BOOK CLUB
MERCURY AND ME
Jim Hutton, Bloomsbury, $32.99
ven though Freddie Mercury, lead singer with Queen, died in 1991 and Jim Hutton nine years later this reissued memoir — their love story — will no doubt receive the Vegemite reaction that it did in 1994. Loyal Queen fans were appalled that Hutton revealed too many secrets in the book, others liked it as much as I did. The year Mercury and Hutton got together, Mercury was still telling the media that Mary Austin was his only friend and common-law wife. It wasn’t so easy for two men to be husband and husband in those days. In the years before they were diagnosed with AIDS they whooped it up. On holiday in Tokyo, Mercury and Hutton spent “well over a million pounds”. In the months that followed Mercury’s to warm to this story about a celebrity and a former hairdresser at The Savoy who some members of their household introduced as ‘the gardener’ right up to the end. Ouch.
