I know the truth about Freddie

Someone emailed me to ask, ‘What do YOU know about Freddie Mercury?’
This was my response:
In 1986, I was with Freddie and Queen in Budapest, for their historic Hungarian gig. A decade later, five years after Freddie’s death in November 1991, I began to research his life for a definitive biography.

I voyaged to his birthplace Zanzibar by air and sea to locate his Parsi relatives, visit locations associated with him, and to begin to unravel the tangle of his early life. Also in 1996, I went to Munich to stay with his Austrian-German lover, Barbara Valentin, and to County Carlow, Ireland, to spend a few days with his ‘last official partner’, Jim Hutton.

During the summer of 1997, I hosted a party at London’s Groucho Club – scene of a number of Queen celebrations down the years, and of which I am a founder member – to launch my first Freddie biography. Jim, Barbara, Freddie’s former PA Peter Freestone and other Freddie- and Queen-related folk attended.

know-the-truth-about-freddieI researched and wrote another, completely new biography of him that was published in 2011. That book was repackaged and relaunched in 2018, as ‘Bohemian Rhapsody: The Definitive Biography of Freddie Mercury’.

Three years later, I was back with ‘Love of My Life’: a deep dive into Freddie’s closest relationships. It was the book that prompted his hitherto hidden daughter to reach out to me. I had come closer, she told me, to the real Freddie than any previous author or film maker.

Because, as she so rightly identified, Freddie Mercury never existed. That Freddie was a creation, a construct, a caricature; a mask behind which the real Freddie – Freddie Bulsara – could hide. But as she added, ‘There are still some things you should know.’

She and I worked together for the next four years, to create ‘Love, Freddie’. That book was published on 5th September last year, on what would have been his seventy-ninth birthday.

I knew from the outset that his daughter, to whom I refer throughout the book as ‘B’, but whom her father called ‘Bibi’, did not have much longer to live. She was ill with chordoma, a rare form of spinal cancer. That was the reason why she wanted to restore his true life story.

Working from the seventeen handwritten journals her father had given her four months before his death, it was what we did. Bibi was devastated by the outpourings of venom and spite heaped on us both in response to news of her existence. She, her husband and two young children were on the last holiday they would take together at the time, in South America.

As they were crossing the Andes mountains, her husband told me, they learned that Freddie’s ‘former fiancée’ Mary Austin had given an interview to The Sunday Times, in which she insisted that Freddie did not keep notebooks/journals/diaries, and that she would be ‘amazed’ if he had fathered a daughter as she knew nothing of any child.

Bibi was shocked. As far as she was concerned, because Freddie had written as much in his personal diaries, Mary was the one person who knew absolutely everything about it. She later speculated as to whether he had written that because he had intended to reveal all to Mary, only the timing was never right.

HIV virus

He then contracted the HIV virus and became ill. She also wondered whether Mary had indeed known everything, but had made a promise to Freddie to maintain her silence on the subject, a promise that she would never break.

Mary had never once responded to Bibi’s many letters and cards written and sent over nearly half a century. When it was later announced that Mary will publish her own book in July this year, based on the notebooks and journals that Freddie had left her – even though she had insisted in The Sunday Times that he had never kept notebooks or journals – all became clear.

Bibi clung to life for the sake of her partner and two little boys. Following the family’s final Christmas together, she died at their second home in the South of France on Monday, 5th January. Her husband and sons returned home to Switzerland, where they scattered her ashes in the Alps so that she may ‘watch over her children’ as they grow. Father and daughter are now reunited in Zoroastrian heaven, which is known as the World of Thoughts.

It was the privilege of my life to have known them both, and to have been given the opportunity to write this and all my previous Freddie books.

What do I know about Freddie Mercury? I know the truth.