Mary Austin revealed the unflattering last words Freddie Mercury said to her before he died.
The Queen icon passed away of AIDS in 1991, and Austin – his former girlfriend who remained his closest confidante – witnessed his difficult final weeks close up.
“He wanted to live his life,” she told the Guardian in a new interview. “It’s sad; you want to live life and then you realize maybe you’ve stretched the book a little bit too far and the spine is going to crack.”
She reflected: “I think he was at his freest in New York. He wasn’t being chased. In America, he could move from state to state. He could disappear when they were on tour. But he could also do that in France and he did it in Munich. Wherever there was larger acceptance of his sexuality, he was happy.”
READ MORE: Why Freddie Mercury Kept Buying Paintings in His Final Days
At Mercury’s London home, however, in the era of England’s out-of-control paparazzi, journalist crowded the street hoping for an exclusive on his health woes.
“The British media had a huge impact, and sculpted the way he lived his life,” Austin said. “I remember a bike was coming through to collect [a] film. The courier asked if there was any news and someone shouted, ‘No, he’s not dead yet.’”
That was around two weeks before he passed. “They were waiting, vulture-like,” she said. “They’d wait for him when he had doctors’ appointments and had to leave the house. Freddie needed decoys. It got chaotic.”
Inside the house, Mercury was cautious around Austin’s son, to whom he was godfather. “[H]e knew he had AIDS, and he felt he should never touch Richard, go near him, because there was so little known about the virus at the time.”
Pregnant with her second son, she didn’t share Mercury’s concerns. “I was there next to his bed; I was holding his hand, I was doing whatever I needed to do.”
Is ‘Love of My Life’ Really About Mary Austin?
Austin paused after being asked to recall his last words to her, before saying: “I was holding his hand. He was on morphine and in and out of consciousness, and he falls back to sleep. I stand there for quite a while, and he finally comes round again and he just said, ‘My old faithful.’ So I felt a bit like a dog. I wasn’t flattered.”
She revealed that he’d never told her he loved her, and that his way of expressing love was when “he bought things” for people.
And she stated that his song “Love of My Life” wasn’t actually about her. “He never said it was about me. He wrote ‘Lily of the Valley’ about me.”
Asked whether he really was the love of her life, Austin said: “I think I can say, in retrospect, so far, yes, he is the love of my life.”
Listen to Queen’s ‘Lily of the Valley’
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Gallery Credit: UCR Staff
