Freddie Mercury (29 page)

Before he became ill, he adored spicy food, be it Indian, Mexican or Chinese, realising of course that because it is spicy does not mean it’s full of chillis. With his breakfast he would usually continue to drink tea. He was never really a coffee person. Occasionally he would have fruit juice but at any time during the day, not specially for breakfast.

Any mail specifically or personally addressed to him would be left by his place at the kitchen table, the first sitting on the banquette. He would open mail carefully with a knife as he loathed paper cuts. He divided up the mail into that which required Mary’s attention as a secretary, copy mail from management or accountants we would file for him in paper folders which were kept in the big commode in the sitting room.

Also in this drawer we would have to keep mail from ‘fans on the edge’. Let me explain…

On two or three specific occasions, Freddie received a series of letters and cards from ‘fanatics’ as opposed to fans. We had been advised by the police to keep all such mail should any of these people attempt to carry out their threats. “I’m going to get you if you don’t acknowledge me…” was the general tenor of the contents. He would read them silently and then hand them over for us to read, saying as he did so, “Look, here’s another one…”

It’s only thinking about it now while writing this that makes me realise that it’s another excess which he had to deal with in his personal life. It’s something I hope none of you will have to go through. Outwardly he handled the situation very well but who knows what was going on inside? He never burdened us with the problem.

Regarding the mail which he wanted to answer personally, he would have a selection of cards which we had bought for him covering all occasions and the cards themselves ranged in taste and style from indescribably rude to those which were ‘suitable for mothers’. When he was in Japan, he would always buy a huge selection of cards for his own use and keep them in his bedside drawer. We would
remind him of upcoming occasions amongst his friends and family which he needed to remember. He himself had a birthday book which included dates of birthdays and anniversaries of family and close friends which he always kept meticulously up-to-date.

During or after breakfast he would inform us of his day’s schedule. Terry Giddings usually arrived between ten-thirty and eleven o’clock each day. On days when Freddie had appointments which we would all have known about in advance, Terry would be in much earlier but usually we all knew that Freddie would not be out of the house before eleven o’ clock.

If he wasn’t going out, he would do very little. If it was a warm, sunny day he’d wander round the garden and then, at the eleventh hour, decide to invite people over to lunch. So, while one of us would get on the phone to the various people he’d want invited, the others would run out and buy the food he’d elected we were going to eat. Thor Arnold has reminded me of one luncheon occasion when Freddie demanded an
al fresco
lunch in the garden in honour of the American guests who were vacationing with us. One of the tables had been specially commissioned in sections and completed inside the kitchen, and had to be manoeuvred to get it outside. It proved impossible and so in the end, the large dining table which Freddie had brought from Stafford Terrace with the huge top of sheet glass was carried, heaved and manipulated out through the back door and on to as flat a place as we could find beneath one of the magnolia trees.

On the subject of the garden, Freddie was a very keen amateur gardener although I must admit that his idea of gardening was looking through all the garden books and deciding what plants he wanted Jim Hutton to go out and buy. Jim was a passionate gardener and only wanted to make the grounds of Logan Place beautiful for Freddie. He was, after all, the official gardener and had no reason to be ashamed of the magnificent job he did despite Freddie employing a general jobbing assistant to do the weekly tidying. But, make no mistake, Jim’s was a real job. It was Jim who mowed the lawns and did the weeding. Jim who effected all Freddie’s designs and schemes. Jim adored gardening. He spent hour upon hour outside in it and did everything he could to keep it looking beautiful.

Freddie and Jim once had one of their huge arguments which had something to do with the garden and Freddie said after Jim had stormed off, “Right! I’ll show him. I’m
not
useless!”

I was duly dispatched to Rassell’s, the Kensington nurserymen, to pick up a vast assortment of petunias in colours which wouldn’t clash. Freddie had decided that he himself was going to plant two urns of these bedding plants to stand outside the French doors of the Japanese room.

Whist Jim was strategically absent, cooling off his frustration, Freddie and I spent a good two or three hours planning exactly where each plant would go almost like a battle-plan of lines of soldiers. Freddie then actually used a trowel and filled up one of the urns. But he soon got bored.

“Right, dear, that’s enough. Perhaps you’d better do the next one,” and off he went inside for a cup of tea. He did emerge twenty minutes later, carrying a watering can just to ensure his planting was properly watered in.

Freddie had made his point.

Back to the lunch which was one that he knew his guests would enjoy and which would vary from a simple fish pie, a favourite of Francesca Thyssen’s, to a four course banquet to which he would invite as many people as were free to come. As you might have gathered, Freddie knew quite a few people who were very happy to drop what they were doing and come when beckoned. There were also others amongst his friends who were genuinely close but who would come when he really needed them. They knew the difference between “lunch” and “help!”

Freddie didn’t pay for all of his friendships.

The world of entertainment is a strange milieu. You can get very close to a person in a matter of days when you’re spending up to twenty hours a day in their company but because of the nature of the beast, you can then be separated for a year or two before you see each other again. Also, working in the entertainment industry is not a nine-to-five Monday-to-Friday job and therefore Freddie used the opportunities of his lunches to reunite the friendships he knew he had formed in this ever-moving arena. And, of course, being performers, musicians and artists, a lot of his friends had the time free to come when he called.

For example, there was the Actresses’ Dinner…

I had once bought Freddie a book from Aspreys in which chronicles of dinner and lunch parties could be entered. On one side, there were the guests, the menu, the flowers, the wines and the
required dress. On the other side, the table plan. This book comes in handy when you don’t want to give the same guests the same meal three times in a row which, as Freddie always wanted his favourite meals each time, so often became a problem as the guests too were often the same. The Actresses’ Dinner involved Freddie, Straker and amongst the guests were Anna Nicholas, Anita Dobson, Carol Woods and Debbie Bishop. It was an idea cooked up between Freddie and Peter for the camp of it … Having lots of actresses round one dinner table was an irresistible whim. Freddie, being Freddie, could fulfil it. I wish I had the dinner book to show you. I only made fleeting appearances in the dining room but I’m sure that everybody got on well with each other. There were gales of laughter emanating from the room into the kitchen where Joe and I were sitting. I must admit that this wasn’t as impromptu an occasion as most and needed some organisation as each of the girls involved had a heavy schedule, especially Anita who was still up-to-her-neck in drink and ‘Den’ as Angie in
East Enders.

Freddie would always inspect the table to ensure that everything was as he wished. While I might have set the table as to the demands of etiquette, he would merely just make sure that all the cutlery, place settings and table furniture were where
he
thought they
should
be.

A lot changed over the course of the passing years. Earlier on, he would only have a light lunch and so our main meal would be in the evening. I suppose that was to fuel him for those many hours spent out on the town. In the last few years, this habit was turned on its head and he preferred having larger lunches either indoors or in restaurants followed by a lighter supper at home in the evening. Talking of the earlier days, for example, at the time he moved into Garden Lodge, he had a wide-ranging taste as far as food was concerned. He was always fond of stews in one form or another, whether Irish stew a la Jim Hutton with potatoes and dumplings or
boeuf bourgmgnon
, served often by itself or with plain boiled rice, always on a dinner plate. He loved my version of the classic
boeuf stroganoff
which I remember making for band meetings in Pembridge Road and also once in Musicland studios when Freddie was expecting Roy Thomas Baker. I had to ensure every ingredient was perfectly prepared: “Do you realise Roy knows everything about food!” And so I peeled the mushrooms precisely, removed the stalks exactly, chopped them absolutely evenly…

Lamb hotpot and
chilli con carne
he also adored and he loved unusual and different things as much as he did his mother’s version of chicken pie which contained sausages and baked beans as well as chicken in a white sauce under a wonderful golden brown crust of puff pastry. He also thoroughly enjoyed fish pie, either with a potato or pastry crust and traditional steak and kidney pie. Vegetables such as fresh boiled beetroot, scattered with fresh-squeezed lemon juice and cumin. Roasted parsnips with parmesan. He loved this dish. I would boil peeled parsnips for about five minutes, then drain them and while they were still steaming roll them in a plastic bag containing flour, salt, pepper and grated parmesan before roasting them in a hot oven until crisp and golden. As far as salads were concerned, if there was a salad presented he would merely pick over it. In the hot climates where he was brought up, salads were just never on the menu where everything had to be cooked to destroy bacteria.

One thing above all, he insisted on fresh food. While he appreciated the quality of Marks and Spencer, he fully believed that it didn’t bear comparison to the real thing. He adored
osso bucco, chicken dhansak, prawn creole, chilli con carne, lamb à la Madhur Jaffrey
and every Sunday of course there had to be the traditional roast – pork, lamb, beef or chicken and at Christmas absolutely, always and only turkey. Pork was always served on Boxing Day.

We always used the same butcher, Lidgates on Holland Park Avenue and I was usually the shopper, driven by Jim Hutton who enjoyed these outings to shops and supermarkets as it gave him an excuse to drive his Volvo, the third greatest love in his life – Freddie, Garden, Volvo. I got on very well with the butchers and even now when I go in, I am still recognised. We always paid cash or cheque. We never had an account.

We would always have a tasty cheddar cheese in the house because, once again before he became ill, Freddie liked an assault on his taste buds but in the last few months I suppose it was one of the symptoms of his disease that he could not tolerate intense flavours. He suffered from a kind of retching, choking feeling in his throat and from then on he would subsist on a bland diet of soups and ordinary scrambled eggs. As far as cheese was concerned, it didn’t figure highly as a course on a menu, the occasional Welsh Rarebit or a lunchtime piece to snack on was as far as it got. Of course in the climates and cultures in which he had grown up, cheese was not a healthy thing to have around.

He was never over-fond of desserts. Once a week I would have a bake-in and one of his favourites was an almond and cherry cake which I found in one of my mother’s old recipe books where most of the flour content was replaced by ground almonds, thereby making it an extremely moist cake. You could even store it for a week and it would still be perfectly fresh although when on the day it was baked it rarely lived to see the dawn of another.

In Freddie’s household, there was always a lot of food on stand-by. Ingredients almost never went to waste as we would always find a way of using them and Freddie did not approve of throwing away food. But every so often, Freddie would find something new he wanted, ask for it at half-past-ten at night when it was unobtainable. We therefore learned and kept a stock.

He loved picky foods. On every trip to Lidgates, I would buy anything that looked vaguely interesting such as their sausage rolls of which he was a big fan. They always had something fresh, new and home-made on their counters; pates, small meat pies made of, for example, lamb and leek as well as standard quiches and cheeses. An average weekend’s butcher’s bill would be something in the region of £100, including, of course, bacon and sausages.

Indoor suppers tended to be anything ‘light’… Light to Freddie meant something different from what light might mean to the rest of the world. Light also meant smaller than lunch. We often made Welsh Rarebit or a pasta, spaghetti with a little fish sauce. He was very fond of an original recipe which came out of our kitchen where we would buy three different colour pastas, white, red tomato and green spinach. We would then play around with sauces invented for each colour. The white lent itself very well to a smoked salmon, cheese and cream sauce. The green worked quite well with an ordinary
bolognaise
and the red we would team up with a
prima vera
variety, using any of the baby vegetables which were currently available, carrots, sweet-corn, mangetout. Another of his light favourites was angels’ hair pasta with garlic, chilli and parsley quickly fried in olive oil and then mixed with the pasta. Delia Smith, eat your heart out! I must admit I would have been totally lost without her and her books and Freddie’s culinary intake would have been greatly compromised. Towards the end of life as we knew it at Logan Place, with both Joe and Freddie ill, it fell to me to assume the chef’s role as well as my other chores and duties.

Conflict for the sake of love, I’ve tried to tell you about that. Conflict for the sake of peace, that too. It was what Queen was all about. Conflict for the sake of life… This is what this section is partly about. Freddie hated yes-men; yes-persons to be PC. If you hate yes-persons, you therefore must openly invite the possibility of no-persons, people who say no. Either no, thank you or no, fuck you! Freddie liked people ultimately to be their own people and he craved friends and associates who would resist him because only in that way, through a conflict of sorts, could he realise what he really felt or thought about a situation. I think that’s the reason why all of us stayed with him and he stayed with us for so long. To give an idea of the longevity of staff with Freddie, I was the junior member after seven or eight years until Terry joined the troupe.