HE was a larger-than-life rock god and she was a quiet shop girl who spent decades guarding their secrets.
But 35 years after Freddie Mercury’s death, his former fiancée and best friend Mary Austin, is finally laying bare the mysterious bond they shared.
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In the year that he would have turned 80, Mary has chosen to open up about life with one of Britain’s biggest musical legends in her book -Freddie Mercury: A Life in Lyrics.
With Freddie being openly gay it’s a relationship that has baffled fans especially as the singer, born Farrokh Bulsara, left his home and archive to Mary, when he died in 1991.
When asked if she had had any suspicions about his sexuality in the early days of their relationship, she recalled him bumping into one of his ex-girlfriends, who he’d described as bisexual.
She told the The Guardian that she thought the Queen star was “testing” her to see if she was bisexual too.
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“Retrospectively, I can say he could have been on a fishing trip,” she said. “But I didn’t want a menage a trois. I’m heterosexual. I don’t stretch that far, you know.”
Mary says her earliest memory of Freddie is seeing him standing by a fireplace in a home in Barnes, southwest London, with his hair flowing like a “dramatic halo” as he discussed band names.
Mary was with Brian May, who had invited her to join a group of his pals in the pub after they’d met at a music gig.
Brian, Freddie and Roger Taylor began talking in the sitting room. Brian and Roger were college friends in a band together, and Freddie had recently replaced their singer.
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It was Freddie himself who had suggested Queen – which Mary admitted she had voted against, in favour of Build Your Own Boat, which had been floated by Brian.
Queen was eventually chosen, and the band played their first gig on June 27, 1970, in Roger’s home town of Truro, followed by gigs in London.
The next time Mary saw Freddie was in late August, when he came into Biba – the clothes shop where she was working, to ask if she wanted to go to the Marquee music club with him on the 5th of September.
The query took Mary by surprise because they barely knew each other – and she was taken aback by his confidence.
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To clinch the deal, Freddie told her it was his birthday.
Mary admitted she’d said she was busy on the fifth, and suggested the following evening instead – September 6, 1970 – a day she wrote in The Times as being one that “changed the course of my life.”
She wrote: “I saw something different in Freddie. The nervous energy I witnessed in Barnes had softened; he was gentle, almost mellow. And although there was no instant romantic connection, there was … something. Freddie and I went from friends to boyfriend and girlfriend.”
Two months into their relationship, things progressed swiftly as Freddie – at that point working on a jewellery and vintage clothes stall in Kensington Market – asked if they could move in together.
By January 1971, they were sharing a cramped, £5 per week, shared flat close to Kensington High Street that only had enough room for a bed, a small table and two chairs.
Mary admitted this period felt like they were “building something together.”
On Christmas Day 1973, after the pair had moved into a second small apartment in Kensington, on Holland Road, Freddie proposed.
Mary, was 22, and Freddie, then 27, had concealed the ring box inside multiple boxes.
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Mary said: “Freddie looked as nervous as I’d ever known him as he popped the question, ‘Will you marry me?’ We hadn’t talked about marriage. Even so, I didn’t need to think. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I will.’”
While the first album wasn’t a huge success, things turned around after a performance of Seven Seas of Rhye on Top of the Pops, in February 1974.
The exposure saw the song reach number 10 in the UK singles chart – followed by Killer Queen reaching number two in October of the same year.
As the sales poured in each day, Mary said she could see a “mixture of relief and excitement growing in him [Freddie].”
By the summer of 1975, Mary had started to work for Freddie as his PA.
She often worked 10 hours a day and was “always on call” as Freddie’s “right-hand woman.”
Their relationship started to dwindle in the years that followed.
In early 1977, Freddie told Mary that he was bisexual, to which she replied: “No, you’re gay.”
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She added: “He didn’t reply to that. It wasn’t said to wound him, nor to deny him anything, just that I knew immediately what his proclamation meant for me.
“Looking back, I realise that he’d been struggling internally for a long time. Emotionally, he was sincere with me, but physically he was moving somewhere else.”
For 18 months, they stayed living together, and Freddie was open about the men in his life, including his first long-term partner – business manager David Minns.
After frequenting New York’s underground clubs, the highly-sexed singer reached peak promiscuity while living in Munich.
During a rare interview in 1985, Freddie shared: “I used to be just an old slag who got up every morning, scratched his head, and wondered who he wanted to f*** today. I just lived for sex. I’m a very sexual person but I’m much more choosy now than I used to be.”
His sex parties were notorious, with male groupies walking about with only women’s hats covering their modesty, or nude models covered in chopped raw liver.
By this time Freddie was heavily into cocaine, drinking a couple of bottles of vodka a day and having violent rages.
In a bid to create a future that didn’t have Freddie at the centre, Mary secured a job at CBS Records in London. But it didn’t last long before she returned to Freddie and became his full-time PA
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Mary eventually moved out in early 1978 to a flat Freddie had bought her in Phillimore Gardens, and while their relationship became more relaxed, she admitted she still felt “hurt.”
Meanwhile Freddie secured Garden Lodge – where he spent the rest of his days and lived with partner Jim Hutton.
It was here that he told Mary of his HIV diagnosis in 1987, which she kept private.
She added: “We both understood performing live would soon be beyond him. He’d already talked to me about how physically painful it was becoming.”
Freddie issued a press release on November 23, 1991 – a day before he died at the age of 45 – which informed the public he had Aids.
While Mary said Freddie never told her that he loved her, she said: “I think I can say, in retrospect, so far, yes, he is the love of my life.”
He may not have declared his love, but in a 1985 interview, he said: “All my lovers asked me why they couldn’t replace Mary, but it’s simply impossible.
“The only friend I’ve got is Mary, and I don’t want anybody else. I couldn’t fall in love with a man the same way as I have with Mary.”
Following his death, Freddie left Mary – who he called his “common-law wife”- Garden Lodge and 50 per cent of his fortune and future royalties.
She was reluctant to accept the eight-bed property, and admitted: “I said, I don’t want the house. And he said, if everything had gone to plan you would have been my wife, and this would have been rightly yours.”
While her half of the estate has grown from £20-30million to £150million, it hasn’t been all plain-sailing.
Hutton was left £500,000 by Freddie, but was told he had to vacate Garden Lodge after three months so Mary could move in – despite him claiming the singer had said he could stay.
This led to resentment between the pair, before he died in 2010 of lung cancer.
Not only has Mary but accused of hoarding Freddie’s treasures, but there has also been tension between Mary and Freddie’s family, after she refused to reveal where his ashes were scattered.
She understands any friction, and said: “I think if I was Freddie’s parents, Freddie’s sister, and I wasn’t allowed to know where his ashes have been scattered, I would be upset and offended, but that’s the job he asked me to do. And I did it. I kept saying to them, ‘I’m really, really sorry – I can’t tell you.”
Despite this, Mary claims living in Garden Lodge has given her great comfort, and she feels she is still with Freddie. Although it’s now up for sale for £30million.
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Mary never found a love that endured like theirs, choosing not to marry painter Piers Cameron, the father of her two children, Jamie and Richard, and divorcing her husband Nick Holford.
And as she later explained: “I lost my family, really, when Freddie died. He was everything to me, apart from my sons. He was like no one I had met before.”