"The real Freddie Mercury" - excellent Lesley Ann Jones article on BR

It's subscription only, so I have copied it in below. I hope you'll enjoy and I would obviously welcome any comments. Would be great to hear what those who knew Freddie / the band think of this.

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The real Freddie Mercury: why the Queen biopic only tells part of the story
The new film Bohemian Rhapsody dodges the gritty details of Freddie Mercury’s life, says his biographer Lesley-Ann Jones

The Times, October 19 2018, 12:01am

Inside the bijou boozer known locally as the “Blanc Gigi”, the White Horse, Freddie Mercury was holding court. At the only tavern in Montreux he was a regular. We found him hanging towards the back in the company of strangers; half his age, male, trim and tightly belted, they jousted in French and dangled from his every word.

I’d met Freddie before. Many times. In the absence of PAs, PRs and gofers, I was not shooed aside. “Ciggie,” he said, as if it were my name. Having only wet vices, I wasn’t armed. My fellow-pressman companion proffered a Marlboro Red. “I prefer Silk Cut,” Freddie said with a frown, snatching one. We smiled and withdrew to flirt with our friends. He was soon back for more.

We’re talking 32 years ago. 1986. Queen were again the toast of the world, having stolen Live Aid the previous July. Kicking retirement in the testicles, they hit the road. Widely criticised for cashing in on the plight of Ethiopia’s starving millions, they advanced from Stockholm to Slane to Stevenage on a last hurrah with their fearless frontman. That 26-date Magic Tour was attended by more than a million fans. The fat lady warbled at Knebworth that August. Five years later Freddie was dead.

Cut to the biopic. It was always on the cards. Many who were outraged by the jukebox musical We Will Rock You, which cleaned up in the West End between 2002 and 2014 and still packs them in around the world, warned that the movie of the musical was only a blink away. Never knowingly predictable, the band and their management went one better, summoning an autobiographical picture, Bohemian Rhapsody, out of Queen’s real-life story. Or should I say Freddie’s? For no aspect of the existence of Brian May, John Deacon or Roger Taylor could ever rival Mercury’s gasp-inducing tale.

What a feast of control-freakery and dissent this rose-tinted spectacle has been. So far, so Queen — who, as Freddie once told me, “argue about every little thing, even the air that we breathe”. Since he’s not here to throw his weight around, and since the bassist Deacon is a hands-off recluse, the guitarist May and the drummer Taylor have had free rein. The film is their take on what happened rather than the warts-and-all account of Freddie that we craved. Did people really start pledging money in droves at Live Aid as soon as Queen came on? I don’t remember that.


And this niggled: the character played by the Wayne’s World star Mike Myers, the record label executive Ray Foster, is fictional. Why? There were enough real music biz monsters from which to choose.

Despite the decade-long ranting that led to the sidelining of A-list screenwriters and the dropping of directors and leading men, the flick got filmed. Instead of the born-to-be-Mercury Sacha Baron Cohen, who demanded to play the shock’n’roller, but who quit in frustration in 2013; instead of Ben “Q in Bond” Whishaw and Dominic “Mamma Mia!” Cooper, we get the 37-year-old Egyptian-American actor Rami Malek, the star of Mr Robot and Twilight, whose vocal performance is enhanced by the Canadian Freddie Mercury impersonator Marc Martel. Not that they are advertising this. Has Malek really captured Freddie’s nimble stage skip, his fist-clench, the pouting, the beckoning finger, the flickering tongue?

He has, you know. He is great. The miming and posturing are spot-on, but I still wish I’d seen the film Baron Cohen wanted to make rather than what essentially amounts to a band advertisement. The picture’s saving graces are its evocation of the Seventies/Eighties vibe, and its Live Aid sequence, which is breathtaking. The band, not so much. They project as complete dullards, which they were not. The sex and drugs are toned down. They ought not to have been. And Freddie’s former girlfriend, Mary Austin, was never quite as saccharine as she is portrayed.

After Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects), the original director, was fired after absences and clashes with the crew, the actor-turned-director Dexter Fletcher (Eddie the Eagle) finished the film, although Singer retains the directing credit. And instead of a script crafted exclusively by Peter Morgan, who wrote The Queen, Frost/Nixon and The Crown, there is input from Anthony McCarten, Justin Haythe and Christopher Wilkinson too. Morgan’s name is still there, writ large. It should be.

I had dealings with him. After reading my first biography of Freddie, published in 1997, he flew to London from Vienna to entice me to schnitzel among society blondes at Daphne’s restaurant in South Kensington. He wanted to know the truth about Freddie. “Read it again,” I said. He’d devoured every Freddie and Queen book, but had found in mine, he wooed, “the meat, the bones, the broth of his wrath. His oscillator, his battery, his mainspring.” Charmed? Cat got an ass? I consulted for him.

Music biopics are the danger zone. Get it right and the world karaokes. Fall short and you’re torching alone. We have our favourites. I’ll take The Rose, sort of about Janis Joplin, for which Bette Midler bagged the Golden Globe; The Runaways, with Joan “jailbait” Jett portrayed by Kristen Stewart; Ken Russell’s Lisztomania, featuring Roger Daltrey as the world’s first rock star and my pal Rick Wakeman as Thor; The Doors, in which Val Kilmer is sublime, ridiculous and poetically constipated as Jim Morrison; and Ray, with the Oscar-winning Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles. Could Queen possibly live up to these?

Because, get this, the Queen story was never about the band. It was about a misfit boy born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar in 1946, in those days a British protectorate, today part of Tanzania, who suffered extreme separation anxiety when his Zoroastrian Parsi parents dispatched him to a British-style Indian public school thousands of miles away when he was eight. Thereafter, he saw them and his sister, Kashmira, only once a year. The void in him yawned. He filled it with western pop.

Freddie and his family ran for their lives during the Zanzibar revolution of 1964, and landed in London. He discovered Jimi Hendrix, and worked in Heathrow’s catering department and as a nude life model while sketching a new identity at art school. He immersed himself in the Swinging Sixties, but couldn’t decide which way he swung. He squatted, dossed, ducked in and out of groups, flogged threadbare garb in Kensington Market, met some egghead academics posing as rockers, inveigled his way in, insisted on the name Queen despite his bandmates’ almost embarrassing blokeishness, conjured up their magnum opus, Bohemian Rhapsody and never returned to east Africa.

He was the greatest of pretenders: vivid and arrogant in public; raw and uncertain behind locked doors. He wasn’t hard to read. He wore his heart on his bicep. Emotionally addicted to the soft affection of women, he preferred hard sex with men. Irrefutably though the gay community has claimed him, “bisexual” was my take. Austin is portrayed as the grieving widow. I have a problem with that. The woman he worshipped, who got him best, and with whom he shared an apartment in Munich, was the Austrian-born “German Jayne Mansfield”, the actress Barbara Valentin. She features in the video for Queen’s It’s a Hard Life. Yet she is not so much as hinted at in this film.

The Freddie I knew was the Freddie she knew: flawed and frail and flamboyant. A cursed exotic, a damaged diva. They mirrored each other perfectly. She and I remained close until her death in 2002, aged 61. I went to stay with her again after Freddie’s funeral. She flew

She flew to London for my book launch. He harboured a death wish, she said. He strode defiantly into the eye of the Aids storm, doing “everything with everybody”. On this, the film needed much more.

I rewrote my biography of Freddie after meeting Peter Morgan. The revised biography was published in 2011. Of any movie, not yet a whiff. The memories, meanwhile, were mushrooming. Much of the gossip and rumour about him is apocryphal. I trust what I saw with my own eyes. Not usually in professional circumstances; he could be clipped and monosyllabic in interviews, with which he couldn’t be bothered. Besides, he was shy. However, blend with his entourage and fold into his schedule for a few days and nights, and the crop could be gold.

There were wondrous dawns with him, down by the lake in Switzerland where Queen owned Mountain recording studios, and where towards the end of his life he acquired a luxurious home. Peering out into the black, he would let his guard down. The waspish Freddie inclined to tell pushy female interrogators where they could shove their reproductive parts receded. He no longer reached for the narcotics that had fuelled debauched capers in the company of rent boys.

I sometimes struggled to recall outrageous Freddie, he who once orchestrated album launches at which canapés were served on the torsos of naked dwarves, who storyboarded video shoots depicting hordes of naked female cyclists. The supply store refused to take back the bikes because “the leather saddles are contaminated”. “I sniffed them, darling,” Freddie snorted. “They were right!” Who commissioned hookers to mud-wrestle and perform live lesbian sex acts backstage for the delectation of liggers; who unnerved a young Michael Jackson by chopping out lines of coke in front of him when Freddie visited him in Encino, Los Angeles, the pair having decided to record together.

Eccentric he was. It came naturally. He never set out to shock or amaze. He wrote Crazy Little Thing Called Love in the bath, demanding a piano tub-side. He dedicated an album to his cats, with the postscript “screw everybody else”. He sent the Spanish soprano Montserrat Caballé the complete works of Queen when the pair were toying with the idea of a duet. When she arrived for an engagement at the Royal Opera House, he lured her to dinner at his home in Kensington, Garden Lodge, then kept her up until dawn at the piano with the producer of their album, Barcelona, Mike Moran, jamming on Queen hits. She knew all the words.

He had calmed down by the Eighties, when I came in. He no longer insisted on separate hotels from the rest of the band, to facilitate his precarious nightlife. He had a live-in lover by then, the Irish former barber Jim Hutton. He excelled at reverse Scrabble and worked on his stamp collection. I once found him in his Budapest suite in a velvet smoking jacket and cravat. He was hosting a cocktail party for us. A global superstar, he was hopeless at face-to-face. Only when we were in place did he emerge, grabbing two bottles of champagne and going round topping people up, so that he didn’t have to converse. I adored him. He held me in his spell. I cried and cried the day the news of his death came, in November 1991. He was 45.

“It’s an arduous thing to tell someone’s life in just two hours,” Rami Malek has said, “but . . . if you wallow in the sadness of what he endured and his ultimate death, that could be a disservice to the profound, vibrant, radiant nature of such an indelible human being.”

Indelible he is. Freddie was a dreamer. It was his flair and creativity that elevated a competent band to stupendous heights. No wonder I still find myself yearning for what Sacha Baron Cohen would have made of Freddie. They kind of deserved each other. Twenty-seven years on, I am left with an overwhelming sense of melancholy.

END OF ARTICLE

Enough with this "Sacha Baron Cohen would have told the real story" business. He's not Quentin Tarantino, he's not even Paul Verhoeven. He's an improv comedian who is six feet, three inches tall whose last couple of movies have been flops. If anyone saw the actual script he was going to work with, I'd love to see it, and I wonder if it's the Scarface meets Cruising story he had hyped it to be to Howard Stern, or if he was just talking a lot of smack, which is what I think he was doing.

She's full of shit and the majority of the interesting 'facts' have long been in the public domain (and many proved to be incorrect) before she put her flashy spin on them.

Of course she's right to say that this is not the real story of Freddie, We all know it's just another money spinner for QPL (the cynical marketing going into overdrive with a pop-up shop of over-priced tat is just one example).

But please do not get fooled into thinking this woman is any kind of authority. Avoid her books.

It's actually sort of interesting she's all boosting for SBC and carving out an opinion, when, really and truly, she's a middle-of-the-road entertainment book writer.

And I guess I would dine out forever if I met Freddie, like, a couple of times as a journalist. But she's by no means any more an authority on matters Queen than many people on these boards or otherwise. You might say it takes a special talent to put together clip-job books, but still. The Cohen opinion is complete BS. And Barbara Valentin as the main confidante?

I'm OK with the idea of the movie for whatever it's worth. And movies are going to get hyped and marketed, that's OK, too.

Lesley-Ann Jones is a dumb twat

Lesley-Ann Jones is a dumb twat

We know how type of journalist she is. I agree with some things she said in the article, but her book (the part from Brazil, the prostitute telling her about Freddie's sex preference is really rubbish) is really easy to read when you are waiting in the airports. Nothing more. I can't understand why so magazines or newspaper gave her so many great reviews, honestly. I talked once with her. She was nice, but...in her new book about Bowie she wrote Bowie was the best from Live Aid. In her Freddie book, said Queen. What's the frequency Kenneth?

Completely agree that Sacha Baron Cohen's version of the film would have been poor. He likes shock humour. In his last film the main characters hid inside an elephants vagina before being ejaculated on by a male elephant. And it was a flop.

He would have had Freddie in some sort of debauched orgy. So what? Why are so many people acting like that's 'the real story of Freddie'?

The SBC version would just be another way to shock, not really to capture Freddie's essence. I agree that this current version might be too mild for some, but there's a different purpose (which is to reintroduce Freddie and Queen to the new generation). I read her biography of Freddie and I thought the writing was quite poor. (Don't get the whole thing with Barbara Valentin either)

I think, not Cohen itself, but Cohen directed by David Fincher....Cohen alone would be a disaster, having a filmmaker like Fincher telling him what to do, is a different story.

Exactly. SBC as actor, not director or scriptwriter.

And obviously, as befits an actor of his status, he can pick and choose his parts.

I think he made the right decision to walk away as it is quite obvious that this is a bland family movie that all but straight-washes Freddie and avoids the any difficult subject matter.

I admire his integrity. BM, RT and JB could do with some.

[QUOTE] [b]splicksplack wrote:[/b]

She's full of shit and the majority of the interesting 'facts' have long been in the public domain (and many proved to be incorrect) before she put her flashy spin on them.

Of course she's right to say that this is not the real story of Freddie, We all know it's just another money spinner for QPL (the cynical marketing going into overdrive with a pop-up shop of over-priced tat is just one example).

But please do not get fooled into thinking this woman is any kind of authority. Avoid her books.[/QUOTE]

Completely agree with this.

Jones is a cunt. Her bio of Freddie was a piece of typical tabloid shite jazzed up to cash-in on the usual bandwagon.

I'm sure we'll see a re-print in the shops soon to cash in on the movie.

Wonder who she fucked to get this latest piece printed.......

dudeofqueen, she did the re-print two weeks ago.