FOREWORD. FREDDIE WHO?

FOREWORD

Freddie Mercury was unique. Before I continue I admit that I am biased. During my twelve years as his personal assistant I learned more from him about art, furniture, porcelain and many more things than I could have ever been taught in any amount of lectures. Freddie’s enthusiasm for life was infectious.

I consider myself lucky to have been there with him during the good times and, although I would have preferred a different ending, I also consider myself lucky that I was one of the few he wanted with him in the final days. He was a musical genius, strong-willed, obstinate, soft-centred, caring and, above all, genuine.

One of the others was Jim Hutton, whom I have known for over twenty years. We first met across a busy restaurant counter in Selfridge’s, the department store, in 1973. Then we lost contact until I turned up at Freddie’s flat one evening for dinner and there was Jim. We hadn’t seen each other for a few years, but it seemed no more than a few weeks.

Freddie and Jim were certainly an odd couple. Because of their temperaments, life around Freddie and Jim was never what you could call easy. But at least it was never boring.

What follows will, I am sure, be of great interest. It gives a previously unseen insight into someone about whom so much has been written. It has never been in Jim’s nature to be anything other than straightforward.

Peter Freestone

London SW1

August 1994

FREDDIE WHO?

It had been just another ordinary weekend in London towards the end of 1983. I’d spent much of it drinking in gay pubs and clubs with my lover, John Alexander. He was a stocky lad with dark hair and I was besotted with him. Sunday night we ended up in a gay club called Cocobana, in the basement of a hotel in South Kensington, west London, and it was my first time in the place.

We were standing near the bar, drinking lager from cans. The club was fairly busy and plenty of anonymous faces were milling around or dancing to the disco beats thundering out from the speakers.

I suppose I was on my fourth lager when it happened. John went to the lavatory and this guy came up to me. I was thirty-four and he was slightly older. He was dressed casually in jeans and a white vest and, like me, had a moustache. He was slight and not the sort of man I found attractive. I preferred men bigger and butcher.

‘Let me buy you a drink, ’ he said.

I had an almost full can and I replied: ‘No, thank you. ’ Then he asked me what I was doing that night.

‘Fuck off, ’ I said. ‘You’d better ask my boyfriend about that. ’ The stranger could see he was getting nowhere with me and let the matter drop, going back to join his friends in the corner.

‘Somebody’s just tried to chat me up, ’ I told John when he returned.

‘Who was he? ’ he asked. ‘Which one? ’

‘Over there, ’ I said, pointing him out.

‘That’s Freddie Mercury! ’ he said, although it meant nothing to me – not a light. If he’d been the managing director of the Savoy Hotel where I worked it might have been a different matter. But I never kept up with popular music. Although I had it on the radio all the time, I couldn’t tell one group from another, or one singer from another. I had never heard of Queen. John wasn’t annoyed that Freddie had tried it on – on the contrary, he was flattered that a famous singer fancied his partner.

John and I carried on drinking until the place closed around midnight, then we headed home to our house in Clapham, south London. Early next morning I was back at work, as a gentlemen’s hairdresser at the Savoy Hotel’s small barber’s shop concession.

Four or five months after that night in the gay club Cocobana John took me out to dinner at a swanky restaurant, September’s in Earls Court, west London.

I was sitting with my back to the door and we ate a delicious meal. I was happy with life, quite content with my lot. Then John, looking over my shoulder, said: ‘Oh, your friend is here. ’

‘Who? ’ I asked.

‘Freddie Mercury, ’ he said. ‘The guy who tried to chat you up a few months ago at Cocobana. ’

I looked around, trying not to be noticed doing so, and indeed there was the same man dining with friends. I don’t think he saw me.

Not long after, John and I moved to Sutton in Surrey where we rented rooms. Our landlady, Mrs Ivy Taverner, was in her seventies and John and I shared the two attic rooms at the top of her semi-detached house. It was a modest place: a bedroom, sitting room and basic cooking facilities on the landing.

But after a while we found we needed more space and we began getting on one another’s nerves. I didn’t expect much out of life but I was desperate for a harmonious, loving relationship. I became too possessive of John and he eventually saw me as a ball and chain; he was yearning for his freedom. In the spring of 1984, after two years together, we split up. I kept the rooms, and John moved out; we’ve remained friends. I worked at the barber’s shop five days a week and every other Saturday morning. In the week I left work around six and by the time I’d got home – forty-five minutes by train from Victoria Station – and cooked myself something to eat most of the evening had gone.

I led a quiet life on my own at Ivy Taverner’s. Once in a while I might meet a friend in Sutton for a drink, but usually I kept very much to myself. I’m not a promiscuous person and never went out deliberately to pick someone up. I liked my own company more than other people’s. Occasionally I’d meet somebody and we might have a fling, but my philosophy was always ‘If it happens, it happens; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. ’ I got into the habit of going out once a week, on Thursdays as that was pay-day, to the Market Tavern, a gay pub in Vauxhall, south London. It was a long way to go from Sutton for a drink, but I regarded it as my ‘local’. I always stood in the same little corner at the bar, eying-up the bar staff with my pint before me and my packet of cigarettes neatly rolled into my sleeve. I’d stand there all night on the exact same spot, drinking a few pints and taking in the atmosphere, oblivious to everyone else. I was kept entertained by watching a bunch of strangers enjoying themselves.

When the summer months came along, it became too dull for whole weekends in Sutton so I switched my drinking night to Saturdays. I always thought I was out totally alone on those nights. Not so, apparently. Many years later, after Freddie’s death, I had a heart-to-heart with Joe Fannelli, a former lover of Freddie’s and his live-in chef, confessor and confidant. Although Freddie had a flat in London, throughout 1984 he was mostly living in Munich, Germany. Whenever he was back in London for a weekend he’d invariably end up in Heaven, the gay nightclub under Charing Cross Station.

I don’t know how, but Freddie discovered where I drank. On his way to Heaven he would tell his chauffeur, a guy called Gary, to take a detour via the Market Tavern. Freddie’s old Mercedes would draw up and Joe was instructed to see if I was on my mark at the bar. Once he’d reported back to Freddie that, indeed, this creature of habit was in place, they’d continue their journey to Heaven for the night.

If you’re Irish, which I am, then 17 March is a date which never leaves your mind: St Patrick’s Day. In 1985, 17 March fell on a Sunday, and the night before I’d been drinking in the Market Tavern with a few Irish friends. We all agreed to meet up again at the pub the next day at lunchtime. I rarely drink at lunchtime, but that day I made an exception; the afternoon soon became the evening and eventually I left for Sutton and bed. I had to go to work the next morning. I’d have probably cut someone’s throat when shaving them if I’d stayed drinking any longer.

That particular Paddy’s Day is ingrained in my memory, so I know it was the following Saturday, 23 March, that I met Freddie again. The day started much like any other. I made myself some supper, then headed out dressed appropriately for the gay scene – jeans and white vest. The look at the time was ‘High Clone’, complete with mandatory moustache. I got the tube to Vauxhall and, climbing three steps at a time, put my knees and arse out of my jeans. They completely ripped.

When the Market Tavern closed, I fell straight into the back of a minicab, driven by a regular face who was used to me slurring Sutton as my destination. That night I decided I wanted to go on partying and told him to drive me to Heaven instead. It was a very occasional haunt of mine; I’d always found it too big and impersonal for my liking.

I arrived fairly late, legless and undoubtedly on another planet. Worse still, after paying the minicab I only had £ 5 to my name. At least I didn’t have to pay to get in, as I discovered that a friend was on the door. I went straight to the downstairs bar and ordered a pint of lager.

‘Let me buy you this, ’ said a voice. I looked up. It was the chap from the Cocobana in 1983. Freddie Thing. I’d had a fair amount to drink. My tongue had loosened up. My defences were down.

‘No, I’ll buy you one, ’ I said.

‘A large vodka tonic, ’ came the reply. There went my fiver in one go. If I was lucky I would be left with a little over £ 1, perhaps enough to get the night bus back to Sutton.

‘How big’s your dick? ’ Freddie asked, laughing. It was, I later learned, a typically outrageous Freddie opening gambit.

I don’t like answering such personal questions, so I said: ‘It’s none of your business! ’ If I hadn’t been so drunk I’d have told him to fuck off. But I did reprimand him on his accent, a sort of mid-Atlantic drawl.

‘For God’s sake, drop the phoney American accent, ’ I said.

‘I haven’t got an American accent, ’ he answered. He introduced himself as ‘Freddie’. I knew he was Freddie Mercury, but still had little inkling who he actually was, nor what he did. It didn’t seem to matter.

Freddie asked me to join his crowd of friends, who were grouped in the middle of the bar. Joe Fannelli was there, and Peter Straker, the singer, with a couple of others. Joe was fair-haired, worked out and was in his thirties, with a cautious approach to people and life. I haven’t got a clue what any of us talked about that night; I let them do most of the talking.

A little later Freddie whispered in my ear: ‘Come on, let’s go and dance. ’ We made straight for the dance floor. I was a bit of a raver in those days, if sufficiently well oiled. I’d get up and dance even by myself if the mood took me – tearing the floor to bits along with anyone unlucky enough to be in my way. For a few good hours I threw Freddie across the floor. I think he admired my unselfconscious, bullish dancing.

By about four in the morning Freddie decided he’d had enough and we were all invited back to his flat at 12 Stafford Terrace, Kensington. I sat next to him in the back of the car.

Freddie’s home was the lower part of a house conversion. The hallway and dining room were on ground level and the kitchen on the mezzanine. In the basement were the bedrooms – Freddie’s facing the street and Joe Fannelli’s at the rear – and a large sitting room looking out on to a small, patioed garden.

Outside, the dawn was almost up, but everyone in that flat was in the mood to keep partying. At one point Freddie offered me some cocaine, but it wasn’t my scene. ‘No, thanks, ’ I said. ‘I don’t touch the stuff. ’ I’d had the odd joint of cannabis in my time, but never anything harder.

Anyway, I was already happily tanked up and more interested in playing with Freddie’s two cats, Tiffany and Oscar, than putting anything up my nose. Despite a room full of noisy people, Freddie and I flirted all the time. There was a lot of eye contact with the odd wink, or nod, or touch.

Eventually Freddie and I fell into his bed, too drunk to do anything more than fumble about with each other to little effect. Freddie cuddled up to me affectionately. We both nattered away until we finally flaked out. Next morning we lay entwined, carrying on talking where we’d left off. When we got around to discussing what each of us did for a living, I told him I was a hairdresser. He said, ‘I’m a singer. ’ Then he offered to go and make me a cup of tea.

Later, around noon as I was leaving the flat, Freddie gave me his telephone number. ‘Fair dues, ’ I said. ‘Here’s mine. ’ I didn’t hear a word from Freddie after that night, and thought no more of it.

Then three months later, in the early summer, he did get in touch. I got home on a Friday and started cooking bangers, mash, marrowfat peas and fried onions. I’d just put the potatoes on to boil when the phone went downstairs in the hall. Mrs Taverner answered it and called up for me.

I trundled down and the voice at the other end simply said: ‘Guess who this is? ’

I tried a few names without success.

‘It’s Freddie, ’ he said. ‘I’m having a little dinner party. Come over. ’

‘I can’t, ’ I replied. ‘I’ve just started cooking my dinner. ’

‘Well, turn everything off at once, ’ he demanded insistently. ‘Come over. You’ll have a good time, I promise. ’

So I turned off my bangers and set off for Freddie’s flat. I had no bottle of wine to offer my host but felt I should take something along, as a present, so when I got to Victoria Station I bought Freddie two £ 1. 99 bunches of freesias.

Then I caught a bus to Kensington High Street and walked towards his flat. ‘This is silly. I’m going nuts! ’ I thought to myself. I’d never taken flowers to a guy before and had really surprised myself when I bought them. Besides, they looked half dead. As I turned into Stafford Terrace I spotted a bin and, embarrassed by the flowers, threw them in. Little did I know that freesias were one of Freddie’s favourite flowers. If I’d actually given them to him that day, he’d have gone crazy.

So when Freddie opened the front door to me, I just gave him a big smile. We hugged and went downstairs to the sitting room to meet his other guests. There were about six of them.

I felt apprehensive about meeting Freddie’s friends. As we were going upstairs to the dining room, one of the guests put his hand on my shoulder and acted hurt.

‘All right, ’ he said. ‘Ignore me. ’

‘Jesus! ’ I said. I had to look twice. It was Peter Freestone, a former colleague from my pre-Savoy days at Selfridge’s, the Oxford Street department store. In those days I was working as a hairpiece sales assistant while Peter managed the ground floor Orchard Room restaurant. Later he worked at the Royal Opera House as a dresser. Now he helped Freddie manage his life and was constantly on call.

Peter was in his early thirties. Well over six feet tall, he towered over everyone, large and stocky. He had a chubby face and a warm smile. I could tell there wasn’t a bad bone in his body.

Freddie and the others always called Peter ‘Phoebe’. Freddie loved finding nicknames – usually gender-swapping ones – for those around him. His own was Melina, after Melina Mercouri, the volatile Greek actress and Joe was Liza, as in ‘Liza Fannelli’. (Although I’ve called my book Mercury and Me, I only ever called him Freddie all the time we were together. )

At supper I sat next to Freddie. He had hit the cocaine again at some point, and couldn’t stop talking. He was buzzing so much he could have talked to the wall.

After supper we headed out to Heaven for a few hours, then, exhausted, we went back to Stafford Terrace. All Freddie’s other guests, especially a guy called Paul Prenter, were trying to find out what they could about me.

I didn’t feel at all at ease with Prenter. He was a slight man with a moustache and glasses. His eyes constantly darted around the room, watching everyone around him and everything going on. He didn’t miss a trick. He was very talkative but also had a bitchy streak in him.

There was a lot of bitchiness among Freddie’s friends. They seemed to compete constantly for his attention. None of them had ever seen me out on the gay scene. Unlike most of Freddie’s previous boyfriends, I was a total stranger. And I remained a tight-lipped mystery to them. They knew my name, where I lived and what I did for a living, but no more. When they asked questions, I was as evasive as possible. It was none of their damned business!

Freddie didn’t ask any questions. We picked up exactly where we’d left off three months earlier. I hadn’t heard from him in that time, and that night he explained why it had been so long. After our previous liaison he’d gone back to his flat in Munich. It was his real home, because at the time he was living out of Britain as a tax exile. He’d also been on a tour of Australia, New Zealand and Japan with his group, Queen.

In January Queen had headlined the world’s biggest rock festival, Rock in Rio, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. By all accounts the trip had been a riot for Freddie. He told me he had travelled everywhere in an armoured car with police outriders, sometimes speeding the wrong way down one-way streets. One policeman kept trying to make him laugh – by shoving his loaded gun down his trousers. And when Freddie slipped from the hotel with Joe to go shopping they were mobbed by fans and locked in a shop for their own safety until security men could spirit them away. Even the great South American footballer Diego Maradona turned out to be a Queen fan, and when he met Freddie he gave him his football shirt.

At the Rio concert Freddie almost made a terrible mistake when he made his entrance to sing ‘I Want to Break Free’ in drag with huge plastic breasts. Brazilians had adopted the song as their liberation anthem and took offence at what he was wearing. Things began to turn nasty until he quickly whipped the outfit off.

One tune I recognised was Freddie’s solo debut single, ‘Love Kills’. It had been a huge hit in the gay clubs in London at the end of 1984. He had just released his first solo album Mr Bad Guy, dedicated to his cats, and his second single ‘I Was Born to Love You’.

While Freddie told me the story of his life that summer we discovered there was a special chemistry between us. I fell in love with so much about Freddie, regardless of what he did for a living. He had big brown eyes and a vulnerable, child-like persona. He was quite the opposite of the sort of man I’d ever fancied before: I liked big men with stocky legs, but Freddie had a waspish figure and the thinnest legs I’d ever seen. And for all that he had apparently achieved, he appeared to be remarkably insecure. He seemed totally sincere, and I was hooked.

Freddie said he had taken a shine to me when he’d first seen me because I reminded him of a favourite pin-up: Burt Reynolds! He liked his men big and strong, as long as they were softies at heart.

After three months’ silence, we were ready to begin our affair. I think I must have seemed something of a challenge to him: he was one of the biggest rock stars in the world and I didn’t seem impressed by any of that side of his life.

We spent that night together. I left in the afternoon, before Freddie was driven to Heathrow to take a flight back to his home in Munich. My life went on in London, unchanged. I strolled down to Kensington High Street to wait for a bus to Victoria. I walked with my head bowed towards the ground as usual. But it wasn’t because I was sad or miserable. Quite the contrary.

Freddie’s car zoomed by, but I didn’t notice. He told me later that he had spotted me and thought I looked downcast and it had made him upset. He’d said to Joe and his driver: ‘There goes my man. Doesn’t he look miserable? ’

I wasn’t miserable, I was just being me. All the same, Freddie said he’d been tempted to turn back and cheer me up.

The next day I was back at work at the Savoy and my life carried on as before, totally without incident. Then, on the Friday I got a call in the barber’s shop from someone in the ‘Queen Office’, saying Freddie was expecting me to go to Germany that night to be with him. His chauffeur was being sent to pick me up from the Savoy after work to drive me to Heathrow. I panicked. I was completely broke.

‘Sorry, ’ I said apologising to the stranger at the other end. ‘I can’t afford it. I can’t afford fares like this. ’

‘You don’t have to worry about that, ’ came the response. ‘Your ticket has already been paid for. ’

That night, after I had locked up the barber’s shop at the Savoy, Freddie’s chauffeur handed me a Lufthansa air ticket and I was soon flying off to Munich.

The flight was pretty special. It was the first time I’d ever travelled first-class and I had the compartment to myself, with four young attendants waiting on my every whim.

My feelings about the weekend were rather mixed. Although I was thrilled that he’d bought me a ticket I was a bit annoyed with him because I always like to pay my own way and remain under no obligation to anyone. For the first time I couldn’t afford to be independent. I was a hairdresser on £ 70 a week.

When the plane touched down at Munich Airport, Freddie was waiting. He was with Joe and Barbara Valentin, a German actress who in her day had been Germany’s answer to Brigitte Bardot and was now a cult heroine because of her work with the fashionable German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Freddie grabbed and hugged me. Such open affection embarrassed me dreadfully. That day the British tabloid press missed a fabulous photograph to throw over their front pages, but Freddie didn’t care who saw him throw his arms around me. He felt that in Germany people were more tolerant and certainly no one at the airport batted an eyelid.

From the airport we drove the half-hour journey through the darkness to Freddie’s apartment. As soon as we arrived he jumped on top of me. He hardly gave me time to put down my overnight bag before we made love and we continued for half an hour or so. I would learn that he was very impulsive about sex which, fortunately, we both enjoyed thoroughly. When he got the urge for sex there was no stopping it – he wanted it at once. He was a very sexy man and I think I partly fell in love, much to my own surprise, with his amazingly slender body. His waist was just twenty-eight inches. The sex we had was raunchy but very gentle – nothing too acrobatic. Freddie could be either active or passive, but tended to be the latter throughout our relationship; it depended on the time of month! I think Freddie thought of it as making love in those early days, but I don’t think it would be called lovemaking until some time later. For the time being it was just steamy sex.

When we re-emerged from the bedroom, Freddie showed me the rest of his flat. It had two bedrooms and was on the third floor of a four-storey block. It was bright and spacious, and sparsely but tastefully furnished. The dinner table sparkled, laid ready for supper. Before long Freddie’s guests arrived, mainly English-speaking German friends. After supper we left for the gay bars in Munich’s bohemian ‘Bermuda Triangle’ district. And finally we ended up in a wonderful club, New York New York.

Freddie was the club’s regular star and one corner was exclusively reserved for him and his inner circle, who were reverently referred to as ‘The Family’. Freddie had been at the cocaine again and by New York New York he had caught his second wind. As soon as I had had a few drinks and became a bit merry, I grabbed him and recklessly headed off to the dance floor.

That night Freddie made a great fuss of me and showed me off to his friends. I was surprised to discover that I lapped it all up. Doors had been opened for me to a completely new world.

Despite the late night, I woke up early on the Saturday morning and left Freddie sleeping. I went into the kitchen, made myself a cup of coffee and gazed out of the bedroom window. Eventually the flat started to stir. Freddie got up in the middle of the morning and Joe went out to buy some provisions. For the first time on that trip Freddie and I were together, alone. We cuddled on the sofa, talking about anything which came into our heads. Before we knew it, the day had flown by.

After supper, we ventured out to the pubs and clubs. I discovered that I had become known as the mystery man on Freddie Mercury’s arm. Most of Munich’s gay society were wondering who the hell I was. Freddie would only introduce me as ‘My new man’. We laughed and danced all night before falling back into bed.

The next day, Sunday, I had to leave for London at the end of the afternoon. I was very sorry to say goodbye to Freddie. As a friend drove me to the airport, I started getting myself ready to return to my quiet, modest life in Sutton and devote myself to the daily routine of the Savoy barber’s shop. I was thrilled about the weekend with Freddie but didn’t dare tell a soul where I’d been. I simply carried on with the haircuts ahead of me, happy inside to have found Freddie.

I wrote to thank him for the wonderful weekend and included a picture of a big ginger tom cat called Spock I used to have. I was thrilled when Freddie rang during the week.

The next weekend I was back on my own in London. On Saturday night I headed back to the Market Tavern for a few beers. On Sunday I treated myself to a lie-in, then tackled Mrs Taverner’s garden, which I enjoyed. Gardening has always been a joy for me and I could dig and prune all day.

One of the lines from Freddie’s song ‘I Was Born to Love You’ was: ‘It’s so hard to believe this is happening to me, an amazing feeling coming through. ’ That summed up just how I felt about my affair with Freddie. The next time I saw Freddie was when he invited me to watch the making of the video for that very song at a studio in the East End of London. In the video, two Dutch dancers were doing a sultry bar-room routine of a Frenchman and his sexy partner. Late into the evening disaster struck. The Frenchman threw his girl across the stage but she slipped and smashed her head. Freddie stopped everything and took her to hospital, where he waited in the corridor while she was examined. Even though it was late at night, Freddie’s visit caused a stir and soon he was signing autographs for excited young nurses and insomniac elderly patients.

The following Friday an air ticket was again waiting to fly me to Munich for the weekend and, very nearly, my first fight with Freddie. This time I declined his generous offer of a chauffeur to drive me to Heathrow. It all seemed a bit daft: he had to drive from West London to the West End then back out to Heathrow. I got the Tube instead. Again I was flying first-class.

Joe met me at the airport, but Freddie wasn’t with him. Joe said he had some long-standing engagement. Joe usually knew every single move Freddie made – he was told everything – but that night he said he didn’t have a clue where Freddie was. He wasn’t even sure that Freddie would be home that night.

On Freddie’s instructions, Joe took me to the Bermuda Triangle bars and we ended up again in New York New York. When he decided he’d had enough and wanted to go home, I still wanted to stay. So he left me in the capable hands of another ‘Family’ member, a fellow Irishman called Patrick. When New York New York closed I went to Patrick’s flat for a drink and then he walked me back to Freddie’s. Freddie had made it home by then and, I thought, was sound asleep. I quietly undressed, got into bed and cuddled up.

‘Where have you been to at this hour in the morning? ’ he snapped.

‘Out with Patrick, ’ I answered.

He remained silent all night. The following morning we didn’t say a word to each other for hours. Finally, Freddie broke the ice and apologised for not having been at the airport when I arrived.

I’m not sure why, but I had the distinct impression that Freddie had another boyfriend in the city somewhere. I thought back to my arrival a fortnight earlier and realised why Freddie probably wanted me there so desperately. I was just part of a game between lovers. He wanted to flaunt me so that his boyfriend would see or hear of me and be jealous. Freddie had managed it all very successfully.

Again that night Freddie and the Family ended up in New York New York. There I caught a glimpse of the opposition. A German boy was pointed out to me by Barbara as Freddie’s lover. He was quite different from me in many ways. Freddie liked his boyfriends fairly big; you could say he was a bit of a ‘chubby chaser’. Although this guy, called Winnie Kirkenberger, was fairly plump – perhaps because he owned a restaurant – and like me he had dark hair and moustache, unlike me he looked very aggressive.

Whenever Winnie appeared Freddie made a big fuss of me, while the dark German shot me piercing glances. Back home with Freddie that night I was tempted to tell him I wasn’t prepared to be a pawn in his game. But, as we got into bed, I decided to say nothing.

The next day, Sunday, we pottered around the flat, cuddling on the sofa and watching telly. Then I flew home and, over the next fortnight, wrote to Freddie a number of times. He was now a large part of my life.

The next weekend Freddie came back to London and introduced me for the first time to Mary Austin, a petite woman with shoulder-length fair hair, blue eyes and a fair complexion. Mary was reserved but very welcoming when we met. She worked as company secretary of Freddie’s private company, Goose Productions, which managed all Freddie’s personal affairs and paid his staff. Mary lived and worked about a hundred yards away in a flat owned either by Freddie or by his company.

The following weekend, now well into a routine, I flew to Germany. A car met me and when I got to the flat Freddie was waiting to greet me. Then he slapped me in the eye: he said he was going with Winnie, out of Munich, up in the ‘Hills of Bavaria’ – and off he went. He didn’t come home at all that night. I didn’t let any of this upset me. Perhaps I was a little naive. I hoped the two of them were just tying up the loose ends of their failed love affair.

The next morning the phone rang and it was Freddie, inviting me and Joe to meet him at Winnie’s place above his restaurant. We strolled through the city to Winnie’s flat and let ourselves in. Freddie breezed by and trilled: ‘Right, let’s go. ’

We strolled back the way we had come and dived into a pet shop where we fell in love with the kittens. Freddie bought tins and tins of cat food, in flavours you couldn’t buy in London, as well as little toys for his beloved Tiffany and Oscar.

When we came out of the shop it happened. As we were crossing the main street, Freddie leaped up into my arms. If I hadn’t caught him he’d have crashed to the ground. He smothered me in wet kisses, and I was so embarrassed that I dropped him and ran off. He made a few more runs at me before he left me alone. I couldn’t handle this sort of thing in public, so I kept well ahead of him.

We went back to the flat and Freddie was desperate to jump into bed for sex. His drive was amazing. Then we flaked out on the sofa, watching television. It was something we did an awful lot in our time together alone. On the sofa Freddie and I usually sat side by side. Sometimes he’d lie one way and me the other, and I’d massage his feet. He adored that. We rarely drank anything stronger than water or tea in the daytime, though we quickly made amends each evening.

Freddie loved old black-and-white movies and the early Technicolor classics – stuff from the Bette Davis era. He also liked old comedies, such as Some Like It Hot and The Women. But his favourite was the Marx Brothers; he was a great fan of theirs, as the titles of the two Queen albums, A Day at the Races and A Night at the Opera, prove. In fact, the band had to seek permission from Groucho Marx to use the titles. Freddie told me his response had been warm-hearted and, as you’d expect, very witty. He replied: ‘I am very pleased you have named one of your albums after my film and that you are being successful. I would be very happy for you to call your next one after my latest film, The Greatest Hits of the Rolling Stones! ’

The following weekend, back at Stafford Terrace, Freddie was to reveal an unlikely secret. After breakfast on Sunday, several of his friends arrived – including Trevor ‘BB’ Clarke, a caterer; an artist called Rudi Patterson; and Mary Austin with Joe Bert, her musician boyfriend, formerly with Tom Robinson’s band Sector 27.

‘We’re going for a walk, ’ Freddie announced to us. It was gloriously sunny and we strolled for about twenty minutes – about half a mile – until we came to a gate in a long wall. Freddie unlocked it and led us through into a magical secret garden.

Garden Lodge, 1 Logan Place, is a large Georgian house set inside a large, mature English garden behind high brick walls.

Freddie had bought the place at the end of the seventies from the Hoare banking family – hence its nickname under Freddie’s ownership: the Hoare House. He had gutted it, totally renovating and redecorating it just the way he wanted. That Sunday the last of the builders and decorators were about to move out; the place was almost ready for Freddie to move into.

The front door of Garden Lodge leads into a large, light hallway with an elegant wide staircase. To the left and right, double doors lead to two spectacularly spacious rooms, parquet-floored with expansive windows gazing out over the garden. The room to the right was the most magnificent, a massive space with a minstrels’ gallery and tall windows. It had once been an artist’s studio, hence the windows. Behind this room were the kitchen and dining room.

Upstairs, several rooms had been knocked into one to give Freddie a large master bedroom suite. From the landing you first entered a dressing room with a large plaster dome. On either side was a bathroom, each finished in Italian marble with gold fittings. The room on the left, decorated in veined white, grey and pink marble, boasted a jacuzzi bath big enough for three. The sleek bathroom on the right was decorated in black panels. Ahead were the large sliding double doors, which always remained open, leading to the bedroom. The walls were in a pinkish cream colour moire – water-marked fabric. Straight ahead were large windows opening on to a long balcony, and to the right a window which looked straight on to the garden. Freddie’s Queen-size bed was to the left of the room.

The jewel of the house was undoubtedly the garden, which made the house totally private. We spent most of that first visit outside, sitting on a small mound, soaking up the sun and larking around.

Freddie had mentioned Garden Lodge in passing, but the house was far more magnificent than I’d expected. But at that time, however beautiful the London house, Freddie still thought of Germany as his main home.

Freddie would work on Queen albums in both London and Munich, and it was during one of what were to be many sessions that I met the members of the band for the first time: guitarist Brian May, drummer Roger Taylor and bassist John Deacon. They were immediately very friendly and struck me as down-to-earth. Roger had run a stall at Kensington Market with Freddie years earlier and they were clearly soulmates; they’d often sit together, giggling. Brian was very intellectual and meticulous about his music. But it was John Deacon I took to most. He was the silent member of the group – remarkably modest, quiet and unassuming. He and Freddie were the most closely involved in the business side of Queen when they started out, and John had doubled as the band’s accountant. Later, their success wildly escalated the demands of the job. His running gag was: ‘I’m only the bass player. ’

The next big event was Freddie releasing his new solo single, ‘Made in Heaven’. The video for the track was an incredible production, with a Dante’s Inferno theme boasting a 60-foot rotating globe, apocalyptic fires, raging storms and a ton of extras.

Freddie invited me to visit the set after work, but I didn’t reckon on the reception I’d get. I went up to the security guy on the studio gate and asked for Freddie’s trailer. He pointed it out and I ambled over.

When I opened the door, Freddie was very jumpy. ‘How did you get here? ’ he snapped. Then he flew into a rage, insisting that security had to be made much tighter.

When he calmed down, he told me why he was so jittery. Some time before, a man had broken into Freddie’s flat and tried on all of his clothes. He had been caught by the police and put behind bars, but the incident had upset Freddie enormously.

The morning of the video shoot Freddie learned that the man had escaped from prison; his girlfriend had alerted the police that her man was out, armed, dangerous and probably looking for Freddie Mercury. The police were taking the threat so seriously that they had sealed off both entrances to his house in Stafford Terrace. After a while the drama passed; the poor man was caught by the police and put back in prison where he belonged.

Filming the video lasted late into the night, and when we got back to Freddie’s flat around five in the morning a couple of policemen were waiting for us. They said they wanted to make sure Freddie was feeling all right after his ordeal, and they stayed and joked for a while.

And Freddie joked back.

He pointed to a little antique Japanese lacquered box.

‘I suppose you’re wondering what’s in that box, aren’t you? ’ he said. ‘It’s my drugs! ’

They burst out laughing.

After they’d gone, by which time it was about six, Freddie said to me: ‘You go and have an hour’s lie-down. I’ll wake you for work, don’t worry. ’

An hour later Freddie woke me, softly, saying: ‘You’d better be getting off to work, darling. I’ve run the bath. ’

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