Freddie Mercury: The Biography (28 page)

‘We’d left the studio late one night and gone home,’ he says, ‘when in the early hours Freddie rang me, very excited. He told
me he had had a call from Spain that Montserrat Caballé wanted to meet him, and we were going over to Barcelona on Saturday.
A little sleepy I sat up and asked suspiciously, “What do you mean
we’re
going to Barcelona?” He replied, “Well, I’m not fucking going by myself!”’

According to Moran, the prospect of meeting Montserrat Caballé terrified Mercury. ‘He got himself worked into a
right state,’ he says, ‘and was rushing about panicking. He kept saying, “First I’ll have to work out what samples of my work
to take along. What can I take?” I grabbed hold of him and said, “Freddie. You’re famous! You don’t need samples of your work,”
but he insisted that he did. Eventually he said, “I’ll play her this thing,” which was the B-side to “The Great Pretender”.’

The assignation took place at the Ritz Hotel in Barcelona. ‘We got there first,’ Moran recalls, ‘and Freddie was still fussing
like a mother hen. He wanted the sound system set so that all he had to do was press a button. We waited, and then Montserrat
swept in with an entire retinue behind her. The hotel staff were bowing and scraping, almost walking backwards before her,
which made Freddie even more nervy – but she was really good fun and everyone, except Freddie, loosened up the more the champagne
flowed.

‘All of a sudden, at a break in the chatter, Freddie burst out to Montserrat, “Well, can I play you this then?” The thing
is she got the wrong end of the stick, because he somehow introduced the track by saying, “This is me, pretending to be you,”
and he played “Exercises in Free Love”. She listened carefully, glancing quizzically at Freddie, and a few of us thought,
what’s she making of this? Then when the track finished she asked, “You wrote this for me?” Freddie had now realised his mistake
but made matters worse by saying, “If you want, you can have it.” He turned and asked me, “That’s OK, isn’t it?”’

Confusion aside, the reality was that Montserrat Caballé liked the track very much. ‘She’s this grand diva, and here she was
suddenly announcing, “I’m performing at Covent Garden next week. I will perform this number and you” – she pointed at me –
“will accompany me.” And sure enough, in less than a week, we did it at Covent Garden. Freddie was more nervous on that occasion
than at anything I’d ever seen, and he wasn’t even performing.’

Moran reveals that ‘Before a gig you could never talk to Freddie. He would be so uptight and want to be alone. He’d bawl out
anyone who intruded on him at this time. But at Covent Garden he was so nervous for me that he suddenly burst into my dressing
room as I was getting ready and began flapping about, talking ten to the dozen. Eventually I snapped, “For fuck sake, Freddie,
go away and leave me alone. You’re doing the same to me that you hate people to do to you!” It was nice, all the same, that
he was thinking of me.

‘Montserrat had asked Freddie where he would like her to place “Exercises in Free Love” in her programme, and he hadn’t liked
to suggest. She kept at him, though, and eventually he said, “Why don’t you do it for an encore?” And she replied, “Which
one? I usually have eight.” Freddie just gaped at her.’

Pino Sagliocco had also attended the meeting in the Barcelona Ritz, and he recalls that by the end of the night there was
a chemistry between the two stars. After that Covent Garden performance, Caballé accompanied Freddie back for dinner at Garden
Lodge. ‘Later the three of us grouped around the piano,’ says Moran, ‘as Freddie tried to teach Montserrat to sing gospel,
which was a bit painful, but they became very good friends, and her parting shot was, “Do me a favour? I really enjoyed this.
Would you and Mike write me a piece about Barcelona?” Freddie replied, “Oh, of course,” and promptly forgot all about it.’

Soon after his glib promise to Montsy, as Mercury nicknamed the opera star, around that Eastertime he received some traumatic
news. In the hope of allaying his mounting anxieties he had again undergone medical tests, one of which involved the removal
of a small piece of skin from his shoulder. When the results had come back, he learnt from his doctors that he had AIDS.

The implications were horrendous and hard to absorb. Mercury confided in very few people, and it seems likely that
only Mary Austin and Jim Hutton knew at this early stage. Following consultations with the best available specialists, his
treatment began straight away. Mercury told Hutton that he would understand if he wanted to leave him, but his lover opted
to stay – and it was only at this point that they began to practise safe sex. Considering the growing awareness of the disease
over the previous years – and the acute anxieties brought on by the deaths of two former lovers – it seems almost criminal
that Mercury had not thought it essential before this point to use condoms. It was too late for the star now, but it was to
be hoped that that was not the case for his lover.

It must have taken an act of incredible willpower to show an untroubled face to the rest of the world, to those people close
to him personally and professionally. But that’s precisely what he did. Although secretly undergoing a battery of further
tests, Mercury understandably wasn’t ready to deal with such a harsh reality. He fell back on an ability he had cultivated
as a child to conquer fear and block out emotional pain: initially he denied that anything was wrong. To do this he tried
never to refer directly to AIDS again. He just got on with his life, throwing himself into a whirl of activity. Perhaps in
that sense it was fortunate that Montserrat Caballé, oblivious of any problem, had been bringing some pressure to bear on
him.

‘She had been calling Freddie from all corners of the world,’ says Mike Moran, ‘asking how he was getting on with the song
he had promised her. Freddie eventually came to me and said, “Fuck sake! We’ll have to write this bloody song!” So we sat
down and in pretty short order co-wrote “Barcelona”. To let her hear it, Freddie recorded both parts, and we sent her a rough
tape of it. She got back to us instantly, saying she loved it.

‘Opera stars are booked about five years in advance, but because time was so short she cancelled a huge engagement – I think
it was at La Scala – and whizzed over to London to stick
her voice on “Barcelona”. It was all recorded in London, except for when I went to Spain to get her vocals on the B-side,
“Exercises in Free Love”.’

Before long Montserrat Caballé had visions of them recording an album together. According to Moran, ‘Freddie and I both thought,
Oh, my God! And I just knew it wasn’t going to be an easy thing either to combine those two. We had originally, don’t forget,
been going to work on a Freddie Mercury solo album, but this took up so much time. And then there were two Queen albums in
the offing,
Innuendo
being the last one – by which time Freddie was very poorly. And so we never got to do his intended solo album.’

Work began on the Mercury/Caballé album in April. Pino Sagliocco’s Ibiza ’92 festival was due to open with the TV special
at the Ku Club the following month, at which Mercury and Montsy were to headline. But before that, in early May, Freddie was
defeated again, this time when his former personal assistant Paul Prenter sold his story to the
Sun.

Prenter claimed that Mercury had recently rung him, panicked that he might have contracted AIDS. Prenter made other lurid
revelations about the star during his wild days, including how he would drink two bottles of vodka a night and had shared
lines of cocaine with a handful of other named superstars. He also blew Jim Hutton’s cover by naming him as Mercury’s current
lover. Friends later swore that Prenter had always been a shifty character, who had spent years ripping off the star for money
and drugs.

Prenter was said to have been paid £32,000 by the tabloid to dish the dirt, and for that he had thrown in private photographs
of a lasciviously grinning Mercury, entwined with a variety of previous male lovers. It was a three-day serialisation and
aimed at inflicting maximum damage on his former employer. While Mercury, already struggling to hide from the truth of his
illness, was devastated, his friends were furious; made more so by what
they saw as not only Prenter’s gross disloyalty but also his ingratitude.

The previous year Prenter had been made redundant after eight years in the star’s employ. Afterwards, when he had almost immediately
fallen on hard times, Mercury had let him stay rent free at his Kensington flat. It was there that he alleged he had received
a frantic call from his ex-boss in the early hours of one morning, during which, he claimed, Mercury unburdened his fears.

Freddie Mercury had a reputation among friends for having a very forgiving nature. Presumably hoping to play on this, Paul
Prenter tried ringing him at Garden Lodge in the midst of the exposé. But this time Mercury refused his calls and never spoke
to the man again. Deeply hurt and very fragile, he left Britain and headed straight for the sanctuary of Pikes Hotel. The
Ibiza ’92 festival was due to kick off soon anyway, but he needed the peace and security that he could be sure of finding
there – even with a
Sun
photographer hot on his trail.

Roughly two weeks later, as Pino Sagliocco had dreamt, Mercury and Montserrat Caballé headlined at the Ku Club. Spandau Ballet,
Duran Duran and Marillion also took part in the TV special. The opera singer and the rock star closed the show together by
performing ‘Barcelona’ against a stunning backdrop of fountains and fireworks.

But behind the pizzazz lay a sad reality. Fish clearly recalls how shocked he felt when he came across Mercury here. ‘I thought
I’d go see him,’ he says, ‘and say “How ya doin’?” you know, and he was, like, really drawn. There were about three or four
close friends in the dressing room with him, and it was like someone had fuckin’ died! I thought, Something really heavy is
going down here, and I’m not part of it. So I got out of there fast.

‘At the time the people around him were saying things like, he’s got a kidney complaint or a liver problem – stuff like that.
But having glimpsed some of Freddie’s excesses, it wasn’t so hard to put two and two together.’

For those close to Mercury, there wasn’t a lot of guesswork required. The signs of his illness had begun rapidly to show with
the usual development of Kaposi’s sarcoma, or KS, an otherwise rare cancer. It resulted in large dark red marks surfacing
on the skin of his hands and face. Treatment for these early telltale marks is to neutralise them with special lasers. They
fade, but slowly, and usually leave blemishes, which are best covered by make-up; in itself a giveaway sign. At the Ku Club
Mercury had not been able fully to disguise these marks; something that Barbara Valentin remembers only too well.

‘Freddie and I never spoke about his HIV and AIDS, but he knew that I knew,’ Valentin says. ‘It was in our eyes whenever we
looked at each other and was a silent understanding between us. When I joined him in Ibiza for this TV special, I saw straight
away that he had not been able to hide the marks on his face properly – and so, before he and Montserrat performed, I said
nothing but took Freddie away with me to another room and used my heavy professional make-up on him to make him look better.’

But Barbara Valentin’s help had come a little late. Says Pino Sagliocco, ‘There was an incredible party afterwards, and everyone
had a good time, but I think we already knew then that Freddie was sick. He was not telling anyone anything, but as soon as
he arrived we saw that he had begun to get these strange blemishes on his face. We were told it was his liver, and, of course,
he did drink too much – but all those spots?’

Tony Pike also harboured unspoken fears. ‘By this time,’ he says, ‘rumours had begun circulating that Freddie had AIDS – but
then you don’t ask a friend if he is terminally ill, and no one ever spoke about it. It was just not discussed. Those around
him would have categorically denied it anyway.’

Once home, Mercury had writing and recording commitments with Mike Moran ahead of him for his album with Montserrat Caballé,
and there was a Queen album looming, too, after their year apart. Possibly hastened by the recent press revelations, Hutton
had recently left his job at the Savoy Hotel and officially become the gardener at Garden Lodge. During August Barbara Valentin
paid Mercury a welcome visit, but soon after that he began withdrawing more and more into himself. Around this time, as his
treatment stepped up, Mercury was upset when his precious koi carp began dying off for no apparent reason. He made up for
it by acquiring yet more kittens.

But for all his attempts to hide from the truth, Mercury must have agonised a million times about how he was going to cope
when his illness worsened. Yet he refused to crumble. He certainly had no plans to avoid celebrating his coming birthday in
style. To host this party he chose to return to Pikes. Tony Pike was happy to accommodate him, but things almost went awry,
as Pike recalls.

‘Freddie’s forty-first was originally going to be arranged in conjunction with Elton John’s manager John Reid. That was until
he and Jim Beach had a massive argument. Beach had been four hours late for their rendezvous, through no fault of his own
– he and his family had been caught in a terrible storm at sea – but Reid, unaware of the circumstances, was fuming at being
delayed so long. As a result, he promptly cancelled the party. When Freddie found out he called me and said he wanted a do
regardless – just something for a hundred people instead of the previous two hundred and fifty – which, from a business point
of view, was rather disappointing.

‘The story of the bash being called off had somehow appeared in an English newspaper, and when Freddie read it he was incensed.
He told me that he wanted the biggest party the island had ever seen, and I said, “But, Freddie, there are only four days
to go.” He replied, “I know you can do it.”’