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

  The following day, we got up and I was about to walk in to the sitting room without shoes on when Freddie called to me and told me to first put something on my feet and to be very careful; I was then to find out why. As I walked into the sitting room, the whole plasterboard wall to my left was a mess of jagged holes and the floor all around was strewn with broken glass from all the champagne and vodka bottles whether full or empty and most of the glasses which had been used for drinking.

  Dangerous broken glass was everywhere. This latest disaster was just another manifestation of Bill Reid’s ‘love’.

  How Freddie had survived without being hit by a flying bottle is anybody’s guess. None of the others could believe what they saw when they arrived and they urged Freddie yet again to get rid of the man. But Freddie still persisted in keeping him around. As far as Bill Reid seemed concerned, it was as though nothing whatsoever had happened and, to be fair, Freddie never appeared to bear a grudge over the incident. I think Freddie needed the physical manifestation of someone’s love and as far as Reid’s was concerned, this debacle appeared to Freddie to be proof of ‘love’. It was certainly what Freddie seemed to need.

  The tour reached its conclusion at the Forum, Inglewood in Los Angeles on September 14 and 15. Photos show Freddie with Michael Jackson, Olivia Newton-John and Donna Summer amongst other luminaries in the audiences. Between this triumphant end of the tour and September 25, the band flew back to New York as they were scheduled to appear on Saturday Night Live singing ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’. This date marked the end of the continental American tour. The entourage was due to move on. However, Saturday Night Live was very important. It was the first time the band had ever played what, at this point, was a very prestigious television show, watched nationwide by many millions of people.

  Once again, ‘love’ reared its violent head.

  Once again, the reason for the argument between Freddie and Bill Reid is forgotten in the mists of time but they were screaming at each other non-stop for many hours through the Friday night prior to the show. Were this an ordinary television show, there wouldn’t have been a problem as their performance would have been mimed to a backing track. But, as the name of the show describes, Queen’s was to be a live performance.

  When Freddie awoke on Saturday morning, he found he had simply screamed himself hoarse the night before. We had a run-through of the show that afternoon at which point Freddie just marked, simply going through the motions of a performance. The band played and he merely spoke his way through. I’d gone out earlier in the morning and found some Oil of Olbas. We spent the whole of the afternoon in one of the studio’s small bathrooms with the hot tap turned on full and the door shut tight to create as much steam as we could manage and I dripped as many drops of the oil as practicable to infuse the steam with healing efficacy. The electric kettle was boiling constantly to supply hot water for the continual hot honey and lemon drinks that I was making for Freddie. He spent the whole afternoon convinced that he would be unable to perform and felt as though he was letting the rest of the band down badly.

  This particular adrenalin boost had gone horribly awry.

  Every now and then after the run-through he would try a note and very slowly the voice started to come back. While he actually gave a brave performance, anyone who has seen it will notice that he is not on his best form. The top notes were just not there but ably filled in and augmented by Roger.

  Another person Freddie felt he might have been letting down was the then new super-talent of Jennifer Holliday. He had been informed that she was going to be in the audience that evening and he had seen her not long before in the stage show of Dream Girls. This came about very simply by me having heard the song ‘And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going’ on the radio, one day in London. I then found out where the song came from and I proceeded to get a tape copy. I was meeting Freddie that night and knew we would be going out. I took the tape along and lined up the song on the tape deck in his Rolls Royce. We were driving down Kensington Gore when I told him, “You have to listen to this. You’ll be stunned.”

  I told him nothing about the show but merely pressed Play. He was indeed stunned.

  It then came about when we were in New York that he found out where the show was playing and managed to get seats. It is one of the few shows that he and I went to together in New York and the only one where the whole audience was on its feet at the end of the first half and all this for a twenty-one-year-old newcomer. He met Jennifer Holliday just after the Saturday Night Live performance but couldn’t bring himself to stay talking too long because he felt that he hadn’t given a praiseworthy performance himself. I think this time Freddie realised that it was he who had bitten off more than he could chew as far as Bill Reid was concerned and somewhere, somehow he decided that enough was enough.

  That doesn’t mean it was the last we ever saw of Mr Reid.

  Freddie had already given him money to buy a car and so Freddie just asked Bill to come around to the apartment building to pick up what few belongings he had and take them away, which Bill did.

  A couple of days later, we had got back to Freddie’s apartment at the Sovereign Building at 425 East 58th Street from a night out on the town. It was fairly early – maybe four o’clock in the morning – when all of a sudden there was screaming and banging on the apartment door. You must realise that this is very unusual because of the concierge and security in the buildings’ foyers. These are not allowed to let anyone in without announcing callers to the tenants. I went to the door and by this time, the glass on the other side of the peephole in the door was smashed and I saw through the aperture that on the landing side was Bill, in a fury. He was screaming, “You’ll not get rid of me this easy. You’ll never get rid of me!”

  I called security who came and removed him. They were obviously extremely apologetic but they weren’t to know about the changes in Freddie’s domestic arrangements. Up until the time the apartment was sold, I don’t think the damage to the metal-faced door was ever properly repaired.

  Freddie left the apartment, never to return to it, not long after this incident. I think this was the straw that broke the camel’s back and finally put Freddie off New York. The apartment had been purchased because Freddie needed a base in America. He had been spending quite a lot of time there while recording, touring and enjoying himself and the other members of the band had homes in Los Angeles. There was never any doubt that if Freddie had a home in America it would be anywhere other than New York. He didn’t like the Los Angeles ‘feel’. Everything so laid back you almost fell over, not that Freddie was too averse to falling over.

  In New York he had a friend in Gerry Stickells’ wife, Sylvia. When he first thought of buying a place, she very kindly offered to have a look round at various properties for him. Up to this point, Freddie had spent all of his time in New York in various hotels, the first one I remember staying in was the Waldorf Astoria Towers. He then took up residence in the Berkshire Place Hotel on East 52nd Street. Another was the Helmsley Palace. After discussions with Jim Beach and John Libson, Freddie decided that he was spending far too much money staying in hotels and he would be a lot better off if he had his own place. It must be remembered that these hotels were costing him a thousand dollars a night and that was just for the beds for him and me.

  He lived otherwise on room service and we usually ate out at places like Shezan, the London restaurant in Cheval Place which had opened a New York outpost. Pearls, the Chinese restaurant in the early West Fifties, was another favourite. He said Pearl’s served the best Chinese food he had ever eaten. Joanna’s down in the East Village was another and was one of the few haunts of the rich and famous he used to frequent. The other favourite place is another one now defunct, Clyde’s in the West Village. It was not expensive, the standard American food was very good and Freddie really enjoyed the atmosphere. Clyde’s was also very handy for the bars of Christopher Street and its environs.

  Sylvia Stickells
researched probably a hundred apartments in different areas of the city including Number One Fifth Avenue, an amazing loft in the Soho district and I even looked at spaces in apartment buildings that were yet to be completed. Of Sylvia’s hundred, I was dispatched to look at twenty-five and Freddie himself checked out around ten of these. What Freddie was looking at in the building at One Fifth Avenue was in fact two apartments which would have had to have been knocked together to provide the required space. This was on the third or fourth floor which Freddie wasn’t too happy with and, added to this, the inconvenience of the construction work deterred him. The Soho loft space sticks in my mind mainly for the circular wood-panelled room with the glass domed ceiling. It was the main feature of the property but none of us could come up with a definite purpose for the room beneath it. The nearest we came was to make it a bedroom but it would have wasted the panelling and the problem of making the room dark in the morning would have been very, very difficult to overcome.

  The third place that I remember which Freddie refused to see was on the thirtieth floor of a construction site on the East Side in the Forties. The St. James’ Tower. There were literally fifty slabs of concrete supported on pillars. I was taken up the outside in the rattling open cage of an exterior elevator … Me! Scared of heights! I spent the time with my eyes shut. On arriving at the thirtieth floor, gales howled around. I made my way to the centre of the concrete floor as soon as I was able. While, the attendant real estate agent was extolling the future glories of the rooms that were going to be built, all I could think of doing was hanging on to something to make sure I wasn’t blown away.

  Eventually, the agent came up with the Sovereign Building. This huge construction at 425 East 58th Street between First Avenue and Sutton Place. The building is designed in such a way that in certain apartments there were almost unrestricted views of the city. There were forty-eight floors and Freddie’s apartment was on the forty-third. Imagine not being able to see the ground because of the cloud.

  The apartment was about the same size as Freddie’s two-floored flat in Stafford Terrace. There, the sitting room and dining room were knocked through into one huge room. The same could almost be said for the New York apartment. On the north side of the apartment there was a balcony which overlooked the 59th Street Bridge immortalised in the song of the same name by Simon and Garfunkel on their Parsley, Sage, Rosemary & Thyme album. Other than the apartment itself, one of the features which impressed Freddie was the building’s staff and their organisation. There were doormen, concierges and security staff which alleviated any worries he might have had concerning his own security. Even though New York is known for the violence on its streets, being on the streets never worried Freddie despite the sad demise of peers such as John Lennon.

  Not long after Lennon’s death, it was made known to Queen that threats had been made to assassinate them during a concert. The only other alert concerning Queen’s immediate personal security was in London when the band members were given police protection during the making of a video and two policemen were even stationed in Freddie’s Stafford Terrace apartment. The police authorities insisted that the officers remain in Stafford Terrace until Freddie returned home. Freddie was really surprised when he walked in and found them there but it didn’t stop him playing up to them, even to the point of teasing them unmercifully.

  “Look,” he said, “that’s my drugs drawer over there!”

  They laughed and took it all in good part. It came to us later that Kensington Police Station knew what Freddie was doing and where he was doing it most of the time but happily they left him alone as he was never one to draw undue attention to himself and his activities. It was known exactly, for example, how many times in a week he had been to the Copacabana Club in Earls Court Road. Maybe they kept the same sort of tabs on all the Royal Borough’s famous residents?

  I don’t know exactly what made him decide on the New York apartment he finally chose… The views from his bedroom were certainly stunning. On a good day, you could see as far as the suspension bridge across the Verrazzano Narrows, a view which included one of Freddie’s favourite buildings, the Chrysler and also the Empire State and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre. We were surprised at the continual changes of the lighting set-up on the Empire State Building which reflected the various public holidays i.e. green for St. Patrick’s Day, red, white and blue for July 4.

  One thing Freddie was very proud of, after he had been told, was that seven bridges could be seen from the apartment. He was really excited during the celebrations for the hundredth anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge which we watched simultaneously both from the corner window in his bedroom and, once removed, on the television.

  The apartment had belonged to a senator or congressman by the name of Gray and Freddie actually purchased the place from his widow. Gray had been his name and indeed grey was the predominant colour in the apartment’s decor. Four bedrooms and five bathrooms and a den, particularly the den which was decorated in grey pinstripe men’s suiting fabric. There was a mirrored and closeted bedroom at the hub and a dining room with walls covered in silver-grey satin. But Freddie never wanted to nest here. The place remained virtually unchanged from the day he bought it until the day he left and he left it without a backward glance, never to return.

  But, conversely, neither did he ever sell it…

  But back to the marathon world tour which spawned this digression, we left the USA to travel to Japan for six shows. Nobody at this time realised that their most recent New York show would be the last live performance given by Queen in America. But with the combination of future public dismay at the ‘I Want To Break Free’ video and Freddie’s own stage-weariness, it was not a surprise. The band had completed two huge tours in as many years and I think that Freddie thought it would be nice to give America a break.

  All Freddie left behind was a cold apartment and a final unhappy memory. Unusually, he had made no firm commitments to return, knowing that he would keep in touch with the true friends he had made and could always fly them to him, wherever he was in the world. Or him to them.

  I remember he flew Bill Reid and my friend Patrick Morrisey over on Concorde one Christmas. I think Freddie believed Concorde was the only transatlantic aircraft because it’s the only way he ever flew from London to New York and vice versa. I don’t know how many times Freddie has been on the plane but I know I’ve been on it nine. Of course, if I was travelling alone, I would go on a non-Concorde flight. If only he’d had shares in British Airways.

  The Japanese tour was an excuse – if excuse was needed – for another shopping expedition. And these dratted shows getting in the way! Freddie loved being in Japan and if having to perform in five different cities meant he could shop in five different cities, so be it. This was an unusual trip in that it did take in all the cities. Generally, any of Freddie’s private shopping trips and any length of stay in Japan usually just involved Tokyo. He indulged in his passion for lacquer boxes of which there was an amazing selection available. Each of the cities specialised in different forms of Japanese art and he was able to immerse himself in all things Japanese for a while. There was an ancient Japanese ethic of peace and calm which he perceived as well as the culture’s appreciation of beauty which enabled him in turn to find beauty in all things Japanese whether in the lines of the woodblock prints or the serenity of a Japanese garden which was all elemental rocks, pebbles and water.

  In February, 1984, the band agreed to appear at the San Remo Song Festival, traditionally a resort which belonged to the blue-rinse and fur stole brigade. This was going to be an easy gig for them as they were only required to mime to backing tracks. This didn’t decrease the intensity of the fans’ activity and security was still as tight as ever. The invasion of the neon-coloured hairdos of the various rock bands’ followers finally eclipsed the blue rinses of the resorts usual clientele.

  On the same bill were Culture Club, who were the new band of the era. George and Freddie ha
d met on occasion before and really quite enjoyed each other’s company. George then, as now, had a brilliant wit which Freddie greatly appreciated. It seems ironic now considering what was to happen to George, but at that time he was very anti-drugs which made him something of a rarity in the music business.

  Freddie had heard through the ever-growing grapevine of George’s dislike which extended to him forbidding any of his entourage holding stocks of illegal substances. Feeling that this enforced denial was unfair on the others, Freddie arranged a little afternoon tea for George and himself in Freddie’s suite while a separate small party was arranged in my adjoining room for the rest of the Culture Club party whose tastes extended to slightly more than tea and cucumber sandwiches. The housekeeping must have thought it strange to see a queue of people outside my room, people coming in and going out in twos and threes, smiling a lot.

  This festival is something that the band hadn’t done before and was perhaps seen as a warm-up for their second mimed appearance at the Golden Rose pop festival in Montreux later that year in May. It was eventually broadcast to over forty countries around the world. I think the obvious reason for both of these mimed appearances was so that the band could reach the massive audience that these televised broadcasts would attract. At this point, The Works had been released and these two festival appearances were the best possible promotion.

  We rehearsed for The Works European tour in Munich on a Bavarian film studio sound stage just outside the city. Rehearsals were held over two weeks at which everybody appeared to be in a very good mood. One of the crew’s ways of relaxing followed the then trend for abseiling which they all took turns at down the outsides of the sound stages. Munich was a city that everybody liked for their own reasons. At that point, Freddie’s reasons were Barbara Valentin and Winnie Kirchberger and all those bars. Freddie’s partner of the time was expected to trail around after him as relationships never stopped Freddie from going out.