FREDDIE MERCURY'S 'SECRET DAUGHTER'? PULL THE OTHER ONE... BY SANDRA HARRIS.

FREDDIE MERCURY’S ‘SECRET DAUGHTER?’ PULL THE OTHER ONE…

BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©

Okay, so I’m delighted that the iconic Freddie Mercury, one of the greatest music frontmen of all time- who am I kidding, he’s the best- is still making newspaper headlines today, nearly thirty-four years after his agonising death from AIDS.

However, M’lud, however, I find myself being deeply sceptical of claims in today’s newspapers that Freddie had a secret daughter no-one knew about, except for the child's mother and her husband, the other three members of the band QUEEN, Freddie’s parents and sister and Freddie’s ex-girlfriend and long-time friend, Mary Austin, and presumably her husband and the father of her own children.

The revelations are due to be published in an upcoming book entitled LOVE, FREDDIE, penned by respected British rock biographer, Lesley-Ann Jones. I’ve read a couple of her other books about Freddie and Queen, and I’ve never known her to be anything but affectionate and respectful towards them in her writing.

However, this notion of the ‘secret daughter’ is a little hard to swallow. She is supposed to have been conceived ‘accidentally’ in 1975, the year that the band’s monster hit Bohemian Rhapsody was released. Her mother is allegedly the wife of a friend of Freddie’s. They had a fling behind her husband’s back.

Now, Freddie presumably did sleep with women early on in his magnificent career. After all, he was engaged to Mary Austin for a time, and they lived together before Freddie and she both came to the realisation that Freddie was gay and wanted, no, needed, to pursue relationships with other men.

Also, he was a heartbreakingly beautiful young man in his glam rock days, and his sexy-as-hell stage persona would have drawn women to him like flies to jam. They must have been literally queuing up outside the stage door for a piece of Freddie.

We also know that he had a sexual relationship in the early-to-mid-1980s with Barbara Valentin. She was the gorgeous blonde bombshell Austrian actress who became known as the ‘German Jayne Mansfield’ for her bleached hair and luscious body.

Freddie stayed with Valentin and her daughter in Munich during the days when he was recording his solo album, Mr. Bad Guy, and she features briefly in the video for QUEEN’s song, It’s A Hard Life.

She died of a stroke in 2002 at the tragically young age of sixty-one, and she wasn’t present at- probably not invited- Freddie’s funeral in 1991. Neither does she feature in the 2018 biopic of the deceased star, Bohemian Rhapsody. It kind of looks like she was just completely written out of Freddie’s life by the people who knew him best.

Anyway, anyway, the ‘secret daughter,’ harrumph. Apparently this forty-nine-year-old woman, living in Europe as a medical professional, now claims the following: ‘Freddie Mercury was and is my father. We had a very close and loving relationship from the moment I was born and throughout the final 15 years of his life.’

In today’s newspapers, she is also reported as saying: ‘He adored me and was devoted to me. The circumstances of my birth may seem, by most people's standards, unusual and even outrageous. That should come as no surprise. It never detracted from his commitment to love and look after me. He cherished me like a treasured possession.’

Apparently, before he died, Freddie gifted this ‘secret daughter’ with seventeen of his personal journals, diaries he started writing when he heard he was to become a father. These diary entries will form the basis of the book being compiled by Lesley-Ann Jones.

My understanding of the situation is that the identity of the ‘secret daughter’ will not even be revealed in the book, and this person will just be known as ‘B’ within its pages. Why, after all this time, is it so important for her to keep her identity a secret? To protect her parents? To protect her own children?

I’ll tell you something for nothing. If I’d had Freddie’s love-child, I’d have been shouting it from the rooftops. If I’d been Freddie’s lovechild, ditto. I’d have wanted my share of the limelight. It’s only natural to want people to know you exist, that you matter, that you once mattered very much indeed to the biggest and best musical frontman of all time.

Also, Freddie was an incredibly loving and oftentimes desperately lonely soul. He adored his cats and valued his small family and his closest friends. If he’d had a child, I believe he would have wanted the world to know about it. He’d have wanted his child to have nothing but the very best of everything, and for his relationship to/with the child to be known to the world at large.

Why would he keep such an important part of his life a deathly secret? And, more to the point, how would he have been able to? In his later years especially, the press followed him everywhere, even on visits to the doctor who was treating him for full-blown AIDS. How was he able to keep such a massive secret, if indeed there was such a secret to keep, and again, why would he have wanted to…?

Lesley-Ann Jones, whose back catalogue of rock biographies is highly impressive,  claims that she has been collaborating with this ‘B’ person for years now, and she is confident that ‘B’ is not a ‘fantasist.’ I guess I’ll have to reserve my judgement until the book comes out, but it’ll have to do a really good job to convince me of the existence of this ‘secret daughter.’