I couldn’t tell you from one day to the next what the weather was. I just went out into it whether it be cloudy, sunny, freezing cold… Nothing really mattered. It must have been on the Tuesday night before he died that I had my talk with him. The doctors had told each of us that we had to enable him to let go, that in order to make it easier for people to die, they had to be told that it was okay by those they were about to leave behind.
I was lying on the bed with Freddie and he was asking how things were in the house, if things were straight and tidy. “I feel so tired, wondering whether I will ever see any of it again. Trying to visualise what’s going on. I’m so isolated up here. All of a sudden it feels a huge house.”
I sensed this was the only chance I would have to carry out the doctor’s advice. “Everything’s fine,” I said. “Just as you’d like it, like always. And we’re fine too. We’re coping. Don’t worry about us. If you feel it’s time to go, we’re behind you all the way. Don’t worry about us. Don’t feel you’re leaving us. Everything’s fine.”
We just sat quietly, silently for an hour or two and then he dozed.
This, the final week of Freddie’s life saw several sets of visitors. His family, Bomi and Jer, his parents and his sister Kash with her husband Roger and their two children, arrived early in that week for afternoon tea. While directing events from the bed, with superhuman effort he was able to entertain them for some two or three hours. This was still Freddie protecting them, making them believe that there was nothing for them to worry about. We brought up the tea which included home-made sandwiches and shop-bought cakes. Little did any of us know that this would be the last time that they would see Freddie alive. Although they wanted to return later in the week, Freddie categorically denied himself and them another meeting. He didn’t want to put them through further suffering by them seeing him as bad as he was. Was there anything more for him to say to them?
Elton John arrived one day and stayed for about forty minutes and this time he arrived in his Bentley and pulled up at the front door. So often in the past, he’d kept his visits secret by driving in his Mini and parking in the Mews. His reply to the press’s questions was that, “I’ve come to see my friend.”
He was due to leave for work engagements in Paris. Before he left, he gave me a series of telephone numbers where he could be contacted.
Brian and Anita came and on another occasion Roger and Debbie. Both visits were fairly short. Without them knowing it, Freddie was saying goodbye. Dave Clark was fairly frequently at the house. Freddie took comfort at his being there, realising that this gave us some respite from the continual care and observation.
Dr. Atkinson made his usual regular calls throughout the week, every other day, to monitor the deterioration in Freddie’s health. At this point, we were led to believe that Freddie still had maybe two to three weeks left. Terry Giddings still came most days even though there was no possibility now of Freddie ever going anywhere… Terry was very concerned.
Even though she was seven months pregnant and had little Richard at home, Mary still tried to get to the house daily for a short visit in order to continue her work. Freddie had determined that business was still to be as usual.
Which brings us to Friday, November 22, 1991.
On Thursday, the day before, Freddie asked that we get Jim Beach on the telephone and then informed us that he had arranged for Jim to come over and see him. We realised it must be for something quite serious because of Freddie’s general health. Jim had kept in touch with Gordon Atkinson as much as he had with us or Freddie at the house, so that he was always abreast with the reality of the situation. Jim thus arrived at about ten o’clock in the morning and went straight up to Freddie’s bedroom. At one point, Joe went up and provided them with what appeared to be much needed refreshments.
At about three-thirty, after a long meeting of five-and-a-half hours, which showed that Freddie was still entirely capable of rational thought, Jim Beach came downstairs and informed us of the basic content of the previous hours’ discussions. Freddie and he had decided that it was time to release a statement with regards to Freddie’s Aids status. Obviously, this came as a great shock to us as we waited in the kitchen. Jim Beach explained the reasons behind this announcement and gave us the chance to put our point of view. None of us knew exactly how to react at that point. After all the years of having to keep this huge secret to ourselves, it was now going to be broadcast to the world. After discussion, we accepted the reasons behind it. A lot of good could come out of Freddie admitting to having the disease while still alive. His circumstances and celebrity could be used as a basis for the benefit of other sufferers and those affected by the disease. It would show that anyone was at risk.
It was explained to us that the full effect would be much diluted should his health status be revealed after his death.
You have to realise that I had been consistently lying to my closest friends for these past years. For the full information to be now released as an official press statement made a public liar of me.
Freddie had thought about releasing a statement at various times during recent years but was always held back by his feelings and concern towards us and his family, the people closest to him. He wanted to protect us as much as himself from the glare and scrutiny that going public would have created. He didn’t want anybody to have to walk down the street with people pointing at them and talking behind their backs. Also, due to the recent revelations to him from both Joe Fanelli and Jim Hutton about their own health, he did not want Garden Lodge to be branded a House of Death and life for all the residents within made intolerable.
Roxy Meade, the Queen press officer, was instructed to release the statement on Friday evening. Jim Beach had hoped to avoid the tabloid press capitalising on the news because these newspapers had devoted so much space in the previous months, printing and speculating on rumours of Freddie’s ill-health. Jim had hoped the Sunday broadsheets would carry the news more responsibly.
After checking the prognosis for Freddie with Doctor Atkinson, Jim Beach left on a previously arranged trip to Los Angeles to deal with band business.
Since the previous Monday, Joe, Jim and I had been operating on a rota we had worked out so that Freddie had someone with him twenty-four hours a day. This included one of us being with him all night. Freddie would be in the bed and the one on duty would be on top of the bed at his side. We actually did very little but at least we were there to hold his hand when he woke. He would lie awake often for an hour or more but not need conversation. The physical presence of another human being was enough. Should we be asleep when he awoke, he would never wake us.
It had been my turn on duty on the Friday night, following the press announcement and that’s when Freddie explained to me his reasoning behind the timing of the announcement. He had a fairly peaceful night as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. In the morning, I left his bedroom when Joe got up so that I could have a short nap before Saturday’s merry-go-round. Jim went and bought all the papers and there was Freddie splashed across the front pages. We turned the television on downstairs and there he was too. We took some of the papers up to him but they were left unread on the bed. Freddie appeared withdrawn, as though he knew what was about to happen. The press’s speculation over and embellishments upon his statement no longer concerned him.
I actually saw very little of Freddie on Saturday due to my having been with him all the previous night. I went to bed at my usual time and it was Jim’s turn on the rota. At half-past-five in the morning on Sunday, the phone extension by my bed rang. I could tell it was an internal call by the ringing sound.
This particular dawn call was from Joe. He sounded very anxious and asked me to come straight over to Freddie’s room. I didn’t have the courage to ask if he was dead. I just put the phone down and threw some clothes on.
When I got to Freddie’s room, I found Freddie had slipped into a coma. He had had an attack of rigors. He was lying very
stiffly, his head at an awkward angle and his eyes were staring into the corner of the room behind him. There were no signs that he was aware of our presence, even though we tried talking to him and gently shaking him.
We were confused. While we’d been preparing ourselves for anything out of the ordinary, we were not actually at all prepared for this turn of events. We called Dr Atkinson who told us he would be with us as soon as he could. I called Mary and let her know what had happened. She came over to the house later in the morning, at about ten-thirty, and we left her to spend a short time with Freddie before having to return to her little son Richard.
Dr. Atkinson arrived and, after we’d unburdened all our fears, he tried his best to calm us down and explained to us that Freddie could carry on in this state for a further few days. He spent quite a lot of time assuring us that Freddie wasn’t like this due to anything we had or hadn’t done and that there was nothing more medically that we could do for him. All that was left was for us to be there with him.
Freddie’s family also called. One thing which still plays on my conscience, even now, is that I couldn’t let them come to see him that afternoon. I explained to them that Freddie was not having a good day but maybe early in the following week he would feel better. I didn’t know then that I would be calling them four hours later to say that Freddie had passed away.
Dave Clark was called and immediately made his way over to the house and by the end of the afternoon, we had also been joined by Terry Giddings. In the house by then were Freddie and Dave Clark upstairs, Jim, Joe, Terry, Gordon Atkinson and myself downstairs in the kitchen. At about a quarter-to-seven, Dr. Atkinson said that there was nothing more he could do for the moment and so would go and have dinner and return afterwards. As Joe escorted Dr. Atkinson through the garden and thence out into the Mews, Dave Clark came downstairs and asked Jim and I to go upstairs to help Freddie to the lavatory.
We were pleased and surprised that Freddie had been able to ask to help to be relieved. While Freddie was clinically bed-bound, he was proud to the end that as far as he was concerned he wasn’t. In that final week we would manoeuvre him to the edge of the bed and then supporting him with our arms like a human zimmer-frame, we would get him to the lavatory and back. Therefore, to his own satisfaction, he was not bed-bound!
When we got to his bedside and started to move him, we found that nature had taken its course. In the process of making him comfortable again, both Jim and I noticed that he wasn’t breathing.
It was about a quarter-to-seven.
My first reaction was to try and get Doctor Atkinson back who had only just left. From the house, I called over to Joe in the Mews on the phone as Gordon Atkinson was already driving away in his car. Although Joe’s running out into Logan Mews alerted the press to something going on, Joe managed to stop Gordon and brought him back inside. Gordon immediately came up to Freddie’s bedroom where he pronounced Freddie dead and certified the time as being twelve minutes to seven.
Chapter Seven
From that moment it seemed to fall to me to be in charge of the situation. It was as though a bomb had dropped and everyone was in a daze. Even as I looked round, everything appeared as though we were in a fog and I was the only one able to move.
A frantic round of telephoning began. The first and most important call was to Mary. The second call was to Freddie’s mother and father. It was so difficult informing his parents of what had happened. I had earlier put them off visiting once more. It was after those two calls that I had to try and trace Jim Beach at one of his many meetings in Los Angeles. Jim’s role as manager had now been superseded by that of Freddie’s executor, along with John Libson whose home phone number we had never been given. Even though it was Sunday, Queen business didn’t stop. In the conversations I had with Jim Beach over the next hour when I’d finally got hold of him, it became obvious that timing was of paramount importance.
Timing and the manipulation of events seems to have been an integral element in this whole story and now it was decided that it couldn’t be seen that Freddie’s body was being sneaked out of the house. Doing so might appear that we were trying to cover up the fact of his death. A statement had therefore to be released to the press before the departure of Freddie’s body could be carried out with the likelihood of any dignity at all. That’s why the press announcement was released at midnight, giving me time to make the necessary arrangements.
Some two weeks previously, when Freddie had made ‘the decision’, I had broached the subject of how we would remove Freddie from the besieged house with my father who, coincidentally, was and is the general manager of the funeral directors John Nodes. We had therefore already laid plans to replace the usual fibre-glass coffin-shaped container with a proper coffin in case the press somehow managed to get photographs of his leaving. After I’d arranged the midnight departure, I think it was Terry Giddings who informed the local police of what had happened and asked their advice as to how to deal with the press outside the house.
The funeral directors’ van pulled up and reversed into the mews to the front door of the house. Joe was up in the bedroom when I led my father, Leslie, and his four coffin-bearers with their burden up the narrow main staircase to Freddie’s bedroom. It was more than surreal. To feel all that Freddie had achieved in life, which was mirrored in the house, and witnessing the arrival of his coffin surrounded by men dressed in sombre black was unreal. Joe and I stood to one side, our backs against the French windows leading out onto the small front balcony.
We couldn’t take our eyes off Freddie. We watched with tears brimming as the men manoeuvred Freddie’s body into the black protective bag, the use of which being mandatory in the case of every death which has occurred from a communicable disease. It wasn’t a shock as such because I had read about it, seen this type of activity on television and in the cinema but when it is happening to you and one of your loved ones it jars. For me it was the moment of finality. Once he was zipped up inside the bodybag, there was just no way he was ever coming out. And it was the last time I saw him. Although as it was happening, I realised and accepted that this had to happen, I really didn’t want to see it happening and as a last memory of my friend, it was not the most pleasant. What was sweet was seeing the little teddy bear that Jim Hutton had placed with Freddie being put into the bag with him.
“What the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over,” is one clichéd situation that I now wish I could have experienced at that point. I really didn’t want to witness all this. Who would? I remember holding Joe’s hand. He was shaking. I was nearest the bed. He was on my left and I could see out of the corner of my eye that he was shaking. I reached out and squeezed his hand to let him know he wasn’t there on his own.
The bag was placed tenderly and carefully in the coffin and when they were ready I led the pallbearers down the stairs. For the first time, one of Freddie’s aims of lining up all the doors in the main house and the Mews so that you could look in a straight line from one end of the property to another came into good effect. He always used to say, “Take the money and run!” and indeed, with this configuration of rooms, he was able to make his last exit swiftly and unencumbered. Or, in the manner of the announcement which always used to come at the end of every Elvis Presley concert, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Mister Mercury has left the building!”
With the invaluable aid of the police who had arrived in force with barricades to keep the press at bay, the van pulled away from the Mews and into Logan Place. When the van got to the end of the street, due to the one-way traffic system it had to turn right. The police created a road block for five minutes, thus preventing any of the press from following the van and discovering where Freddie’s body was being taken.
One of the strangest calls to the house that evening had been from Freddie’s great friend Barbara Valentin, the German actress with whom he spent many happy hours. She had telephoned to ask how Freddie was although she had no idea that he was dying. She had just felt
that it was the time to ring. It came as a terrible shock to her to find that she had called perhaps an hour too late. I sensed the same reaction to the news from all the calls that I had to make including those to his friends Thor Arnold and Lee Nolan in San Diego. Bad news always travels fast and soon we were being inundated with calls from all over the world. The rest of the band were informed by Julie Glover, the Queen Productions secretary and Jim Beach’s trusted right hand.
Because of Freddie’s wish to be cremated and my previous experience when I was very young of having helped my father, I knew that we had to have two doctors’ signatures on the death certificate and so one of the calls was to Doctor Graham Moyle who had looked after Freddie through much of his illness. Even though there were a few people in the house, it felt incredibly empty.
The creator of these surroundings was no longer here.
I don’t think any of us felt particularly tired and I know it was gone four o’ clock Monday morning before I got to bed.
It fell to me to sign the certificate registering his death at Chelsea Registry Office which I did the following day. I then went to the head office of John Nodes and Sons to complete the more formal details of Freddie’s funeral. I knew from the family, whose responsibility the body of the unmarried Freddie now was, that the funeral according to Parsee tradition had to be as soon after death as possible. After speaking with them, I found out what their requirements were and then it was up to my father Leslie and myself to organise the fine tuning.
Freddie Mercury: An intimate memoir by the man who knew him best Page 30
