.

  Talk of British tradition! What could be more Victorian than carols round the piano? Freddie used to enjoy the carol singing I think almost as much as all the other parts of Christmas together. I remember one year, he was overjoyed when Stephanie Beacham and her children were there, all singing carols. This communal singing business he always thoroughly enjoyed, often holding impromptu choral harmony sessions, especially when in the company of Straker and Kenny Everett. Whether this enjoyment came from his time at his English boarding school at Panchgani in India, who knows?

  Christmastime was always a poignant anniversary regarding Fredd
ie’s friendship with Kenny Everett. Kenny had been extremely influential in ‘breaking’ ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ on Capital Radio in 1975, introducing the seven-minute single to a nation accustomed only to the three-and-a-half minute sound bite. It seems incredible and rather farcical now to remember that this intense friendship between two highly emotional people broke up because of a confrontation over drug use. It wasn’t even a head-to-head argument. There was no one-on-one row. It was ‘relayed’ to Freddie (by some kind friend, of course) that Kenny thought that Freddie was quite happy using anybody else’s drugs without providing any himself. When Freddie heard this, he couldn’t believe his ears because it was his own feeling that the boot was in fact on the other foot and that it was Kenny who was always appropriating anyone else’s ‘stash’ other than his own. Freddie’s opinion was similarly ‘relayed’ back to Kenny and the situation then arose, which I think everyone must have encountered, where it becomes impossible to patch up a hole that never was. Polarisation ensued, pride took over and the rest is conjecture but they never spoke again after Christmas 1980. Drug induced paranoia? What? My personal feeling is that it’s just the way some friendships go. How the newspapers thought that Kenny was one of the last of Freddie’s best friends to speak to him before he died, I really wouldn’t like to say.

  At some point in the Christmas week he would go over and see his parents and family and take their presents but they would never be involved in any of his Christmas schedule at Garden Lodge. Freddie never mixed friends and relatives, even to the point where when his parents were invited to Garden Lodge, Joe and I had to go out. Mary would be asked to stay. His parents had grown to like her, having been introduced to her so many years before when he and Mary were sharing a flat and it helped to square the view of normality which he wished to give to his parents. Normality in the strictest sense of the word. Not necessarily ‘straight’ as in heterosexual but merely to allay any fears they might have had for him, to assure them that there was an ongoing secure continuity in his life and that no harm was coming to him.