He was Queen’s flamboyant frontman. She was his shy girlfriend, dreaming of marriage until they both realised he preferred men. Thirty-five years after his death, in the week he would have turned 80, Mary Austin talks about their unbreakable bond
There were four silver trunks in Mary Austin’s attic that she packed in the mid-1980s and hadn’t opened since. It was too painful. Almost 40 years on, in 2022, she opened one. It was crammed with lyrics from songs written by Freddie Mercury – Don’t Stop Me Now, Killer Queen, We Are the Champions and, of course, Bohemian Rhapsody. She shut the case. It was still too painful.
“To say I was overwhelmed is an understatement,” she says. “I couldn’t look at the lyrics. I felt as I did when I originally packed them – that they were his personal belongings and I was being offered an opportunity to delve into them, and I couldn’t do that.” Eventually she asked her two sons to sift through the treasures on her behalf.
The original handwritten lyrics belonged to her. As does Mercury’s house, which she has lived in for more than 30 years. As does half of his estate, which has grown over the decades from an estimated £20-30m to around £150m. In the years since Mercury died, Austin has become extraordinarily rich, although she denies reports that her share of the estate rose to 75% after the death of his parents.
Many of Queen’s fans have accused her of hoarding his treasures, of making a fortune from the band’s legendary frontman without lifting a finger, of denying them and his family access to the most basic truths, including where his ashes were scattered. Meanwhile, Mercury appeared to regard her as the one person in the world he could wholly trust and Austin has quietly dedicated her days to him.
The relationship between Austin and Mercury is captivating. Over the years it has fascinated his fans, not least because she has so rarely talked about it publicly.
We meet at the Guardian offices in London. Austin has a beautiful face (when she smiles, she’s got a touch of Debbie Harry), walks with a stick, and is elegantly but unobtrusively dressed. Everything about her is unobtrusive. Austin is here with her younger son, Jamie, who is in his mid-30s and was born a couple of months after Mercury died in 1991, aged 45. Strangely, he looks a little like the singer, although Mercury is not his father.
She is about to publish Freddie Mercury: A Life in Lyrics, a book that combines the lyrics in their original scratchy form, photographs and her observations on the relationship between both the lyrics and Mercury, and Mercury and herself. As you’d expect of somebody who has guarded his privacy fiercely since his death, it is hardly a kiss’n’tell. Nor is today’s interview. But she is remarkably candid about their life together.
She and Mercury, who was born Farrokh Bulsara 80 years ago this week, were an unlikely couple. He was loud, flamboyant, confident and supremely camp. She was quiet, inhibited, diffident and conservative. He was a rock star in one of the world’s most successful groups; she was a shop assistant turned manager at Biba. He loved flashing the cash, whether to indulge himself or for good causes. She didn’t give a toss about material stuff. He was gay, she was strictly heterosexual.
They met in 1970, when Mercury was running a clothes and textile stall in Kensington Market in London after graduating from his graphic art and design degree. Austin was a friend of Brian May’s, and one day she was at May’s student house when he, Mercury and Roger Taylor were discussing possible names for their new band. May suggested Build Your Own Boat. Mercury proposed Queen.
“They asked what I thought,” she says. “I said I preferred Build Your Own Boat.” Did she really think that? “Oh, no. I thought it was a terrible name. But Brian was my friend. I’d just met Freddie.”
What were her first impressions? “I thought he was too confident for me.” She describes him standing by the fireplace, while she sat on the sofa, and I can see her transported back to the day. “He was full of bravado. I picked up a magazine and started thumbing through it because I felt I shouldn’t be there. Why was I sitting in a conversation I had no part in? Yes, he was very confident and I found it a bit intimidating.”
But they soon became friends and lovers, and within four months, Mercury had suggested they move in together. The idea might have been partly pragmatic, she says. He wanted to live in London and couldn’t afford a place by himself. So they moved in together and split the rent.
They bonded over their difficult childhoods. Mercury was born in Zanzibar, and at seven was sent to a British boarding school near Mumbai. Over the next seven years he saw his parents only once, Austin says. He came to Britain for the first time at 17.
Austin grew up with two deaf parents who struggled for money. Her mother was a cleaner and her father a factory worker. Her mother died when Austin was 15, and she found herself bringing up her younger sisters. Both she and Mercury felt they had been robbed of their childhoods. “Freddie could see the sadness in me that he felt within himself, and vice versa.”
