Mercury: An Intimate Biography of Freddie Mercury (35 page)

“When Hayter had a party, you did your best to get in,” recalls Dave Hogan. “Freddie, Kenny Everett, the cream of London’s gay mafia would be there. You’d witness wonderful scenes, and go along with all of it, but you were only there to enjoy it. You knew you’d never take a picture and get out alive.”

The Embassy was the prototype for Jeremy Norman’s even more ambitious project: a nightspot catering almost exclusively to the needs of gay men. Situated off Trafalgar Square beneath Charing Cross station, Heaven occupied 21,000 square feet under the arches. As one of the world’s first openly gay clubs when it launched in 1979, it made headlines and the gay clubbing scene acceptable.

Freddie adored the place, and he and his entourage were frequent visitors.

“For gay men, the dance floor was truly a place of liberation,” remembered Jeremy Norman, who later revealed all in his memoir
No Make-Up: Straight Tales from a Queer Life
. [It was] a place where we could feel free to express our sexuality and the unity of our tribe. The dance club was, in a sense, our cathedral.”

It was also, in many cases, their Waterloo. While Norman, who would found two AIDS charities, by no means stands accused of having brought the disease to Britain, there is no question that his club had a fatal attraction.

Paul Gambaccini remembers with chilling clarity the night in 1984 when he realized that Freddie was going to die.

“I was standing in a particular spot in Heaven with him, and I asked him if he had altered his behavior in the light of recent developments,” Paul says. “And with that characteristic flash of the arms, he said, ‘Darling, my attitude is, fuck it. I’m doing everything with everybody.’

“I had that literal sinking feeling. I’d seen enough in New York to know that Freddie was going to die. There are too many ghosts for me to pretend that Heaven can ever be a carefree environment.”

Whether or not Freddie was taking precautions now that he was aware of AIDS, to ensure that other people didn’t die, even if he was prepared to, Paul was not prepared to speculate.

“With infection to disease taking an average of ten years, Freddie would have been infected before the disease was known,” Paul explains.

“Which puts him in the category of having been horribly and unfairly exposed. This was a brief period in history between syphilis and AIDS, when people could not die from having sex. All forms of sex were being tried out, whether through enjoyment or experimentation. There
was
no stigma then. In the music business, especially, everything went. No one was judgmental. Then suddenly, you could kill someone by having sex with them. So everyone became morally responsible. And there were consequences.

“With Freddie, I’m assuming he knew, and must have reconciled himself to it . . . I also think he thought that somehow he would beat it. He was still healthy enough in 1983 [by which time, in New York, the disease had become an epidemic] to carry on. But when the time for Live Aid came [July 1985], his doctor actually recommended that he should not perform, because he had a bad throat infection. I thought, at the time, Is this the beginning?”

The fact that Freddie was at that point picking up and having sex with dozens of men each week, while openly flaunting his relationship with Barbara Valentin, suggests that he had come to regard himself as bisexual rather than gay. But, counters Paul, “Remember that the concept of homosexuality only came about in the 1860s, when a German psychologist invented the word
homosexual
. The sexual spectrum is broad. Between the two extremes, there are a lot of people who make love to both sexes. For those going outside their majority activity, as it appears that Freddie did with Barbara, there is usually a great emotional contact. I don’t see any contradiction between the statements that, in
the course of his life, Freddie would have had sex with more men than women—which I believe is probably true—but that in the end he would recall his love for Mary. These are not contradictory positions. It just means that she was one of his exceptions to the rule. It means that emotion came into play as well as lust. I’m not saying that Freddie did not love some of the men he loved, but she could easily have held a special position in his heart.”

Freddie betrayed both Barbara and Winnie, if that were possible, when he hit on Jim Hutton in Heaven one night in 1985. He couldn’t resist. The pair had met two years earlier, at the Copacabana, a gay bar near Freddie’s home. Jim was in a relationship at the time, so the encounter had not gone further. This time, the humble barber was single and raring to go. Freddie was immediately attracted by Jim’s lustrous dark hair and thick moustache. The likeness between him and Freddie’s German lover Winnie Kirchberger was striking. Taken aback by Freddie’s chat-up line—“How big’s your dick?”—Jim was persuaded to join Freddie’s gang, which included Peter Straker and Joe Fanelli. He spent the rest of the night dancing with Freddie before returning with him at dawn to the singer’s Kensington flat. After which, Jim heard nothing from Freddie for the next three months—Freddie was still living as a tax exile in Munich and had been on the road with Queen, performing in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.

When the encounter was all but forgotten, Freddie phoned Jim out of the blue to invite him to a dinner party at his place. When he arrived, Jim was astonished to see Peter Freestone. The pair had once worked together at Selfridges store on London’s Oxford Street. Neither had imagined they would meet again thanks to Freddie Mercury.

Jim, who died of lung cancer on New Year’s Day, 2010, three days short of his sixty-first birthday, was the least likely of Freddie’s partners. Prior to their meeting, Jim, one of ten children born to an Irish Catholic baker and raised in a tiny two-bedroom council house, worked as a £70-a-week barber at the Savoy Hotel. Freddie, according to Jim, was “sensitive, shy, had terrible mood swings, and always wanted his own
way. Whereas I’m quiet and don’t have much of a character—unless you want to pour a few gallons of beer down my throat.”

For Jim, it was smitten at first sight: “I fell in love with so much about him,” he told me, “regardless of what he did for a living. He had big brown eyes and an almost childlike personality. He was not like the men I usually fell for. I normally fancied big guys with stocky legs. Freddie had this waspish figure, and the thinnest legs I’d ever seen on a man. He also seemed totally sincere. He was lovely. I was hooked. For all his achievements, he seemed remarkably insecure to me,” said Jim, contradicting Barbara’s impression of Freddie, and proving what his closest friends had long suspected: that Freddie revealed different aspects of himself to different people, but never his whole self. His modus operandi in personal relationships indicated a lack of confidence in the ability of any individual to fulfill all his needs. By the same token, Freddie himself could never give a single partner everything. It could explain why his closest and longest-lasting partnerships were with people not his equal in terms of breeding, status, or wealth. With those who were “less” than him, Freddie could call the shots. He would always come first.

The couple embarked on a love affair which, thanks to Freddie’s imposed absences, demanded a regular routine. Freddie would fly back to London one weekend, Jim out to Munich the next. On Jim’s first visit, he found Freddie, Joe Fanelli, and Barbara Valentin waiting at the airport to greet him. He hardly knew what to make of it. When he realized that Freddie was only using him to make Winnie Kirchberger jealous, which was blatantly the case at first, he was desperately upset.

“Jim was a puppet on a string,” declared Barbara. “Freddie treated him quite badly during that time. He’d bring him over from London, then send him home again, sometimes all in one day. I heard many sad stories during that time. Jim would cry very often. I’d say to him, ‘Just resist. Say no for once. Don’t let yourself be used.’ ‘Yes,’ Jim would say, ‘Yes, but I love him.’ For that, he was shoved around like a monkey. He’d do anything Freddie said. It was always on Freddie’s terms, and
Jim came running, every time. It was quite pathetic. Freddie was often mean.”

The relationship was deeper and more meaningful than it appeared to almost everybody else—even though it was Mary, not Jim, who accompanied Freddie to celebrity events and public gatherings, and who would be paraded as “the widow” in the end. Peter Freestone, who had observed all Freddie’s affairs at close range, did accept the affair as the real thing.

“I believe Jim and Freddie did love each other—in their own way,” he told me. “The book that Jim wrote about their relationship is to some extent idealized. Jim wanted a one-to-one happy relationship with someone. But I don’t think he could ever appreciate how much more there was than a relationship to Freddie’s life, and later on to his home life, at Garden Lodge. Freddie had his life, and it was a big, extravagant, multifaceted life. Everybody knew that you had to adapt to Freddie’s life. He was never going to adapt to yours. Part of their problem was that Jim was too stubborn to accept that. Consequently, their relationship was very
Upstairs, Downstairs
. Jim wanted Freddie to come downstairs, but Freddie wanted Jim to come upstairs. Having said that, Freddie would certainly not have had such good years at the end without Jim. Overall, Jim was right for Freddie at that time in his life. He meant a great deal more to Freddie than a lot of people have suggested.”

With Garden Lodge finally ready to move into, and his period as a tax exile almost up, it was Jim, not Barbara, whom Freddie chose to bring home as his live-in lover when it was time to return. Although Jim talked about their “eight-year relationship,” they were a couple for six years. Even so, this suggests that Jim meant more to Freddie than devastated Barbara wanted to believe.

“Jim had nothing to say,” she scoffed. “When they went back to Garden Lodge, he was good for Freddie’s cats and the fish and for the garden, that was it. Freddie would sometimes really lose his temper with frustration over the whole thing. Once, when I was staying at the house, Freddie went completely crazy and rushed into the garden. He
tore up all the tulips Jim had planted and threw them around on the ground. I said to him, ‘What are you
doing
? Poor plants!’ Freddie said, ‘I
hate
him, this asshole.’ He said that Jim was good for nothing, more than once.”

Yet there was clearly something between Freddie and Jim that other lovers could not provide—not even Mary. Even Barbara conceded this.

“We often thought of Jim as no more than a servant, really. But in one way, I know that Freddie loved him. He kicked Jim around, but then some people need a kick in the ass. They thank you for it. In the end, it was good that he was there. Six years together—that’s quite a time. Freddie moved back to London, and Jim stayed with him until the end. Thank God, in a way.”

America, meanwhile, was in the grip of an AIDS epidemic of catastrophic proportions; it would soon be the scourge of the world. Most of the victims were young, sexually active gay males, suffering from HIV-defined illnesses: weight loss, lesions, swollen lymph glands, herpes, cryptococcal meningitis and toxoplasmosis, characterized by jaundice, enlarged liver and spleen, and convulsions. Cellular immunodeficiencies were on the increase. New manifestations of immune disorders, including exhaustion, shingles, and night sweats, were appearing all the time. Candidiasis (thrush) in the throat was on the increase, in some cases the yeast infection so advanced that the victim could hardly breathe. Paranoia, forgetfulness, and disorientation were complained of. Of all cases of AIDS reported throughout the States, the New York City area accounted for half. A quarter of a century later, the disease is pandemic. There is no known vaccine or cure.

It was Barbara who first noticed in Munich that Freddie’s health was failing.

“It started with little things,” she told me. “You couldn’t really say that Freddie was losing his appetite, as he never had much of one to begin with. ‘I eat like a bird and shit like a bird,’ he’d say. His favorite food was caviar with mashed potato, and these little cheese crackers his mother used to send him. He liked Italian, Indian, and Chinese food,
but never ate much of it. He’d always wash everything down with Stolichnaya vodka.

“Freddie started getting sick for no apparent reason,” she said. “Once, when he was taken ill in my apartment and I didn’t know what to do, I called my gynecologist, whom I trusted as a friend. He came right over, and found Freddie quite delirious. Suddenly he woke up in a terrible state. I said, ‘It’s OK, this is my gynecologist.’ ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it,’ said Freddie. ‘Am I pregnant?’ ”

It was around this time, she remembers, that Freddie began to bitch about the other members of the band, which she had never previously heard him do. Later came Freddie’s famous falling-out with his dear friend Peter Straker. Their relationship, which had lasted many years, was over in a flash and would never be restored.

“Straker was funny, he was a clown, he was good for Freddie because he kept his spirits up and made him laugh,” Barbara said. “But Straker was not settled. He drifted. He was always ‘living with friends.’ Eventually he got a flat in one of Jim Beach’s buildings in London. But the bathroom badly needed doing: new tiles, bath, sink, everything. Five times Freddie gave Peter the money to do up the bathroom. The work never got done. Eventually Freddie just lost his rag and banished Straker from his life for good. Straker never understood what he’d done. That kind of behavior became typical of Freddie. He would give and give, never counting the cost, but eventually one straw breaks the camel’s back.”

Perhaps the stress of knowing that he was seriously ill—despite the fact that he did not confess it, Barbara believed he was already aware, confirming Paul Gambaccini’s suspicions that Freddie knew what was coming back in 1983—was causing him to act in such an extreme manner. The day eventually came, said Barbara, when she could no longer ignore “the growth in Freddie’s gullet.”

“It would well up suddenly, in the back of his throat. We called it ‘the mushroom.’ It came and went, but after a while it never went away again. He said he felt as if he was rotting from the inside out. One night
I was lying in bed with Freddie and one of his boyfriends, and Freddie got a terrible coughing attack, which was what this thing used to do to him. He sat up to cough into some tissues, then leant over this guy to put the tissues in the bin. The guy woke up: ‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘I never thought I’d have a naked rock star dying on top of me in a bed!’ ”