Mary Austin, the former girlfriend and lifelong confidante of late Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, has opened up about his final days and the unflattering last words he said to her before his death, according to The Guardian.
Austin reflected on how relentless media attention shaped Mercury’s private life and recalled the moment she stood by his bedside in his final hours.
“He wanted to live his life. 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,” Mary Austin said. “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.”
Austin went on to describe the intense scrutiny Mercury faced from the British press in the years before his death.
“The British media had a huge impact, and sculpted the way he lived his life. 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.’ They were waiting, vulture-like. They’d wait for him when he had doctors’ appointments and had to leave the house. Freddie needed decoys. It got chaotic,” she continued.
She also spoke about Mercury’s decision to keep his distance from loved ones after his AIDS diagnosis. She recalled her presence by his side in his final moments.
“[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. I was there next to his bed; I was holding his hand, I was doing whatever I needed to do,” Austin said.
“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 added.
Austin closed by reflecting on Mercury’s songwriting and what he meant to her.
“He never said his song, ‘Love of My Life,’ was about me. He wrote ‘Lily of the Valley’ about me. I think I can say, in retrospect, so far, yes, he is the love of my life,” she said.
Mercury died in 1991 at the age of 45 after publicly announcing he had AIDS just a day before his death. Austin remains one of the closest figures to have shared insight into his private life.
Austin’s account offers a rare, intimate look at just how tightly Mercury guarded his diagnosis and how few people he allowed into that part of his life.
Mercury learned he was HIV-positive in 1987, but he chose to keep the diagnosis private for years. He issued a brief public statement confirming he had AIDS on November 23, 1991. He died the very next day, on November 24, from bronchial pneumonia linked to the illness.
Austin was among the small circle of people Mercury trusted with the truth from the very beginning. He told her himself in the kitchen at Garden Lodge not long after receiving the diagnosis in the spring of 1987. Only his doctor, Austin, and his partner Jim Hutton knew of his condition at the time. The secret was kept even from his Queen bandmates Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon.
That secrecy weighed heavily on Mercury from the start. Austin has described just how shaken he was in the moment he first learned the news.
“When he found out he was HIV-positive, it was a very traumatic moment for him. And I sensed his distress. I honestly don’t know what else to say,” Austin said.
The years that followed were marked by Mercury’s determination to protect the people closest to him from the same uncertainty and fear that surrounded the virus at the time, a burden Austin carried alongside him until his final breath.
