The REAL reason Freddie Mercury's sister had to buy back £3million of his most treasured possessions...from the ex-fiancee who got the lion's share of his fortune
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With an auction of this magnitude, it’s not unusual for there to be requests from wealthy and anonymous interested parties for private viewings, as there was during the Sotheby’s sale of Freddie Mercury’s effects in 2023.
The trove was so enormous – 1,406 lots – the auction took place over six days.
There was music memorabilia: dozens of gold discs, stage outfits, Brit awards, manuscript lyrics and two pianos.
Artwork by Picasso and Matisse were on sale along with a range of Japanese prints, including by the master Hiroshige.
And there were lots for Faberge clocks, Lalique glassware and more than 50 kimonos – not to mention jewellery, including Freddie’s silver Tiffany moustache comb.
Prior to the doors opening, a small 69-year-old woman walked in accompanied by her son and PA, wanting to see the items before they went public.
But when it came to auction time, the woman was nowhere to be seen. The PA was there, however, with the pair staying in touch online and over the phone.
In the end, the anonymous bidder paid £3 million for several items, including a jukebox, a Nike sweatshirt and a waistcoat with portraits of Freddie’s six cats on it – which went for £139,700.
We now know the mysterious Freddie Mercury fan was, in fact, Kashmira Bulsara – his younger sister.
She was, a source revealed this week, ‘angry and upset’ at seeing so many of her beloved brother’s possessions available for anyone to buy – and so went along to try to discreetly buy some of them back.
‘They had set aside a huge budget, so were actually very happy with the final figure laid out despite paying well over the estimated price for each one,’ the source said.
‘Of course, Kashmira appreciates how adored Freddie was across the world, but she was saddened to think of some of his sentimental belongings not being with his loved ones.’
The extraordinary turn of events came about after Mary Austin, Mercury’s former fiancée and the ‘love of his life’, was bequeathed his home, Garden Lodge in Kensington, and everything in it after the singer’s death in 1991 aged 45.
Two years ago, she decided to put everything up for auction in a sale that raised more than £40 million.
In a statement, Mary, now 74, said: ‘The time has come for me to take the difficult decision to close this very special chapter in my life. I decided that it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to keep things back. If I was going to sell, I had to be brave and sell the lot.’
Yet the sale raised many questions, chief among them being: given the shared love of Freddie by Mary and Kashmira – and the fact they are both benefactors of his £75 million fortune – could Kashmira not just have asked Mary if she could have some of Freddie’s effects?
And why didn’t Mary offer her the chance to pick out some items? It’s not like mementos were in short supply.
And by 2023 Freddie’s mother and father were dead, as was his last boyfriend Jim Hutton, meaning Kashmira and her children are his last living close relatives.
However, the sad truth is in the years since his death from AIDS-related bronchial pneumonia, a deep and apparently unbridgeable divide has sprung up between the two most important women in Freddie’s life.
It seems they’ve not spoken since his small funeral. Indeed, it’s said Kashmira still has no idea for certain where her brother’s ashes were scattered – an extraordinary state of affairs by any standard.
‘Mary did it – and Mary won’t tell,’ says a Mercury source. ‘It was one of the last promises she made to Freddie.’
Freddie, born Farrokh Bulsara, hadn’t been close to Kashmira growing up, as he was sent away from the family home in Zanzibar to a boarding school in India when he was eight years old.
He was 18 when the family joined him in the UK, having fled the Zanzibar revolution and settled in Feltham, Middlesex.
In later years, Kashmira, six years younger than Freddie, and her then-husband Roger and two children would visit him at Garden Lodge, as would their parents Bomi and Jer.
He never ‘came out’ to his mother or father – both Parsi followers of the Zoroastrian religion which forbade homosexuality – and didn’t let them see the wild partying side of his life.
He wanted to protect them, it’s said, and they in turn respected his wish for privacy.
Former brother-in-law Roger has said: ‘Freddie kept his life strictly in compartments, and they rarely overlapped.
‘We used to celebrate our kids’ birthdays at Freddie’s. He’d always have a massive cake or Easter egg for them. He never had any kids of his own.
‘I think he would have liked to have seen our children grow up.’
All the Bulsara family were very fond of Mary, whom Freddie fell in love with when she was 19, and working as a PR for the famous Biba boutique in London.
A petite and still-glamorous blonde, she too seems to have a taste for privacy. She didn’t want to be featured in the 2018 Bohemian Rhapsody film (she was played by actress Lucy Boynton) and apparently deplored its ‘intrusion’. The two spent seven years as a couple and set up home together.
When Mary was 23, Freddie even proposed marriage with a jade ring one Christmas.
As she described in her only known interview in 2013: ‘Freddie hadn’t said anything more about marrying, the only way that I could test the water was to say, “Is it time I bought the dress?” But he said no. He had gone off the idea and it never happened.’
She added: ‘I was disappointed but I had a feeling it wasn’t going to happen. Things were getting very complicated and the atmosphere between us was changing a lot. I knew the writing was on the wall, but what writing? I wasn’t absolutely sure.’
Eventually, he told her he believed he was bisexual and she responded: ‘No Freddie, I don’t think you are bisexual. I think you are gay.’
They carried on living together for a time, with Freddie bringing home boyfriends but, eventually, she moved out.
Mary, though, was always a part of his life and he remained devoted to her in the years which followed. She was among the small crew who nursed him when he fell ill, visiting daily.
Freddie was godfather to her older son Richard, by artist Piers Cameron, and she was pregnant with their second son Jamie when Freddie died.
The relationship with Cameron broke up and she married again, but she and her second husband divorced around 2005. She’s thought to have been single ever since.
Mary has stayed so determinedly out of the public eye many of Freddie’s old crowd don’t even know where she is living. She put Garden Lodge up for sale last year for £30 million and is thought now to be living ‘somewhere in London’.
Kashmira, now 73, has not done the same, having recently emerged into the spotlight to claim her place as the keeper of his flame.
She attends the annual Freddie Mercury birthday party which is thrown by the Mercury Phoenix charity every September, while Mary always stays away.
In 2019, she gave a collection of art deco cases to the V&A museum. These are on display bearing the description: ‘From the Kashmira Bulsara collection. A loan and promised gift from Kashmira Bulsara, made in the memory of her brother, Freddie Mercury.’
Some question if the Mercury kimono, which was exhibited in recent years as part of a kimono exhibition at the V&A, might also have come from her.
And many wonder: could she have been the mystery bidder who snapped up his iconic mustard yellow jacket at an auction held by Bonhams in 2004?
The jacket, worn during the 1986 Magic tour, is thought to have been taken from Garden Lodge by Jim Hutton and then given along with other items to Hutton’s friend Shawn Matthews to sell. The jacket was sold for £26,290.
A source in the Mercury camp offered the theory this week that Kashmira is planning to further reclaim Freddie’s legacy by putting on an exhibition of her own with some of the items she has bought from the auction.
Her publicist made no comment on that either way this week.
However, Freddie Mercury biographer Lesley-Ann Jones says that the two women have differing views about the best way to honour Freddie.
Jones said: ‘Mary was criticised for not preserving Garden Lodge as a museum for fans to visit and pay their respects. But the house was always hers to do with as she wished. Freddie made that clear.
‘The fans and the band may have wanted a Graceland, but that wasn’t Freddie and Mary’s plan.’
And while Mary stays as anonymous as possible, recently Kashmira has been making a few media appearances.
She spoke about their touching time together while Freddie was on his deathbed in a televised interview in 2021, and also recently granted an ‘at home’ interview when she was putting her £4.75 million central London flat up for sale.
Jones adds: ‘No love is lost between Mary and Kash.
‘The resentment erupted when Freddie’s will was read and it emerged that he’d left the bulk of his estate not to his blood family but to the love of his life, and it has never subsided.’
Half of his estate went to Mary Austin along with Garden Lodge. Meanwhile, boyfriend Jim Hutton, who died from liver cancer in 2010, and assistant Peter Freestone were asked to move out.
Mercury’s parents were given either 25 per cent of his fortune between them or 12.5 per cent each – depending on which report you believe.
While Bomi died in 2004, in an interview before her death in 2016, Jer said she didn’t mind Mary taking the lion’s share. ‘Why not? She was just like family to us and still is,’ she said.
‘She was lovely and used to come to us for meals. I used to wish they had got married and had a normal life with children.
‘But even when they broke up, I knew she still loved my boy and they stayed friends right to the end.’
Kashmira’s share has also been reported as either 25 per cent or 12.5 per cent.
It’s thought his parents shares passed on to Kashmira after their deaths, although some Queen experts are convinced the money actually went to Mary – which would indeed feel like a final insult.
Either way, both Mary and Kashmira will have shared in a huge financial windfall from the hugely successful film Bohemian Rhapsody and from the sale of Queen’s back catalogue to Sony.
How much might his estate now be worth in total? I’m told well over £300 million; both women are seriously rich.
There is also the question of Freddie’s ashes and where they were scattered.
Mary kept his ashes in his bedroom for two years after his death, and then – by her own account – slipped out one day and scattered them in secret.
‘He didn’t want anybody to dig him up as has happened to other famous people,’ she said. ‘Fans can be obsessive. He wanted it to remain a secret. I never betrayed Freddie in his lifetime. And I’ll never betray him now.’
There was a theory, never confirmed, that his ashes were scattered in a cemetery in North London, where a small bronze plaque bearing his real name was discovered in 2013 – before it was promptly spirited away by staff, nervous of an invasion by fans.
A Mercury source says: ‘Mary never told the family where she scattered the ashes, so Kashmira does not know. Mary says that she was just loyal to him and did what he wanted.
‘She’s not close to any of the band, or the family, and has no interaction with his fans. Her belief is that she has given Freddie a gift of privacy.’
But whether Kashmira also sees it as a gift is another matter.
