King of Queen

Mercury

An Intimate Biography
of Freddie Mercury

by Lesley-Ann Jones

Touchstone

To legendary lyricist Tim Rice, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is more than a rock classic. It was, he tells biographer Lesley-Ann Jones, Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury’s way of admitting what he rarely did to his friends, and never to the general public. He was gay, and he sometimes struggled with his wild side.

“It’s fairly obvious to me,” Rice says. “There is a very clear message contained in it . . . this is Freddie saying, ‘I’m coming out. I’m admitting that I’m gay.’ ”

If true, that’s the only time Mercury would admit this, or much of anything else. He waited until just one day before his November 1991 death to admit to the world that he had AIDS.

Onstage and off, Mercury was rock ’n’ roll’s most uninhibited frontman — bisexual, voracious, a constant, insatiable party in spandex. But he would only hint at the dark side of that abandon, that his fame and appetites had grown out of control.

Mercury, born in Zanzibar as Farrokh Bulsara, inherited his mother’s “full lips and open smile,” the latter of which (he had four extra teeth) would drive a lifetime of insecurity.

He studied music at boarding school and, inspired by the likes of Elvis Presley and Fats Domino, played in a band called The Hectics, where “his lively boogie-woogie piano style . . . was soon the talk of the town.”

Developing his rock-star style in college thanks to his worship of Jimi Hendrix, he was also “prone to fits of giggles,” and would “put his hand right over his mouth to cover up those huge teeth of his” whenever he laughed.

A good friend of his sang for a band called Smile — which also included guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor — and he became a groupie, traveling everywhere to see them, and offering unsolicited advice on every aspect of their style and performance.

He learned guitar and formed bands of his own, and while his singing voice was still raw, his “flamboyant and melodramatic” stage presence was undeniable.

Smile’s singer eventually quit, and May and Taylor noticed that Bulsara was an “eyeball magnet” on stage. The three joined up, and Freddie ditched the surname “Bulsara” for the flashier “Mercury.”

As the band added bassist John Deacon and started playing shows, Mercury began a six-year sexual relationship with a reserved young woman named Mary Austin, and the two moved in together.

Austin was supremely devoted to Mercury. She remained ever-patient with his eccentricities — as when he’d pull a piano next to their bed in the middle of the night whenever inspiration hit — and his coming home later and later at night.

When Austin told Mercury she wanted them to have a child together, he reportedly told her that he’d “rather have a cat.”

The band, meanwhile, struggled to get a record deal, recording their first album in their manager’s studio, which they could only use at the last minute — usually in the middle of the night — when paying clients like David Bowie had finished.

Famed Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman flew to London to see them play but was disappointed when this band with the macho hard-rock sound had a frontman who performed in “ballet shoes, feather boas and leotards.”

Holzman eventually did sign them for the US, and when their debut album was released in 1973, critics hated them, with NME’s Nick Kent calling the album “a bucket of urine.”

Happily, the record-buying public felt otherwise, and the ensuing fame brought with it celebrity friends. Mercury became particularly close to Elton John, who would later refer to Mercury as the rare friend who could out-party him, calling his appetites “unquenchable.”

For the band’s fourth album, “A Night at the Opera,” Mercury brought to May the fractured patchwork of rock and opera that was “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

The band was initially mystified about how the song’s pieces would fit together, and once they recorded the tune, those around them were even more baffled. Even Deacon privately feared that it would become “the greatest error of judgment of Queen’s career.”

But when Mercury gave a tape of the song to a prominent British DJ friend to get his opinion — with “strict instructions not to broadcast it” — the man liked it so much that he played it 14 times in one weekend, igniting its legend.

The tour that followed ushered in a more decadent phase of Mercury’s life, as the band’s post-gig parties became legendary. One celebration the author attended after a Madison Square Garden show, Jones writes, included “a dozen topless waitresses with magnums of champagne, filling your glass constantly. Nobody was allowed to run dry. [Mercury] told me that the secret of happiness was living life to the hilt.”

“Excess is a part of my nature,” he said. “To me, dullness is a disease. I need danger and excitement. Straight people bore me stiff. I love freaky people.”

Mercury would go on to call his sex drive “enormous” and say that, “I sleep with men, women, cats — you name it. I’ll go to bed with anything! My bed is so huge, I can comfortably sleep six. I prefer my sex without any involvement.”

Mercury, who fell in love with the Meatpacking District’s then-bustling gay club scene and bought a lavish apartment uptown on East 58th Street, finally found the courage to be somewhat honest with Austin.

“Mary, there’s something I have to tell you,” he said. “I think I’m bisexual.”

“No, Freddie, I don’t think you’re bisexual,” she replied. “I think you’re gay.” The revelation freed them both, and Austin remained an important friend and companion for the rest of Mercury’s life.

Meanwhile, the band’s parties became even wilder. At one, there was “a vast fish tank with nothing in it except nudes sprayed to look like stones and reptiles, all lying on top of each other.” Attendees at one bash consumed 30,000 British pounds worth of vintage champagne over five days, and his enormous birthday cakes took the form of Rolls-Royces and grand pianos.

The outrageousness carried over to their “Jazz” album, as they promoted their single “Bicycle Race” with a poster featuring 65 naked women on bicycles. The poster was not only denounced as “pornography” here in the US, but the company that rented the bicycles to the band insisted they pay for the replacement of the 65 leather seats.

By now, Mercury — whose favorite pickup line had become a blunt, “How big’s your d – – – ?” — developed a taste for men who were “chunky and hunky and a relatively blank slate,” and came from “very unsophisticated roots.” At one point, the book refers to Mercury’s type as the “unwashed truck driver.”

On one later South American tour, Mercury had an associate pick out “young male prostitutes known as ‘taxi boys’ ” to keep him company, and one told the author about Mercury’s debauched gatherings.

“We’d shed our clothes and enter Freddie’s room, where he would greet us, wearing just his dressing gown,” he said. “Freddie engaged in sexual activity with each in turn, in front of the others. When he was tired, [the associate] paid the boys and asked us to leave . . . [Mercury] did not even seem to be enjoying himself. Just going through the motions.”

Mercury’s desire for men, though, hadn’t squelched his love of women. He took up with Barbara Valentin, a “former soft-porn actress,” but that had no dulling effect on Mercury’s other escapades.

“We did have sex together regularly. We even talked of getting married,” said Valentin, who believed that homosexuality was a role that Mercury chose to play. “Of course, he’d still pick up dozens of gay guys and bring them back night after night, but I didn’t mind. It sounds insane, but that’s the life we were living.”

The insanity of the road did take its toll, though. Mercury — who had always asked for accompaniment to go to the bathroom by yelling, “pi-pi!” whenever he had to go — surprised his bodyguards on one Buenos Aires trip by insisting, over their objections, on going alone.

When he failed to return 20 minutes later, his guards found him cowering in a stall as four people banged on the stall door, screaming that they had to see him. When the guards chased them out and Mercury emerged, he was terrified. “You were right,” he said. “I can’t even go to the bathroom alone, can I?”

AIDS took hold of the gay community in the early ’80s, and Valentin said that at one point, over a hundred of their friends had died of the disease. But Mercury refused to curtail his antics. One friend recalls with “chilling clarity the night in 1984 when he realized that Freddie was going to die.”

“I asked him if he had altered his behavior in light of recent developments,” Paul Gambaccini told the author. “And with that characteristic flash of the arms, he said, ‘Darling, my attitude is, f – – – it. I’m doing everything with everybody.’”

By the time of the Live Aid concert in 1985 — a global smash that, after several flagging albums in the US, revived Queen’s popularity here — Mercury was “picking up and having sex with dozens of men each week.”

He developed a growth in the back of his throat — his friends called it “the mushroom” — that was at first sporadic, then permanent.

While he spoke casually about “maybe not living much longer,” he never spoke openly of his disease. Valentin only had his sickness confirmed for her when Mercury cut his finger one night, and as some of his blood got on her as she went to help him, he screamed, “No! Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!”

He wasn’t officially diagnosed until 1987. He never actually told, or discussed it with, his bandmates, but instead let them know in his own bizarre way at a restaurant in May 1989. The conversation had “turned to the curse of illness,” and Mercury “rolled up his right trouser leg and lifted his leg onto his chair,” revealing an “open, weeping wound on his calf.” “You think you’ve got problems!” Mercury said, leaving a shocked table to quickly change the subject.

He issued a statement through a publicist on Nov. 23, 1991, stating that he had AIDS, and then passed away the next day.

Mercury summed up the insanity of his life — and, perhaps, his death — when he noted that in becoming a star, he had created a monster.

“The monster is me,” he said. “Success, fame, money, sex, drugs — whatever you want. I can have it. But now I’m beginning to see that as much as I created it, I want to escape from it. I’m starting to worry that I can’t control it as much as it controls me.”