Freddie Mercury made his mark with a legendary singing voice, a memorable strut, and a larger-than-life
stage presence.
But as out there as his public persona was, he kept a lot of big things to himself.
From his nights on the town with Princess Diana, to the real reason he could sing so
well, here are the most remarkable things we learned about Freddie Mercury after he
died.
Freddie Mercury's body was cremated, but there was no public ceremony for the spreading of
his ashes or even an announcement of where the singer wanted his remains to go.
Only one person knew what he wanted done with them, and it's unlikely she'll ever reveal
the secret.
According to Rolling Stone, former fiancé and long-time friend Mary Austin is the only
person who knows where Mercury's ashes went.
As she told the magazine,
"He suddenly announced one day after Sunday lunch, 'I know exactly where I want you to
put me.
But no one's to know, because I don't want anyone to dig me up.
I just want to rest in peace.'"
So Austin kept Mercury's ashes for two years, until long after her comings and goings stopped
attracting press attention.
Then she told everyone she was going out for a facial, and buried his remains in secret.
Because fans will be fans, there remains plenty of speculation about where exactly Mercury's
remains might be.
Some think Austin took him all the way to Zanzibar, though "I'm going for a facial"
would be a weird way to try and cover that up.
Others think he's under a tree in his own backyard.
All that guessing is unlikely to amount to much, though, because the only person who
knows for sure where Mercury's remains went will probably take the secret to her grave.
In the 1980s, it wasn't uncommon for people who suspected they might have been exposed
to HIV to just not want to know for sure if they had the virus.
At the time, HIV was a death sentence.
Now people are encouraged to get tested for the disease and do what they can to avoid
passing it to others.
But in Mercury's time, much about the virus' nature was unknown.
Tests for its presence weren't considered to be accurate, and the outlook for infected
people was bleak.
It's understandable why someone wouldn't want to face the possibility that they'd contracted
it.
According to journalist Tim Teeman, Mercury didn't know he was HIV positive until he began
showing advanced symptoms of AIDS.
While he might have suspected he carried the disease at some point, he wasn't diagnosed
until 1987, after a type of cancer called Kaposi's sarcoma appeared on his shoulder.
Longtime partner Jim Hutton said that up until that point there'd been no real indication
that Mercury was ill.
Even after his diagnosis, Mercury was never open about his illness, not even to his family.
He kept his condition secret from the public until confirming the rumors in a press release,
the day before he died.
Much has been made of Freddie Mercury's incredible singing voice, which allowed him to reach
the depths of "Somebody to Love" and the heights of "Under Pressure."
His vocal range has been rumored to span four octaves and remains so impressive that in
2016 it inspired a team of scientists to look into its biological source.
Mercury professed a belief that his voice's special quality came from his unusual teeth.
That's why he never tried to have his overbite corrected, despite being self-conscious about
it.
But the 2016 study concluded that it wasn't his teeth behind his vocal range, but rather
his vestibular folds.
These are a pair of membranes located just above the vocal cords, which are sometimes
called "false vocal cords," as they're not typically used for making sound.
Mercury could use his to create subharmonic vibration, which is how he produced that growl
he's famous for.
Whether or not his voice was really capable of hitting four octaves is something the scientists
weren't able to determine, so that aspect of Mercury's talent remains a subject of debate
for music fans.
Freddie Mercury was able to navigate the line between celebrity and privacy with grace,
but for some famous people, being anonymous is almost impossible.
Lady Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales was one of the most notoriously harassed celebrities
of her time, and the constant media attention was especially hard on her.
According to Rolling Stone, Mercury befriended Diana in the mid-1980s and sympathized with
her situation.
Along with some friends, he conspired to take her out for a paparazzi-free night on the
town.
They disguised Di in drag by dressing her in an army jacket, aviator sunglasses, and
a leather cap, after which they snuck her into the most raucous gay bar in London.
The plot worked flawlessly.
The bar patrons were so dazzled by Mercury and his friends that they paid no attention
to the princess, who was able to spend the entire evening incognito.
Diana was so thrilled with the experience that she told Mercury and his friends that
she hoped to do it again.
Because Mercury was one of the first celebrity AIDS victims, people are often surprised to
hear that he was once engaged to a woman and that she remained very close to him even after
he started having relationships exclusively with men.
While the Bohemian Rhapsody movie glossed over a lot of things, this aspect was pretty
accurate.
Even though they never married, Mercury often referred to Mary Austin as his wife, and in
a 1985 interview he once said,
"All my lovers asked me why they couldn't replace Mary, but it's simply impossible.
I couldn't fall in love with a man the same way I did with Mary."
Mercury was involved with Jim Hutton for the seven years prior to his death, but he left
the former hairdresser with a pittance compared to what he reportedly left to Mary Austin.
She received the bulk of his estate, including his money, his mansion, and his recording
royalties.
And Austin wasn't exactly kind to Hutton after Mercury's death, either.
In fact, she kicked him out of the house shortly after the singer's passing.
Hutton ended up taking the 500,000 pounds Mercury left him and used it to build a home
in his native Ireland, where he remained until his death in 2010.
Sexuality is a lot more complex than just straight or gay.
But in Mercury's day people would sometimes assume that you had to be either one or the
other.
When the public learned of Mercury's AIDS diagnosis, the disease was widely, and wrongly,
associated only with gay people.
It was then widely assumed that Mercury himself must have been gay, too.
But Mercury wasn't gay in the strictest sense of the word.
He continued to profess his love for ex-fiancé Mary Austin even years after their physical
relationship ended.
It has also been asserted, in biographies published after Mercury's death, that the
greatest love affairs of his life were with women.
So it seems that the singer was emotionally drawn to women but physically drawn to men.
It's a state of affairs that seems to have caused some upset toward the end of his life,
even though he spent his last seven years in a relationship with Jim Hutton, he still
thought of Mary Austin as his soulmate and therefore the natural heir to his fortune.
"Y'know she's been a girlfriend of mine for a long time, and uh, even though we're not
together right now in the interim, I sort of refer to her a lot."
Freddie Mercury knew he was dying, but he refused to feel sorry for himself.
He wanted to remain productive, preferably while free from unwanted media attention.
So he chose to keep his diagnosis a secret.
As bandmate Roger Taylor told Entertainment Weekly in 1999,
"He didn't want to be looked at as an object of pity and curiosity.
And he didn't want circling vultures over his head."
Mercury kept recording throughout most of his final years, even when it became very
difficult for him.
According to GQ, Queen released the single "The Show Must Go On" just six weeks before
Mercury's death, and the singer was so ill during recording that bandmate Brian May expressed
concern about whether he'd be able to perform the vocals at all.
Mercury put those doubts to rest, though.
As May later described the events,
"I said, 'Fred, I don't know if this is going to be possible to sing.'
And he went, 'I'll f---ing do it, darling,' vodka down, and went in and killed it, completely
lacerated that vocal.""
He couldn't keep it up forever, though.
While recording "Mother Love" he stopped before the last verse, and then said, quote, "I'm
not feeling that great, I think I should call it a day now.
I'll finish it when I come back, next time."
But there was no next time, Mercury never went back to the studio, and May sang the
last verse of "Mother Love" himself.
Mercury's bombastic stage reputation didn't follow him into his personal life or even
into his relationship with his bandmates.
It's said that Mercury was really the most level-headed of the bunch, especially when
it came to disagreements between his fellow band members, which were evidently quite common.
Mercury once said the band, quote, "argued about everything, even the air that we breathe."
Yet somehow the band persisted through it all.
According to writer Lesley-Ann Jones' biography of Mercury's life, the front man was usually
the guy who ended up keeping the peace, an assessment the bandmates agreed with.
As Brian May recalled in 2007,
"It was normally Roger and I who were at opposite ends.
Everyone thinks that Freddie was difficult.
Actually Freddie was great.
He was a great diplomat."
"We argue a lot, we fight a lot, but in the end, what really is the key feature is that
we must come up with some product."
Freddie Mercury was friends with Michael Jackson for a time, and the two intended to record
music together at some point.
But as it turns out, Mercury was just too wild and crazy for Jackson's tastes.
That's right, the guy who owned a chimpanzee, once tried to buy Marvel Comics, and had dreams
of building himself a giant robot replica thought Freddie Mercury was too wild and crazy
to hang out with.
According to Mercury himself, quoted in Lesley-Ann Jones' biography, the two musicians made efforts
to record several songs together, but could never really find the time to finish the tracks.
The three songs they worked on together, "Victory," "State of Shock," and "There's More to Life
Than This," ended up being completed without each other's involvement on their own albums.
Ultimately, the two stars had a falling-out, supposedly after Jackson took offense to Mercury
doing too much cocaine in his living room.
"I think one of the tracks would have been on the Thriller album, if I finished it.
But I missed out."
The HIV virus doesn't kill directly.
It attacks the immune system, which makes it possible for secondary infections to move
in.
That's what makes AIDS such an insidious illness; it's not a single disease, but rather a lot
of diseases, and the symptoms patients end up showing are all specific to the viruses,
bacteria, fungal organisms, and other microbes that the individual patient is exposed to.
Kaposi's sarcoma, which was Freddie Mercury's first symptom, is a cancer caused by the human
herpesvirus 8, which wouldn't cause symptoms in a person who has a healthy immune system.
As the symptoms of AIDS progressed throughout his body, Mercury developed other horrifying
complications.
In 2017 guitarist Brian May told the Sunday Times Magazine that one of Mercury's ugliest
symptoms was in his foot.
As May told the publication,
"Tragically, there was very little left of it.
Once, he showed it to us at dinner.
And he said, 'Oh, Brian, I'm sorry I've upset you by showing you that.'"
Ultimately, the singer was killed by pneumonia brought on by complications from AIDS, a relatively
common end for an exceptionally uncommon person.
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