Freddie Mercury (34 page)

I feel I must also point out that Freddie’s drivers were also an integral part of his life and our household. In New York it was a man who was nicknamed ‘Lori’ as his surname was Anderson and in London, in the time I knew Freddie, he had three drivers who always acted as his security bodyguards as well.

The first was Peter Jones, nicknamed Gemma, of course, who remained with Freddie for quite a few years, including the beginning of the Munich period. After he and Freddie parted company, which was not a very amicable split, Freddie gave Peter Jones every opportunity to redeem himself. Basically, the way I remember it, Peter lost his international licence in Munich after a drink-driving conviction and then lost his licence again in England. Peter never officially informed Freddie. He simply didn’t ring in. If only he had rung in, Freddie would have kept him on doing other security work. Freddie loathed sacking people and would have always found an alternative. Because Peter never communicated over a period of two weeks, and because Freddie discovered the truth of the situation from other sources, the questions of honesty and loyalty became involved and Freddie was unable to exercise his prerogative of mercy. It then became acrimonious and Peter suffered as much as Freddie, who
went through the tortures of the damned in parting company so unnecessarily.

Then Gary Hampshire, on a well-earned sabbatical from the John Reid experience, drove Freddie and after Gary returned to Reid, Terry Giddings was employed from a security company run by two brothers whose services the Queen machine had often employed.

Terry Giddings was a gentle giant, whose love for his vivacious wife Sharon and his children was something tangible and deeply moving. When he spoke of his children, his son Luke at the time, he fairly oozed paternal pride which I would have dearly like to have bottled. I could have made a fortune. On the occasions when Freddie wasn’t going to use Terry he would let him know in advance but Terry still often found occasion to come over to Garden Lodge with his young son, Terry’s
doppelganger
, for Luke was a dead blond ringer for his dad. Freddie adored playing with Luke who was after all ‘a model’ having appeared in several commercials.

Although Freddie certainly never wanted any children of his own, he adored certain children of other people’s, especially when they went home with their parents after tea. He had a wonderful relationship with his only godson, Rheinhold Mack’s son John Frederick. One thing Freddie demanded of children was respect for their elders and unquestioning obedience, perhaps mirroring his own childhood and upbringing. Continued unruly behaviour really disturbed him and although he hated the idea of Garden Lodge being treated like a museum, it had in reality not been designed for boisterous children to go exploring in. Yet he loved the attitude of a child like Luke Giddings, an East-End boy with boundless curiosity because Luke knew how to behave and to ask questions. If told once, “Now don’t play around with that,” Luke would duly stop and never repeat the bad behaviour.

But back to drivers and driving. Freddie had drivers because he hated the thought of driving and as far as he was concerned there were drivers who were good at driving just as there were cooks who were good at cooking and each allowed him the luxury of not having to do so but instead to write and perform music, which is what he himself was good at.

He did once have a couple of driving lessons as I’m sure he must at one time have at least tried once to boil an egg but he loathed the very idea of either occupation. I think as far as Freddie was concerned,
driving was a waste of time. Rather than thinking of the road and the route, he felt there were better ways of occupying his mind. Also, I think he was too impatient a character to have made a driver. Mind you, I could well imagine him being the master of road rage now! And of course, the nearest Freddie ever caught in the way of public transport was a taxi. But the likelihood of his ever carrying enough money to pay for even a bus was nil.

As far as needing to carry cash, there were few places he went where he ever needed cash. Only twice in the twelve years I knew him did I ever accompany him to the cinema, one film being
Raiders Of The Lost Ark
which we saw in a movie theatre in Manhattan. I paid. He was thrilled at popcorn being thrown through the air from one group of friends to another and although it meant that he couldn’t hear some of the dialogue, he loved hearing the audience cheering out loud, a phenomenon one would expect from live theatre rather than a movie house. Partway through the second half of the movie, a fly very obviously crawls into the mouth of one of the actors playing a German soldier giving orders. For some reason, Spielberg, a man whom Freddie greatly admired, decided that the scene should not be edited. When Freddie and I saw it, some couple of rows in front of us, a large black New Yorker leapt to his feet and screamed aloud, “A fly! That man jus’ ate that fly!”

Freddie was floored. He was in stitches of laughter.

The second movie we saw I should have realised was going to be a disaster. It was in Munich that a group of about ten of us including Barbara Valentin and Winnie Kirchberger went to see
Die Unendlicher Geshichte
(The Never-ending Story as it had been originally titled). The story had lasted approximately ten minutes when Freddie turned to me and said, “I’m getting out of here. This is ridiculous!”

Freddie never dreamt that even though he was seeing the film dubbed into German in Munich that it would at least not have English sub-titles. I think he became extremely frustrated. Although he had a very rudimentary grasp of German, it upset him that there were obviously a good few jokes which he didn’t understand and he could see the rest of his friends laughing. Going to extremes, he might even have been a teensy bit paranoid, thinking that they might just have been laughing at him not understanding. That apart, Freddie’s boredom threshold was so low that to sit in his seat for an hour-and-a-half watching something that bored him was an impossibility. There
were very few things through which he sat all the way and, thus, he was always extremely particular about what he would go out in public to see. Generally it would only be to something where particular friends of his were involved, although on one or two occasions he specifically went to see something because he wanted to see it. Because he had been told so many good things about such and such a play by his friends in the profession, he would trust their judgements and opinions.

Films therefore he watched mainly on the television screen. He would never ask us to rent out movies for him to play at home. He did have a few pre-recorded films and some which he had specifically asked us to record for him from the television. Two of the most played were
Some Like It Hot
and George Cukor’s
The Women
, a screenplay which he had almost memorised by heart.
Imitation Of Life
with Lana Turner was a special favourite. He loved the title. Curiously apt for a man like Freddie whose own life was in so many ways merely a reflection of other people’s real lives. I can remember him on at least a couple of occasions being in tears at the end of the movie where Susan Kohner who played Juanita Moore’s errant daughter arrives too late for Juanita’s funeral and tries to jump on the white coffin in the horse-drawn hearse.

Too much for a pop star in his own front room.

Although this might sound superficial and dismissable, I have to emphasise that this was the everyday life I am trying to describe and which was, as such, incredibly ordinary. I am sure many people will recognise this situation from their own lives. Freddie’s was no different. While Freddie was moved by this specific scene I have just outlined, he never lost sight of the fact that he was being successfully manipulated by the director and the writers. Although it was, after all, only a movie, it was also only what he himself did so consummately in his own film-making on the videos as I hope I have already shown.

He never made any specific plan to watch a movie which was coming up on TV. What could happen was that either Joe or I would see in the
TV Times
that there was a Marlene Dietrich season and when we told Freddie, he would ask us to video all of them for him as he knew he might not be in the mood to watch them as they were broadcast. However, he adored Dietrich and would quite soon get around to seeing the recordings, usually with Straker who
was Freddie’s movie-watching side-kick. Freddie would whimsically decide that Tuesday afternoon would be movie time and ring up Straker who, if he were free, would come over and be Freddie’s date. Instead of a popcorn and Coca-Cola date, it would be more likely champagne and caviar canapes. Incidentally, it was because of his adoration of Marlene that Freddie jumped at the idea of George Hurrell photographing the band for
The Works.
Hurrell had legendarily portrayed Dietrich and many of her contemporaries.

Overall, the movies he tended to watch were black and white. I think he admired the strength of the big women stars in Hollywood when they started to command big studio salaries, the likes of Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Dietrich, Rita Hayworth, Lana Turner… The Hollywood Immortals. In New York, he was always impressed that he lived only just around the corner from Greta Garbo.

The male stars just never seemed to figure as highly in Freddie’s pantheon… Much has been made of Freddie’s apparent desperation to get near Burt Reynolds. I do seem to remember once or twice Freddie passing a comment along the lines of, “He looks quite good.”

But as to Freddie going out of his way to meet Mr Reynolds, that was never the case. There. Another little myth exploded. And on the subject of exploding myths, neither did Freddie ever have anything more to do with Rudolf Nureyev than sharing a stage one night in Barcelona. There is no way Freddie could have kept quiet about sleeping with Rudolf had he done so and, anyway, neither was the other’s type!

It has also been said that Freddie met part of Rock Hudson in a backroom bar called the Gloryhole in Los Angeles. Yes, Freddie went into the bar once to my knowledge but had no intention of going any further than the bar. Wild exhibitionism in public was definitely not for him. As far as I’m aware, he never even met Rock Hudson in polite society. Once again, had he done so, make no mistake, we would have
all
known about it. Although he didn’t broadcast gossip, he could never refrain from telling close friends any tales about himself which would titillate them.

Let me shoot something else out of the sky – namely the press’s statements that John Murphy was another of Freddie’s ex-lovers. Freddie and John did have a very close relationship but I don’t think it ever got anywhere near going to bed with each other. As far as I’m concerned, it certainly wasn’t John from whom Freddie contracted
HIV. For most of the time I knew John, he was very happy with his lover Jim W. King.

I think Freddie acquired a lot of his acknowledged video inspiration from the black and white movies he loved. They reflected the heyday of Hollywood movie stars. The stars were the movies. Perhaps now, without the stars, there is too much demanded of the actors who have to compete with the special effects. In Freddie’s videos, the band are the movie stars and nothing detracts from them, special effects or no.

It has been well-documented that Freddie went often to the movies as a child and at school and it is not inconceivable that the films took the place of his family who were not close at hand for a great part of his growing up. It must have given him a great haven of escape from the realities of school life and having to make his own way. Freddie learned at an early age what a star was. Perhaps it was then that he decided he was going to become one. Interesting that he grew up at the same time that Elvis Presley, the eponymous pop star, had just established a huge career in movies, soon to be followed by Cliff Richard in England and later The Beatles. Although Freddie never aspired to film stardom in the same way, it was because he knew that it had already been done so successfully by his true heroes, Presley, Lennon, etc. and he never, never thought of himself as an actor, even in his videos. Although he would have never been able to learn the lines, it was in the same vein as driving a car and cooking… there were others who did it so much better. He was a musician and the best musician. He enjoyed films made by people who were the best film makers.

He was never scared of getting involved in a project where he was confident in his own knowledge and ability but would always step back from any area of work where he had the slightest doubt about his ability to deliver.

He had exactly the same approach towards his friends and the people with whom he associated. He became a very good judge of character. Maybe it had come with practice for there had been several relationships both of love and friendship which had ended very, very badly which taught him these lessons. Two of the people I’m thinking of were Bill Reid and Paul Prenter. I don’t think that Bill Reid ever loved Freddie in the way that I know Jim Hutton did and when Freddie ended the relationship, perhaps Bill saw the golden goose taking flight.

Paul Prenter was a different matter. Freddie felt so let down when Paul sold his story to the
Sun
newspaper. Freddie had really gone out of his way because of his belief in their friendship to keep it afloat when things were going badly wrong for Paul. Paul was also a close friend as well as an employee and Freddie’s instinct was the same with both employees and friends and lovers. He never wanted to end these relationships. He found calling it a day very difficult. The relationship with Freddie and any of his employees – because all employees became friends – was very difficult for both parties. Imagine a line, one end being employee and the other, friend. The dividing line separating the two ends which were always there changed by the minute. Sometimes, Freddie needed a friend rather than an employee and at other times, it was the employee Freddie needed to do what he wanted rather than to offer an opinion. To be able to do both was like walking a tightrope over ever-changing battle lines.