It is almost 32 years since Freddie Mercury died in the upstairs bedroom of his home, Garden Lodge, on a quiet side street in Kensington, London. But fans from all over the world still ring the bell of the sturdy door set into the high brick wall, which hides the property from the street.
“‘Can we see the house?’ It’s been like that for 32 years,” says Mary Austin, the woman who was Mercury’s lover for six years, and remained his closest friend and confidante until his death, and to whom he left the house and all its contents in his will.
It is where she has continued to live, surrounded by the extraordinary collection of art, antiques and the personal possessions he accumulated throughout his life.
But no longer.
Next month, the entire contents of the house will come up for auction at Sotheby’s in London – some 35,000 items in 1500 lots that will be sold across six separate auctions. It is one of the biggest single-owner sales to come under the hammer in years, surpassed only by the sales of the collections of Elton John and Andy Warhol (both 1988) and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (1997).
Staggering in its size and range, it casts a new and fascinating light on Mercury not simply as a collector but as a connoisseur of the arts, reflecting his various passions for 19th-century portraiture and French and Italian furniture, Japanese art, ceramics and textiles, art deco and nouveau objects, for Erté and Goya, Picasso and Miró, Fabergé, Tiffany and Daum.
The highlight will be the Evening Auction on September 6, where items include the Yamaha baby grand piano on which Mercury wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and other hits, the working lyrics for that song, written on a British Midlands Airways 1974 calendar, an assortment of his most famous stage costumes and the original green door to the grounds of Garden Lodge, covered in graffiti and dedications left by fans following his death.
Austin and Mercury met in 1969. They lived together for six years until Mercury told her he thought he was bisexual. No, Austin told him, ‘I think you’re gay.’ It was the end of their romantic relationship, but not their friendship.
It was Austin who first visited Garden Lodge with Mercury in 1980 when he was looking for a new home.
The property was built in 1908 for the painter Cecil Rea and his wife, the sculptor Constance Halford. Over the years, it was owned by Peter Wilson, the chairman of Sotheby’s, and the British intelligence operative Tomás Harris. When Mercury bought the house, it was owned by a member of the Hoare banking family.
She remembers walking through the green door and into the garden, “and it was so peaceful, so tranquil; there were children playing and this house at the end of the path. And the house was a mirror of the garden, very peaceful and tranquil and full of light. A very happy house, I thought, very much an artist’s house. It took my breath away; I can only imagine it took his breath away too. He made an offer for the asking price on the condition that it was removed from the market immediately.”
Garden Lodge, Austin says, became his sanctuary, a place to retreat from the spotlight, and where the harmony between his collection and its setting became something of a work of art in itself, each object carefully selected to reflect his character, his taste and sensibility.
A few months ago I visited Garden Lodge, prior to everything being removed to be itemised, catalogued and stored in readiness for auction, and was shown around by Austin and David Macdonald, Sotheby’s senior director and head of single-owner sales.
Stepping through the door into the hall, I was stopped in my tracks. In the years that Austin had lived here, she had not changed a thing.
“It’s as it was,” she said, gesturing around the hall where we stood. “When he first moved in we moved the furniture around, and it ended up in the best place. So to move it around again would never have worked. Every piece is exactly where he placed it.”
It felt as if Mercury had just stepped out a moment before I arrived.
Every piece is exactly where he placed it.
The exquisite 19th-century Florentine marble table, inlaid with lapis, malachite and jade, that stood in the hall, the romantic 19th-century portraits hanging on the wall. In the drawing room, light flooded in through the huge picture window. There was the jewel in the crown of Mercury’s art collection, a painting by James Tissot, Type of Beauty: Portrait of Mrs Kathleen Newton, which Mercury bought shortly before his death, alongside Indian miniatures dating back to the 16th century, and an elaborately carved 19th-century French art nouveau cabinet, displaying a Meissen dinner service, delicately painted with botanical specimens.
In one corner stood the Yamaha piano, bought for about £1000 in 1975 as Queen’s star was rising and Mercury’s musical ambitions were outstripping his old upright piano. When not composing some of his biggest hits on the instrument, he would entertain Austin by playing numbers from Winifred Atwell, the Trinidadian pianist who was all the rage in the 1950s.
It was only as she was preparing for the sale that Austin opened up the piano stool, finding an assortment of drawings and lyrics that had lain undisturbed for 30 years, including a sketch of the band captioned “Dearie me!” and one of Jimi Hendrix. “He was always drawing Hendrix,” Austin said. “He adored him.”
(Ephemera provides an amusing sideshow in the auction. A 1985 Christmas card to friends is signed, “Wishing You a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the Preening, Pouting, Posing, Posturing Old Tart.”)
At the back of the room is a minstrel’s gallery, offering a commanding view on to the garden, and where Mercury installed a bar, made from maple and pink marble, to entertain friends. A Japanese lacquer cigarette case and Lalique ashtray – Mercury was an incorrigible smoker – sat on the bar. Beside it, a wooden art deco figure of a moustachioed waiter in a red waistcoat – looking uncannily like Mercury, stood at attention, tray outstretched.
We climbed the main staircase, passing a series of playful paintings of nudes by William Russell Flint, to the landing, the walls hung with drawings by Goya. A door opened to Mercury’s dressing room, lushly carpeted, enclosed by mirrored cupboards. On an 18th-century Louis XV-style giltwood writing table stood a porcelain figurine of a harlequin and a Cartier clock.
The closet doors opened to reveal a trove of Mercury’s stage costumes. Catsuits worn on Queen’s 1977 tour, including one with god of Mercury wings; the leather jacket worn in the We Will Rock You video, the drag costume from the video of the Great Pretender; the black military tunic Mercury wore to the Fashion Aid benefit at the Royal Albert Hall in 1985. Pairs of ballet shoes, size 8.
Because he trusted me I’ve felt so protective of everything.
In a box was the red velvet robe, trimmed with fake ermine, and the paste, rhinestone and fake-fur crown – a replica of the coronation crown – worn by Mercury on his last performance with Queen, at Knebworth in 1986.
When Austin inherited the house in 1991, there was no thought that she would ever do anything but preserve it as it was.
“It’s very hard to explain why I would keep everything, because people are just never going to understand,” she says. “But because he trusted me I’ve felt so protective of everything. I’m in a place of love, so why change it?”
But time changes everything.
A few weeks later I met Austin again, in a conference room at Sotheby’s Bond Street auction room. She is a slightly built woman with a serene and thoughtful manner, who speaks in a quiet, hesitant voice.
Other than her private rooms, Garden Lodge was now all but empty, the walls bare. “I’ve got a trestle table, on loan from Sotheby’s, chairs, and there’s nothing. It’s empty and still beautiful.”
She smiled.
“I’m 72, and next birthday I’m not going to be 50. I’m heading towards, hopefully, being an octogenarian and I just felt that this had to be done in my lifetime.
“I looked at everything and thought, we’ve had our journey. Freddie was a romantic for sure, and I am too. All these artefacts, most of them are antique; they’ve travelled the years, from the 1800s to today, they’ve had various owners, they’ve been loved and cherished – that’s why they’re in such good condition. And now is their journey to their new owner.
“Prior to everything being taken out of the house, I walked around and relived a moment with each of them, and imagined them in their new life. And not one of them was sorry to leave. And I just wished them lots of love and good luck in their new homes. And with some it was, wow haven’t seen you for a while. Bye!” She laughs. “I’m not Miss Havisham.”
Among the items at auction is the guest book that Mercury kept for his dinner parties at Garden Lodge, listing the menus (shredded chicken salad, Thai coconut shrimp, seafood potstickers in lemon sauce), wine and flowers – and the placement.
Among the gathering of friends and celebrities, Mary, one notices, was always seated at his right hand. “That never occurred to me.” She pauses. “I always thought it was because I was useful – it was closer to the kitchen.”
It seems to mean more than that.
“Probably more than I would want to admit.” She pauses. “I spent time living with him, and time reflecting, and time finding myself and not really placing myself within the dynamics of those years that we spent. It’s only now that everything is revolving and moving that I’m finding myself back in 1969 and just reliving it, really, replaying life as one does.”
They met through friends. She was an 18-year-old sales assistant at Biba, the fashionable Kensington boutique. He was 23, an art school graduate – Freddie Bulsara then – running a clothes and textile stall in Kensington Market, about to reinvent himself as the lead singer for a group called Smile that would later become known as Queen.
It was the thing in those days, she says, to drop by the pub after work. “You’d wonder, is anyone there tonight? Just as one did in the ‘60s. I really didn’t know Freddie very well at all.”
And then he asked her out. She remembers the date. “Fifty-four years ago on the 6th of September. We went to the Marquee; I have a horrible feeling that Mott the Hoople were playing. And he was a lot more open than he was in the crowd. He was very open, very warm and funny – and we gelled. Which is not what I’d thought… I thought it was just a night out with one of the crowd. It never occurred to me that it was anything more than that.
“Then the weeks unfolded and we’d meet at lunchtime. He didn’t have a lot of money, so it was half a lager or something, then I’d go back to Biba, he would go back to the market.”
Then one day, she remembers, they were passing Barkers, the department store.
“There used to be a florist outside, and he said, ‘Wait there, I won’t be a minute.’ I was thinking, I’ve to get back to work… And he came back with a single red rose. He gave it to me, and I went back to Biba, thinking, what is this? He could never articulate…”
At that point, she says, she was not in love with him. “But the more we met one-to-one at the pub, and the more I got to know him, I somehow found the human being and once I found the human being I was sold.”
They lived together in a series of Kensington flats for the next six years. But by 1975 things were beginning to change in Mercury’s life. Queen had become a major phenomenon and were touring the world – and he was struggling with questions about his identity and sexuality. And then came the recognition that he was gay.
“It was a difficult period, yes, for sure.” She pauses. “We’d arrived at the point where he presented me with an engagement ring. I realise now, it was Christmas Day, so it was a gift, and mine to keep.
“But I think he found, as he explored his career, and the breadth of life he was being exposed to, that he’d arrived at that period of transition for him. I could see he was a very confused man. But with hindsight, reading the lyrics to certain songs – mainly Bohemian Rhapsody – you could see where the key change began.
“I can’t tell you what he was thinking, because I would be assuming. But I do know he found it difficult to acknowledge within himself, and I could see it was confusing him, and hurting him.” It brought an end to their romantic relationship. “Once Freddie’s life changed I realised that I had to, and what was in the past, I had to keep very much in the past. A new chapter was beginning, and I was ready to begin that new chapter.”
Mary went on to have two sons, the older of whom Mercury was godfather to, although his poor health meant he was unable to attend the ceremony. While Mercury had numerous lovers, spending the last seven years of his life with Jim Hutton, it might be said that Mary was until the very end the only person he truly loved – the person to whom he dedicated his song Love of My Life.
“All my lovers asked me why they couldn’t replace Mary,” he said in a 1985 interview, “but it’s simply impossible. The only friend I’ve got is Mary, and I don’t want anybody else. To me, she was my common-law wife. To me, it was a marriage. We believe in each other, that’s enough for me.”
“Before he died he said, ‘I’ve left you the house because you would have been the woman I would have married, and by rights this would all have been yours anyway,’” Austin says. “What do you say? Well, OK…”
It’s a measure of how much he loved you.
“Yes. And I suppose that’s what I found more difficult than anything living in the house – what could have been and what was are so different. How do you carry that piece of luggage through life? You don’t. You put it in the cupboard, store it away and leave it well alone, because here was a man that could have loved you in a conventional way. Do you really want to rummage through that? No. It is what it is. It was what it was.”
For more than 30 years, she says, the house has been “the most glorious memory box, because it has such love and warmth.
“Everything Freddie bought, he bought with a space in mind. ‘Ah – that’s the perfect size! This is where I want to put it. Measure the wall – it will fit beautifully.’ And where it didn’t, it ended up in the loft.”
Mercury was a fastidious and knowledgeable collector. The bookshelves in Garden Lodge were lined with books on every aspect of the arts and crafts, along with auction room catalogues and magazines. He would make private visits to auction houses, but preferred not to bid himself. Instead he would send Austin or his personal assistant Peter Freestone to bid on his behalf, a blank signed cheque in hand.
“I’d arrive back from an auction, and the anticipation on his face…” Austin smiles at the memory. “‘Did you get it?’ Yes. And then after would be, ‘How much?’ Why he would trust my judgment, I don’t know. There were one or two items that shocked me.”
She remembers being instructed to bid for a particular item in an auction of clocks. “It appeared, and I thought, ‘Why?’ It looked quite dilapidated; the colour lacked lustre. So I bid, took it back, gave it to him, and I said, there were so many beautiful clocks… And he said, ‘Ah, you wait and see after I’ve finished with it.’ And it came back, regilded, the enamel, everything – it was just stunning. And then I realised how gifted he was. He’d seen this and thought, ‘Yes, I know exactly what I’m going to do with you.’”
The clock sat on the mantelpiece in what Mercury called the Japanese Room. He had developed a particular obsession with the country on Queen’s first tour there in 1975, and on his trips thereafter he amassed a collection of antiques, textiles, paintings and kimonos – lots and lots of kimonos.
Among the most exquisite pieces in the auction is an early woodblock print of perhaps the most famous work by the ukiyo-e artist Utagawa Hiroshige, Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake, 1857.
When a print came up for sale at Sotheby’s in 1977, Mary was dispatched to buy it. “But there was a large Japanese contingent at the auction, and it was getting really expensive. I thought, I really don’t think I should bid much more, he’s going to kill me, so I stopped. When I told him, he was not pleased. Then, on his last trip to Japan, he came back and it was, ‘Look what I’ve bought, you’ll never guess.’ And it was the same print, and he’d paid exactly the hammer price at Sotheby’s.” She laughs. “I felt really foolish.”
Everything he collected had a purpose, she says, “and a romance. And he was such a good teacher. For instance, when he started collecting Japanese prints he would explain how the artist would approach the woodblock, so every time I look at a print I remember the journey, and I remember his teaching, I could see his eye, why he would like it, the colours, the technique. It mirrored him.”
“I am hopeless with money,” Mercury once admitted. “I simply spend what I’ve got.” He collected prolifically, extravagantly, Austin says – but not obsessively. “Although I think he realised that it could become obsessive, and then he stopped. The Japanese Room was chock-a-block. There wasn’t a piece of wall space where he could put any more prints.” Sorting out items for the auction, she came across a number of boxes with lot numbers, “with these beautiful prints inside; which had never been hung on the wall”.
Mercury never discussed his collection publicly, and never agreed to have it, or Garden Lodge, photographed in arts, design or architectural magazines. “It was the difference between his public and private persona. Garden Lodge, and all the collection within, was private to him. He was just very discreet.”
The public would see the flamboyant extrovert. “But there was a side of him that was very quiet, thoughtful, meditative,” Austin says. “And that reflective, meditative person needed ‘Mercury’ in order to fulfil his ambition.”
He was such a warm, special human being, really.
It was his alter ego.
“Yes, and I’ve watched people through the years who do conjure up an alter ego and the alter ego takes over. But Freddie always managed the alter ego, and Garden Lodge, and keeping that side of his life private, was Freddie’s meditative space, where he would go back to being Freddie, not ‘Mercury’.”
In the last flat where they lived together, she remembers, his gold discs hung on the wall. When he moved to Garden Lodge, they were put in the loft.
“He was such a warm, special human being, really. He cared about everyone who worked for him, and would go out buying things – ‘he or she would so love that…' But it was always a meaningful gift. It was never a question of, I need to curry favour here. It was always to show appreciation.
“He was a perfectionist about everything in life. Most perfectionists are demanding – often more demanding of themselves than they are of others – and the only person he persecuted with his perfectionism was himself. And he would be hurt by things, but no one would see that side of him. Which made me more protective of him.”
Over the years, she has, in a sense, been the custodian of their relationship, refusing interviews, never talking about it until now.
She was sent the script for the 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody, which starred Rami Malek as Freddie, and asked if she wanted to meet Lucy Boynton, who starred as Austin. But having guarded her privacy for so long, she chose not to, and she has never watched the film.
“I saw the trailers, with Rami Malek singing at Live Aid, and I thought, wow, that’s incredible editing. But then I thought, no, I can’t watch this. Not because it’s a bad film; but it’s not Freddie, so it’s not my life. The juxtaposition is too far removed. I couldn’t relate to it at all.”
Now, relinquishing the objects – the paintings, the piano, the ornaments, everything that filled the house – is not relinquishing the memories, nor the love she shared with Mercury.
She has kept just one thing from their life together, a spindle chair, bought on a shopping expedition to an auction house in the King’s Road, early in their relationship.
“We had very little money but we needed furniture. He found this chair, and haggled – we got it for £5 – and it wasn’t in great order. So we glued it back together. Since then I’ve had it repaired and refurbished, and I thought I would keep it for sentimental reasons.”
Now the house is empty, she says, it’s as if she has been transported back to the day of viewing it for the first time, “and Freddie making plans. It’s such a warm house, a family house, really.” She has not yet decided whether to sell or keep it.
There is nothing that has gone that she misses. “I can still see everything in my mind’s eye. Going through the house I replace the blank wall with the Tissot. Over the years everything has become so familiar. Through the objects I can still see and feel and remember happy times. The ghosts that were here before are gone. It took a while for them to go, but then all the nice memories fall into place.”
What were the ghosts?
“Watching Freddie become frail, watching him pass away…” She pauses.
“How do you explain that this individual human being deserved my total and utter appreciation, and love? And that love did alter, it had its journey.
“I think Shakespeare put it best in the sonnets: ‘Love is not love, Which alters when it alteration finds.’ And that’s absolutely true. It is that journey. It’s not one I quite understood at the beginning, but when you read the sonnets and you reflect, you think, yes, that is love. It’s a wonderful emotion to feel, and a wonderful emotion to accept from another human being. But it took me a long time to understand that.”
She thinks about this. “Freddie’s death was the hardest thing of all to deal with. But the rest was just joy. Everything he bought had a joyful connotation, and then went on to mean a lot to him. There’s a lot of love shifting through all the artefacts and through the house. Really, his last gift was the gift of love.”