Freddie Mercury (30 page)

And it was indeed a sort of
troupe
for it often felt when we went out in public that we were some top-of-the-bill variety turn.

In a way, Freddie was one of the lucky ones. Most of us take each day as it comes, taking things as they happen. Freddie, not because of
who
he was but because of the kind of person he was, mapped out and planned his whole life. Everything he wanted in absolute detail.

If he went out to lunch, it would generally be to the Italian restaurant opposite the Coleherne pub in Brompton Road. Pontevecchio has now metamorphosed into Tusk. In the days when Meridiana was open, he loved going to the talkative, airy restaurant on the site where now stands the jewellers Theo Fennell in Fulham Road. Meridiana had always been a favourite of his even when he would only go there to dine in the evening.

After lunch, if there was any shopping to be done, Harrods was a favourite stopping off point. There was always the variety of goods to catch and please his eye and all under one roof. He loved buying colognes for people and he made at least one specific expedition and bought some of each house’s fragrances and gave presentation packs to everyone he knew. He always included everyone, even his cleaners, Gladys, Mary and Margie in these gestures. If he saw something he liked, he would of course buy it while out on these trips but day-today toiletries and soaps, bath oils, shower gels and hair shampoos would usually be in our realm to buy. He loved bath oils which gave a nice smooth feel to the skin.

If he was specifically shopping, for example, for someone’s birthday present, the Lalique shop on New Bond Street was always a place
where he could find something suitable. While in that area he would often stop off at Tiffany and Cartier and there was also Sotheby’s to be explored. When he spent a morning at Sotheby’s he would usually go to Richoux in South Audley Street and have a light lunch there, something like their Welsh Rarebit or one of their specials of the day with rice and often, if later in the afternoon, sandwiches and Earl Grey. It was a habit he had picked up when Queen were managed by John Reid whose office for a long time was next door at number forty. Always, when he left any of the Richoux establishments, he would pick up two or three of their selections of Godiva Belgian chocolates. I think he liked the packaging as much as the chocolates and when the boxes were empty, everyone having been pressganged into eating the contents, he would of course keep the boxes, some even on display. There was something about Freddie and boxes…

He was very keen on presentation and appreciated and understood its importance. He realised that part of the mystique of food was the way it looked. While he didn’t particularly like the food which was presented as nouvelle cuisine, he adored the patterns the food made on the plates. It is after all only another expression of artistic flair.

At both Sotheby’s and Christie’s, Freddie found many interesting and absorbing people amongst the auction house experts. There were two people with whom he particularly got on, one being Christopher Payne from Sotheby’s in the furniture department who helped Freddie acquire many pieces of his nineteenth century French furniture collection. The other was Martin Beisly from Christie’s who was in charge of the Victorian paintings section. Basically, when Freddie moved into Garden Lodge, he wanted something different to put on the walls and that was when he became more and more interested in Victorian art. Before then, his taste had been much more
avant garde
by way of prints of works by Dali, Miro and Chagall.

His main reading material, particularly in the last two years, was in fact a constant diet of auction catalogues from all over the world, including New York from where I bought one day on the telephone a painting of a gypsy girl. Freddie happened to be away in Switzerland and he had given me a rough guide as to his price ceiling. It didn’t take us long to work out a system of pricing in his absence and he always trusted me. Very roughly, I would be prepared to go to double the bottom estimate price. If he wanted something desperately, I would then use my discretion. You can tell when you’re in the
auction room whether other people bidding against you are prepared to go to the outer limits. I must admit, I loved going to the auctions. It gave me such a buzz. Freddie only went very rarely to attend the actual auction although he would always investigate at the viewing.

The system was that I would pick up catalogues of items in which he might be interested and we would look through the catalogues together and he would pick out specific lots which looked appealing. I would then go and view the pieces and mark down whether it would be worth Freddie’s while coming to see them. While I was walking around I would also look for anything else which we might have missed when reading through the catalogue. I would then report back to Freddie on the condition of the items and on anything else that I had seen. He would decide whether it was worthwhile paying a visit himself. If he went, we would inspect all the items to ensure that my summary had been accurate. We would tick the pieces he wanted in the catalogue and then go off to lunch at Richoux.

He would put the matter out of his mind and try to think afresh when we returned home having put some distance between him and temptation. So many of his purchases had been impulse buys and because he had bought so much, Garden Lodge was beginning to look a little full. But that never seemed to be an argument when he saw something he really liked!

Whenever furniture was bought, I always had to have a van on stand-by almost in the street outside the auction house. Freddie hated the prospect of having to wait until the day after the auction to see his purchase. He would have already signed a blank cheque that morning which I would have taken with me and merely filled in the amount to ensure that the purchase went straight onto the van. Because the auctioneers knew Freddie and were familiar with his whims, I was able to expedite matters. The same principle applied to the buying of paintings except that with a painting, I could always carry it home myself in a taxi.

Freddie’s friend Francesca Thyssen came with me on one of my first jaunts to the auctioneers when Freddie wanted me to bid for his Chagall print which used to hang above the fireplace in the sitting room at Garden Lodge. We sat right at the front under the auctioneer’s desk and when we bought it I think it was the most expensive single item that I had secured for Freddie. It was over thirty thousand pounds. The only time when Freddie came along personally
to an auction was for a decorative arts sale and because he was there in person, the Lalique vase which he was determined to buy went for a vastly inflated price, some thirty-five thousand pounds. But it did look lovely in situ in the sitting room window!

Freddie wasn’t the only person who would send out his agent to do the bidding. Understandably, whenever a ‘famous face’ appears at an auction, people think that there’s money to be thrown around so when someone unknown like me shows up, no one pays much attention.

The only time when he was very disappointed that I didn’t come away with the goods was on yet another occasion when he was in Switzerland and he wanted me to bid for a work by the Catalan painter Joan Miro for whom, as I have already indicated, he had a great admiration. When he saw it hanging in the viewing gallery, he decided he wanted it and at that point said he would go to two hundred and thirty thousand pounds. By the time he’d left for Montreux, the ceiling had been raised to allow me to spend two hundred and fifty thousand. On the morning of the sale I had a phone call from Freddie giving his final decision, “Two hundred and eighty thousand BUT NO MORE!!”

There was a free-far-all in the bidding up to about two hundred thousand pounds which was when I entered the fray and from thereon there was only a telephone bidder and myself. The bidding increased in tens of thousands. I put in the bid at two hundred and eighty and the phone bidder immediately came back with two-ninety. I thought, “Should I? Is it worth it?”

I went to three hundred. My rival came back after a moment’s hesitation at three hundred and ten and so I thought, “What the heck!” I went to three-twenty.

It took a little bit longer but the phone bid was upped to three thirty and I then dropped out.

When I told Freddie, I said that I was very sorry but that I had been unable to secure the painting. Immediately he asked, “So how much did you go?”

“You know you told me two hundred and eighty,” I gulped. “I actually went to three-twenty.”

“Oh,” was all he said and because he was in Switzerland and I couldn’t see his face, I didn’t know whether it was a good or a bad ‘Oh’. “Well,” he concluded, “you should have gone more. You
knew
I wanted that painting!”

Whether he meant it or not, we shall never know although he had saved many thousands of pounds that day. A saving which, after all, he could spend at another auction.

Freddie was never a great shopper for clothes. Generally if Joe or I were out and about and something caught our eye clotheswise which we thought he’d like, we would buy it and present it to Freddie. Jackets, shirts, jumpers… We would also go to Marks and Spencer whence came most of Freddie’s socks although his underwear was usually Calvin Klein. This wasn’t a specific request from Freddie. It was just what Joe thought appropriate. There were, however, several occasions when Freddie shopped for clothes, notably in Ibiza when he went shopping not only for himself but for everyone else in the entourage. Black shirts with Indian patterns, bright floral shirts as well as shorts… A must! Also, on returning from a trip to Japan where he had bought suits and shirts both for himself and everyone else, he brought me back a wonderful red woollen jacket with black leather patches. It sounds naff but it looked sensational.

He had an assortment of suits made for him by David Chambers but in private life, Freddie was not particularly sartorially minded. He was very happy to slop around at home in a sweat shirt and track pants. Whereas he had a very clear idea of the stage image he wished to project and had always dressed that part, especially in the early days when his private life clothes were basically no different from his stage attire, he was no dandy. He never felt the need to dress in the height of fashion and he also never wanted to create a fashion. He was into comfortable clothes.

Although in his later years he would wear a suit to a restaurant or the theatre, when he went out to bars and clubs he would dress in ‘the uniform’ of jeans and T-shirts and leather jacket. He wore trainers mostly and was never into heavy footwear. In the early days he had always worn clogs and in the last year of his life he couldn’t wear leather fitted shoes at all as they hurt his feet so much.

His restaurant tastes would encompass many foods including Chinese, Indian, Lebanese and Italian. He was very fond of the Zen group of Chinese restaurants and as far as Indian cuisine was concerned he was a regular patron of Shezan which, although now closed, was in Cheval Place at the bottom of Montpellier Square in Knightsbridge. He loved Indian food although after Shezan closed, he tended to eat Indian food as take-away only on the occasions when
Joe and I didn’t cook it for him. The Lebanese restaurant on Kensington High Street attracted him because he wanted to “try something different”.

We also persuaded him into enjoying Thai food which was just emerging as the coming new oriental cuisine. We made up some soups using lots of lemon grass and chillis because he loved the hot Tom Yam varieties of thin Thai soups.

He also liked La Famiglia in Chelsea off the Kings Road which had been a favourite since the early days when he and Straker and Clodagh Wallace would often eat there. In Covent Garden he was very fond of Orso’s in Wellington Street and Joe Allen’s in Exeter Street where Jimmy played the piano and where many of Straker’s friends would gather after their West End shows.

As far as the bill at the end of the evening was concerned, Freddie generally wouldn’t even carry his credit card. It would be up to either one of us to make sure that we had remembered to bring his American Express Card. He never had any other credit card. He didn’t feel it necessary.

When he wanted to leave, we could generally guess by his body language that it was time to go and so I or Joe would call our waiter for the bill which we always checked and then handed over Freddie’s credit card. When the card came back with the docket, after adding the service charge if necessary, then we would pass the docket and a pen to Freddie to sign. He very rarely looked at the bills himself and only then if there was some obvious discrepancy which we had found. However, he always knew to some round figure what an evening would be costing him. Despite appearing to be cavalier, he was in fact very canny.

If he stayed in during the evenings he would usually ‘veg out’ and watch television. He would never work his life around television and only very rarely ask that we video something for him and then it would be a programme in which he had a special interest if a friend was appearing or if the programme was a live gig, a Prince concert for example. He had one video of a live Prince concert which he forced many people to watch, sometimes over and over again.

When Freddie settled down to watch such a three hour tape, it could take either fifteen minutes in which we watched only Freddie’s specifically edited highlights or six hours when he would play the same bits over and over again. It was either fast forward or play it
again and again and again, Sam! These video sessions generally occurred at two or three in the morning after Freddie and entourage returned from an evening on the town. The Prince tape was immediately put on and Freddie had sole control of the remote and his guests were subjected to Freddie’s enthusiasm for said artist again and again and again. I managed to avoid ever seeing it but the sound of it haunts me to this day! I was lucky in that I had the excuse of constantly getting drinks for the guests which kept me out of the sitting room.

I think Freddie admired Prince because he was so similar to when Freddie was young. Extrovert on stage, thin, dark, hugely energetic and with that charisma which turns a diminutive form into a giant. Other performers who attracted Freddie’s attention were Aretha Franklin, who loomed large in his admiration stakes until she disappointed him with a concert she gave at the Victoria Apollo. I remember him frequently telling the story of how he went to the show and she sang maybe for a total of half-an-hour, perhaps forty minutes. When she went off, he was expecting her to return at least for an encore but no… That was it. But having said that, his appreciation of her voice never dimmed.