Freddie Mercury was notoriously private. It has become a near-cliché to note that, counter to his ostentatious showbiz persona, he was reserved, modest, perhaps even shy. He felt acutely that he could never match up, as a man, to the monster that was his alter-ego, and this greatly contributed to the policies that would dictate his career – few interviews, no candidness, and certainly no desire to provide any kind of justification for himself: there was no “coming out” for a regular on London’s gay scene, no reference that he was anything other than white British, a staunch refusal to discuss his failing health until barely a day before AIDS-induced bronchopneumonia took his life far too soon. We didn’t even know that he was not, in fact, born as Frederick until after his death.
And that’s not all that we have learned in the three decades since. We know how long he had been diagnosed as terminally ill, the intimate details of how it was revealed to his nearest and dearest, how difficult he found his education in an Indian boarding school, a deep love of Japanese art, even a fondness for chilli con carne. Freddie Mercury, the musician and showman, has evolved into Freddie Mercury the pop culture icon and behemoth and taken Freddie Mercury the private individual with it.
So it is, perhaps, inevitable that this synergy between artist, celebrity and human has finally peaked here, now, at the time when a celebrity’s private life is pored over as much as their public one, and as Freddie’s generation begin to enter the final stages of their natural lifespan. Mary Austin, Freddie’s one-time partner, closest confidante, and heir to his estate, has cited a need to “put her affairs in order” as the reason why almost everything of note belonging to Freddie Mercury has been emptied from Garden Lodge, the well-hidden Kensington mansion where he lived and died, and now sit in Sotheby’s on London’s New Bond Street awaiting their sales at auction, estimated to raise several millions of pounds. For one month, you can visit them in a free exhibition, which feels like scant consolation as genuinely important relics of our shared cultural tapestry presumably disappear immediately afterwards into inaccessible private collections.
You don’t need to be a Queen afficionado to recognise much of it: here’s the robe and crown he wore at the climax of Queen’s 1986 European tour, his very last; and here are his handwritten notations, including corrections, on a new number entitled “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Others are new to even the most obsessive Queen fan, presumably the only potential audience for the ownership of a seating plan for a sit-down meal at home for his friends. Together, they prove that there really is now no demarcation between the Freddie Mercury’s.
I’ve loved Freddie Mercury for practically as long as I’ve been alive. It is not an exaggeration to admit that it is a long-standing dream to be able to simply enter a building and see almost everything he ever wore, wrote and purchased. It’s a wildest dream come true that such a building now, temporarily, exists, and less than an hour from my home. It was in this conflicted state of mind that I attended Sotheby’s exhibition “Freddie Mercury: A World Of His Own” on opening day.
The first thing you note as you queue outside is that some poor staffer had to order a giant, furry moustache to place over the entrance. Everyone else seemed to find it hilarious, but, to me, it was simply an immediate reminder of how inherently confused and bizarre this event truly is: a piece of physical comedy to welcome you into the separation and sale of a life’s work. The second is the surprising revelation that many of Freddie’s most famous outfits are simply sat in the open. On the first floor, you can see an array of arguably his most famous costumes: the pink suit from the music video to “The Great Pretender,” the black military jacket from his 39th birthday party in Munich, his winged satin get-up from the 1975 Queen tour, all modelled by a rather sinister posse of crudely Freddie-fied mannequins, and all mere inches from your face. But worse still are those seemingly deemed less important. Temporarily living in a back room, these wares are thrown absent-mindedly across various coat-hangers, or hung awkwardly from the walls, in what can only be described as a scruffy yet pricey H&M sale. And these weren’t long-forgotten jeans and scarves, either: costumes from videos such as “It’s A Hard Life,” “I Was Born To Love You,” “Made In Heaven” and “These Are The Days Of Our Lives,” the suit worn at his last ever public appearance at the 1990 Brit Awards and a Hawaiian shirt you can see in a photograph his partner Jim Hutton took in his garden, which happens to be Freddie’s last known picture. As I look around at the minimal security, I briefly wonder how easy it could be to take a piece of music history and walk out unencumbered.
If the clothes worn by a dying man don’t seem quite invasive enough for you, then the various rooms of private Freddie ephemera will be a goldmine. You can see his sofa, the sliding doors of his shower, the box of travel Scrabble that accompanied him on tours, his home piano, various books used as ornaments (Freddie famously considered reading a waste of time), all of which have conveniently-placed lot numbers, in case we forget the real reason it’s all here. It almost feels a relief when you realise that his ashes, after all, are one of the few “personal items” Mary has chosen to keep.
Fandom is a strange beast, it is – at its heart – an emotional response to the life and work of someone or something you’ll never truly know. I am self-aware enough to understand, as I gawp sentimentally at an old pair of Freddie’s aviator sunglasses, that this is an illogical reaction to what are ultimately pieces of cloth, wood and plastic, or roughly-scribbled notes on British Midland calendars. I never knew Freddie Mercury, I wasn’t even eighteen-months-old when he died. Ultimately, I have no idea how he would have felt about the prospect of his art, life and moustache comb becoming a temporary news item before being folded up and carted away for a price, but on my way home from an event that let me closer to my hero than I have ever been, it felt as if I was allowed in too far, or worse, that I have contributed to the selling-off of a private human being.
There were three Freddie Mercury’s. One was Freddie the outrageous rockstar. He was flamboyant, extravagant and extroverted, Freddie the artist was serious, studious and driven. Freddie the person, however, was shy and extremely private. If anything, he successfully compartmentalised these into different areas of his life, but now they have been metamorphosed into Freddie Mercury the commodity, and the commodity will, next month, be sold piecemeal to the highest bidders. Get your paddles ready.
Histoire de Perry Hewitt 