I’m standing outside the plain green door of a house in London’s Kensington, huddled against an 8ft-high wall, seeking shelter from a persistent drizzle. Two young women under umbrellas approach the house tentatively, and one asks me, in a thick Italian accent, if this is the “Freddie Mercury Museum”.
Not really, I reply. It is certainly the house where the famous Queen frontman lived during the 1980s, and this was the very wall that was bedecked with flowers and love-notes following Mercury’s death from an Aids-related illness in 1991. But it was not, and never has been, open to visitors, I explain. The two women leave, a little crestfallen, and I proceed, somewhat guiltily, through the door that has been opened for me.
Not only am I receiving the rare privilege of visiting Garden Lodge, the elegant and discreet Georgian-style villa designed for an artist couple in the early 20th century which Mercury acquired in 1980; I will also see it, for the last time, in exactly the condition in which he left it. The following day, all Mercury’s possessions, art works and furniture will be collected by Sotheby’s, to be displayed and then put up for sale in a series of auctions in September.
I walk through a beautifully kept garden that’s dominated by a magnolia tree about to come into full bloom, and I’m greeted by Mary Austin, the woman who has been living at Garden Lodge for the past 30 years. I peek inside the entrance hall, and we may as well be in the Freddie Mercury Museum. One thing is for sure: I am in the company of the best, perhaps the only, person in the world suited to having been its custodian.
Austin is, famously, one of the most important people in Mercury’s turbulent life, and also one of the least quoted. The pair began a relationship in the early 1970s, before splitting up in the middle of that decade. But they remained best friends. The singer’s numerous references to her during his life — the 1975 ballad “Love of My Life” was dedicated to her — attests to his dependence on her quiet support. He left Garden Lodge, and all its possessions, to Austin in his will.
She, in turn, has remained silent on their relationship, and indeed on any other aspect of his life. Given Mercury’s similar reluctance to talk to the media, their story remains remarkably private, often displaced by opportunistic scandalmongers and writers of fiction.
But Garden Lodge has a few stories of its own to tell. We walk through the light-filled drawing room, and one painting stands out: it is by the late 19th-century Hungarian painter Géza Vastagh, “Young Boy on a Sofa”. It shows a flamboyantly dressed youth with long hair, staring straight ahead, as if into the painter’s own eyes.
It is hard not to imagine that Mercury was looking at a version of himself. But there was something more than that, Austin tells me. The painting was hung very deliberately at an angle adjacent to the garden. As Mercury became bed-ridden during the final days of his illness, he could at least take comfort that he could still “see” his beloved garden through the bohemian boy’s vicarious gaze.
A few weeks later, I meet Austin at Sotheby’s London office to talk about the sale. She is a slight and softly spoken woman, and despite her lack of experience in talking about her life with Mercury, she speaks calmly and clearly of their time together. We talk about the couple’s early days following their meeting in Kensington’s famous Biba store, where Austin worked, and their initial shopping expeditions among the stalls of west London’s weekend markets.
Their first purchase was a spindle back chair. “He saw it in a Fulham Road basement. We didn’t have much money, but eventually he paid £5. He brought it home, it was in terrible condition, he glued it back together, but it still kept falling apart.” It is hard to imagine, the already extrovert rock-star-in-the-making studiously gluing a Victorian piece of furniture together. “Oh, then there were the studio cushions!” she says. “He made loads of them. He cut all the fabrics and sewed them together.”
Mercury had acquired those skills at Ealing Art College in the late 1960s. “We lived in a room in a house, we had one pair of curtains and two windows. We were really wealthy,” she says sarcastically.
Austin was struck by how well Mercury could articulate his appreciation of art. “What a great teacher he was!” she says. “He took me to the Tate Gallery, he wanted to introduce me to the work of Richard Dadd [the Victorian painter of supernatural themes, who created many of his pictures when he was a patient in homes for the mentally ill]. He told me the complete story behind him, and explained every detail of this very intricate painting, with such expert knowledge.” The painting was “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke”, which became the theme and title of a 1974 Queen song.
Once Queen became successful, Mercury called on Austin and another friend to help him find a house. The three of them went to view Garden Lodge. Mercury, at least, was instantly smitten. “On leaving, he said to the owner, ‘I will give you the asking price now if you take it off the market.’” The deal was done. Though she and Mercury were now no longer a couple, Austin remained in a nearby flat when he took possession of his new property.
Was it true, I ask, that they could see each other’s windows and used to signal to each other, as depicted in the film Bohemian Rhapsody? “Well, I haven’t seen it,” Austin replies quickly. They could just about see each other when he lived in his previous flat, but not in Garden Lodge, she says. “That was artistic licence.”
The early 1980s saw Queen cement their reputation as an electrifying live act, and their extensive touring included long spells in New York and Munich. Mercury partied hard and wide during this time, and had little time for Garden Lodge, though he did relay his plans for the house’s refurbishment to Austin, who took charge of the project. “When he was away, I was the linchpin,” she says. “But he chose everything, from the tiniest detail, exactly as he wanted.”
Mercury did not really settle properly into his home until after his widely acclaimed appearance with Queen at the Live Aid concert at Wembley in 1985, says Austin. He began to leave his imprint on the house’s interior, which reflected his newfound interests. While on tour in Japan, he became fascinated by that country’s art and began to collect deeply and seriously. He became an auction-house aficionado, though he often asked Austin to bid for him. “He never gave me a limit. He said, ‘I just want you to buy it,’ when he really wanted something,” she says.
The eclecticism of the items on offer in September’s auctions cannot help but reflect the various sides of Mercury’s career and personality: there are the glamorous decorative pieces by established names such as Cartier, Fabergé, Tiffany; exquisite Mughal miniature paintings; stage memorabilia such as the famous crown and cloak worn during his last tour with Queen; handwritten lyrics for the group’s most famous songs, including “We Are the Champions”, “Killer Queen” and “Don’t Stop Me Now”; and Mercury’s own artwork, including a playful, intricate drawing of the band that shows off his draughtsmanship.
The top lot is a painting by James Tissot, “Type of Beauty” (1880), estimated at between £400,000 and £600,000. It was the last work of art Mercury bought, and he placed it behind the television screen in the drawing room so he could see it when relaxing on the sofa. The painting depicts the artist’s muse and mistress Kathleen Newton, whose background as an Irish Catholic divorcee ruined the painter’s reputation. Did the scandalous back-story pander to Mercury’s mischievous instincts?
The most striking room in the house was the dining room, painted in a deep and bright yellow, housing a theatrically laid table, with two Lalique panthers prowling amid the Czech glasses and high-end cutlery. Prints by Matisse, Chagall and Braque adorned one wall; a French chinoiserie clock sat beneath them. It was an intimate space, a reflection perhaps of what Mercury wanted from his house: a formal, sacred space that offered a sharp contrast to the noise of his outside world.
“It was too small,” says Austin firmly of the room. “I don’t think he had his thinking hat on. But he loved laying the table, and he loved tablecloths. I think that may have come from his colonial days [Mercury was born to Parsee parents in Zanzibar and spent most of his childhood in India]. And his pièce de résistance was writing the name cards.”
There must have been some wild times in the house, I suggest. “Oh, yes. But I never went to them. Because I wasn’t invited. I needed protecting.” She says this last sentence without any hint of irony, as if it were an obviously true fact. It feels as if she is being protective of Mercury today, declining to divulge any details of the singer’s saltier exploits during those barnstorming years. “There were some stories,” she teases. “You only have to look at the Polaroids.” There are Polaroids? “Yes. They are in the loft,” she deadpans.
In Mercury’s case, as with so many other artists during that period, the good times were followed by tragedy. He was diagnosed with Aids in the late 1980s, and became the subject of gradually intensifying media pressure. “The reason he had left for New York was because of press intrusion,” says Austin. “He was gay, and he wanted that to remain private and secret. So that did upset him very much.”
As the illness progressed, Garden Lodge became more and more important to him as a sanctuary. “I think performing, and everything that being a successful musician brings, it can just wash over and through you, and leave you unsure of who you ever were. I think Garden Lodge gave him the chance to rediscover himself. He walked back into being who he was — the person that I knew — back in the 1970s.”
Austin finds it hard to talk about Mercury’s final days, but does recall a typically cynical exchange she overheard through the window: “A motorcyclist arrived to collect the photographers’ films at the end of the day, and one of them shouted out, ‘He’s not dead yet.’ Nice thing to say.”
The display window at Sotheby’s on Bond Street is currently showing a loop of assorted Queen videos and Mercury memorabilia, promoting its forthcoming exhibition and sales. It’s a sign of the changing times: although the Mercury sale is not in the same league financially as the auction house’s big modern and contemporary art sales, it gives the place an unmistakable buzz, and shows it to be in tune with its clients’ evolving collecting habits.
Austin saw the display for the first time as she walked in the previous day, and admits to welling up when she saw a picture of the crown. Things catch her by surprise that way, even 30 years later. When I ask her about Mercury’s music-making, whether it resembled the studious and detailed way he approached his art collecting, she finds it hard to answer, as she says she never felt she was involved with it.
“I never used to read the lyrics of his songs, until we were preparing for this sale. But as I was looking through them I saw his handwritten lyrics to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, I got to the second page and I had to stop. I just couldn’t do it.” (Sotheby’s has yet to confirm whether those lyrics will be included in the sale.)
After Mercury’s death, Austin says she felt conflicted about what to do with Garden Lodge. (She had two children with the painter and businessman Piers Cameron. They parted in 1993.) “It was quite a statement to live with, and to feel that I deserved it,” she says.
After 10 months, she finally decided to move in. “I realised it was something that Freddie was trying to share. But it took time for me to appreciate that what was within [the house] was romance, beauty, him. I wasn’t living with him, but I was living through his eyes, through his artistic view. If I had a bad day, I could look at a painting and it would make me smile.
“Freddie’s death took the wind out of my sails, I have to say. Being in that house helped me through those times, and helped me rebuild myself. It gave me back my sanity.”
The decision to clear the house of its belongings, after 30 years of meticulous care, came suddenly and unexpectedly. “I saw one day that my neighbour was moving, and there was this removal truck outside, and as she left I felt a little bit envious. As the days passed, I said to myself, ‘I think I’m ready. It’s time to move on.’” She has no immediate plans to put the house itself on the market.
I ask her what Mercury, as an auction-house devotee, would have made of the £300,000 upper estimate for his handwritten lyrics to “We Are the Champions”? “Quite right!” she says with a smile. And how about any items that didn’t make the sale? She must have kept something for herself?
“The spindle back chair,” she says simply.
‘Freddie Mercury: A World of His Own,’ free public exhibition at Sotheby’s, New York, June 1-8, and travelling to LA, Hong Kong; then London, August 4-September 5, with auctions running from September 6-13. sothebys.com/FreddieMercury
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