Freddie Mercury (25 page)

The bathrooms were, like the rest of the house, crammed with objets d’art which Freddie had accumulated over the years from all corners of the earth. Bits from Japan, bits of France, bits of Germany as well as Tiffany artefacts from New York and souvenirs from South America. Scattered around were various bottles of cologne, eau de toilette and soaps. Among his favourites were Armani for men, Monsieur de Givenchy and the one he wore most in the last two or three years was L’Eau Dynamisant by Clarins. By reason of all its properties, this latter was his favourite.

Also, one perfume which secured a permanent position in whichever bathroom around the world he used was L’Interdit by
Givenchy. Apparently this was created for Audrey Hepburn and Freddie adored the perfume from the first time he smelt it. He didn’t care that it was originally designed for ladies. He just liked the smell. As far as shampoos were concerned, he was quite prepared to use any one that we bought from a supermarket. In the end he did quite like Johnson & Johnson baby shampoo which appeared not to irritate his sensitive scalp.

He liked the soaps made by Roger et Gallet, again in their various perfumes but in the end he used Simple for his own purposes more often than not, keeping the Roger et Gallet for display. He loved going into the perfume departments of stores and occasionally would select a basketful to give as presents to friends. His wicked sense of humour came into play once in New York when from Bloomingdales he bought a bottle of Joy by Patou to give to Tony King (nickname Joy) and for his photographer friend David Nutter (nickname Dawn) he bought a plastic bottle of the washing-up liquid of the same name! We were much amused!

Freddie loved towels and bathroom linen of all description; the bigger the towel the more he liked it. He found a great source in Munich. Barbara Valentin of course knew the best places to shop and Freddie found a large array of exotically patterned bath sheets, huge, almost the size of bed sheets. In the same place he also discovered some amazing blankets which he used to wrap around himself while watching television rather than putting them on the bed. He might not even have been cold but he just loved the blankets which were of a fluffy man-made fibre representing angora, patterned in circles, stripes and triangles of bright primary colours on a white background.

I often think that had he not been a musician, he would have made his fortune in interior design. He had an amazing eye for structure and shape and I think this is also the reason why he bought the occasional property – like the Mews for example – just so that he could decorate it. He bought Garden Lodge at the beginning of the Eighties at a time when he was rarely in the country. I think it was part of the reason why it took so long to complete, because he insisted on being a part of all stages of the house’s decoration.

He employed Robin Moore-Ede as his interior designer but Robin’s job was more to tell Freddie what he couldn’t do rather than do any constructive designing himself. This is not of course to deny that Robin came up with many original ideas which Freddie
developed but Freddie would be more likely to say, “I want this, this, this and this…” and then Robin would consider and then say which of the wishes were feasible. It’s a good way of working if it can be achieved. Robin, of course, introduced Freddie to his builders, Messrs. Taveners, Mr Tavener being the father of contemporary classical composer John Tavener, one of whose works featured in the funeral service of Diana, Princess of Wales. At least Mr Tavener the Elder knew what he was in for regarding artistic temperament when he first took on what was going to be a very long job.

Freddie’s bedroom incorporated not only his bed which was on the left of the entrance but also a sitting-room area on the right. The room was much more a boudoir, such as the room in
Der Rosenkavalier
where the Marchelin receives her callers. He had an assortment of furniture. There was an Edwardian
chaise longue
, a Louis XIV
fauteuil
and a modern two-seater sofa. It was a place where he could feel comfortable and still receive friends and visitors without people continually walking in and out. It was a room where one received. In those days, when Freddie lived in Garden Lodge, he accumulated a large collection of prints by Louis Icart and twenty-two of these decorated the walls which were covered in the same cream moiré satin which was used in all the drapes and soft furnishings.

The bed’s headboard was built into the wall and continued the same wood-pattern as in the dressing room. On either side of the bed, he had had made two commodes, large bedside chests of drawers, whose veneers ran with the mahogany theme.

There were five-foot high French display cabinets, bow-fronted on short legs from the mid-nineteenth century against the walls, containing various small pieces of porcelain, crystal and objets d’art, Lalique boxes and Japanese lacquer boxes. I often think that as far as these lacquer boxes are concerned, the smaller they were the more expensively they were priced.

As with the rest of the house, where there was carpeting, it had been woven specifically to fit the room according to Freddie’s cream colour scheme. One of Freddie’s bedspreads will have been seen by anyone who watched the ‘Slightly Mad’ video. Made up of countless thousands of dyed multi-coloured ostrich feathers, Freddie wanted “… something colourful” for the video and found exactly what he was after lying on his own bed. It wasn’t actually in use overlong on his bed as the cats took a liking to it and showed their affection by
trying to destroy it. I don’t know if this was because of the colours or the feathers.

Access to Freddie’s suite via the raised landing was due to the extra height inbuilt into the north-facing drawing room below which was originally built by the sculptress’s husband as an artist’s studio. In fact, Garden Lodge was no more than a stone’s throw from the artists’ colony of houses begun by Lord Leighton at Leighton House and the various Norman Shaw-designed houses in Melbury Road.

On the walls of the landing was the one common denominator between Freddie’s New York apartment, Garden Lodge and Stafford Terrace. He used up some of his supply of gold and platinum discs to form a wall-covering. We spent quite a few hours with tape measure, hammer and nails to ensure that none of the original wall-covering showed beneath the massed framed records. It can be quite frustrating taking into account that the frames were of different sizes and the hanging wires at the back of different lengths. The tape measure was in constant use. The master of course supervised and measured with the best of us.

Off the main landing, there were several rooms. One was the library at the foot of the stairs leading to Freddie’s bedroom, decorated in wallpaper which Freddie had bought in Japan many years before. It was a room which Freddie made a library because Jim Hutton’s carpentry phase had been given full rein by Freddie, thus allowing Jim to build shelves in this room which Freddie ultimately intended to be used for books. Although Freddie was no reader, the shelves contained catalogues from auction houses and the standard books which all households contain, dictionaries, atlases, encyclopaedia as well as the coffee table books of cats, art and design which he would recycle as he was given or acquired new ones. From the window of the library, there was a view directly down the garden path to the front gate of the house in Logan Place.

The next door along was a little door to a closet which, because it backed on to the hot water tanks, was used as the linen store.

Next door to that was the entrance to the main guest suite which consisted of a large square bedroom and a connecting dressing room and bathroom which was furnished with beautiful pink marble. Freddie obviously had a fascination for moire as the walls in the guest suite were covered in a dusty salmon pink version of this fabric. The suite had a series of Dali prints of surreal subjects on the theme of
Hades on the walls. This room was later to contain some Biedermeyer and Empire pieces of furniture and some that were made specifically for the room. Freddie spent a lot of time in Rupert Cavendish’s shop on the Kings Road in Chelsea. Whenever Freddie arrived at this shop, it didn’t matter how many were in his entourage, Rupert always made all of us very welcome and was very happy to talk about his latest acquisitions.

I think I should say at this point that one thing Freddie was always very unlucky with was showers. The shower in his own bathroom and the one in this guest bathroom caused huge damage to different parts of the building, the Japanese Room below the guest suite and the Gallery above the drawing room respectively. Eventually, the shower in the guest bathroom accommodated some hastily made shelves and he abandoned the shower in his own bathroom in disgust. He couldn’t believe that even the best builders in Britain couldn’t build him a shower that worked. Unlike America, where every household, however small, had a bathroom
and
a shower room that was operational without apparent complication.

The last thing to be said about the guest suite was that it had the best views from the house. As it was on a corner at the front of the house, it overlooked both the fishpond and the lawn with its magnolias in front and towards the conservatory on the other. Because of the position of the house in the grounds, the view from Joe’s and my bedrooms were very similar and were of other people’s windows. It’s amazing what you could see some evenings without even trying! There was very little land at the rear of the house before the high boundary wall of the adjoining properties.

Turning back on the landing, there were two doorways, the first on the left leading to a bathroom which was actually en suite with Joe’s bedroom. To get to Joe’s room from the main landing, there was a door separating the upstairs from the downstairs. This separation was made even more obvious at this threshold where the plush Prussian-blue carpet of the landing finished and a workaday grey stair carpet began, leading past Joe’s and my bedroom to the stairs descending to the kitchen.

Joe’s bedroom was the first doorway on the left and was decorated in a pleasant Messel-green emulsion. My room was next and was resplendently pale-yellow. My room was diagonally opposite the main guest suite so that my view was concomitantly diametrically opposite
to the guest suite’s. I occasionally had an intimate view of other people’s lives. But that’s other people’s fault for doing it without closing the curtains or turning the lights off.

At the head of the kitchen stairs, almost opposite my bedroom door, there was a doorway which led to the modern-day minstrel’s gallery which was, once again, back into the kingdom of the blue carpet. This enclave above the sitting room was crammed full of the most up-to-date, state-of-the-art sound equipment. Also up here Freddie stored a vast collection of videos and albums and had had built a drinks bar and various items of bar furniture like stools, seating and a table, again following the same design principle of the mahogany and maple wood pattern used throughout the house. On the wall behind the bar hung a massive painting, ceiling to floor and twelve feet long, of a jungle scene that Freddie commissioned from his friend, the Jamaican artist Rudi Patterson. At the other end of the gallery, stairs led down into a big sitting room made to look even larger with its sixteen foot high ceiling and its polished parquet floor.

Some twenty-five by thirty feet, this room was dominated by huge windows which almost formed the entire north wall. As Freddie had no intention of painting, this former painter’s studio was turned into his sitting room. In fact, it consisted of three separate sitting areas. The first beneath the windows on a dais, where he had had constructed a banquette window seat to fill the entire bay. Opposite this dais and beneath the overhanging gallery was the area he most used at home in front of the big marble fireplace. He wanted to have an open-fire but without the mess that a coal or woodfire would have involved. He compromised by installing a gas log fire which produced the right visual effect and also he got the warmth from it which he always craved.

To one side was a twenty-eight inch television set which served a seating area comprising a large squashy four-seat sofa and two comfortable chairs with a low Japanese table in front of them on which was placed a silver wild cat bought for him by Billy Squier and various coffee table books and porcelain ashtrays courtesy of Limoges via Hermes in Bond Street. Two lamps sat on tables at either end of this main sofa.

Backed on to this sofa but facing the centre of the room was an Empire period drawing room suite consisting of sofa and four chairs, purportedly made for the brother of the Emperor Napoleon
Bonaparte, upholstered in pale green and gold with a bumble bee imperial motif. The piano on which ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ was composed was in the corner of the room by the window and covering the top of it was arranged a crowded gallery of silver and polished wood-framed photographs of friends and cats.

There were two large pieces of furniture. In the corner facing the piano was a plain mahogany display cabinet, some eight feet high, filled with a priceless Meissen porcelain dinner service, decorated with various hand-painted still-lifes of fruit on a white ground. Freddie needed such a massive display cabinet so that it wasn’t dwarfed by the room. After much searching in antique shops all over London, we came across this cabinet in Chelsea. It had been used in a huge shop so wasn’t specifically designed for anyone’s front room but it was exactly what was required. Terry Giddings and I took the polaroid camera and photographed the cabinet from all angles. These photos we rushed back to Freddie for his approval. He immediately said that he wanted the cabinet but only after it had been renovated to an acceptable condition. The shop upholstered the interior and checked and reinforced the internal, separate metal framework which was to support the plate glass shelves on which the priceless Meissen was to sit. The cabinet was ultimately delivered in two parts by four stout men and the toughest part of its journey from van to sitting room was its entry through the garden gate which was only achieved after the removal of the eighteen inch high drawer section of the cabinet’s base. Freddie of course nervously supervised every inch of the cabinet’s arrival.