Kiwi reveals
My catfight with Freddie Mercury
When a friendly ginger tabby plonked itself on the windowsill of Jo Chilcott’s London flat in the early ’90s, she had no idea that extending a touch of kindness to the moggy would erupt into a catfight of mercurial proportions.
But that’s exactly what the unsuspecting Taranaki-born businesswoman encountered as she innocently reached for the window latch of her basement flat and ushered in the grateful puss.
Jo, 56, who now lives in Wellington, recalls, “Stupidly,
being a bit of a cat lover, I brought the cat in. I might have given it something to eat and drink, then he basically moved in.”
As it turned out, the loving gesture would put her on a collision course with those closest to the ailing Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, who, like Jo, adored felines.
“I had no idea whose the cat was,” she tells Woman’s
Day, the fluffy pet soon spending every hour of the day in her home. “Then one Sunday, I heard somebody calling, ‘Oscar, Oscar!’ and he ran out the window, jumped up onto the brick fence, climbed the wire netting and went over to Freddie’s property. I thought, ‘OK, so that’s whose cat it is!’”
With rumours circulating that the flamboyant singer was on his deathbed, Oscar had well and truly changed addresses to the point that Jo took the poorly pet to the vets to get an abscessed tooth extracted.
“He was a gorgeous animal,” tells Jo. “He was the kind of cat that would sit at the table and be given a little bit of bread with butter on it. He was allowed to put two paws on the table. We even used to put him on a lead and take him out for a walk at night.”
But things turned decidedly feral when Jo decided to relocate 36km east of London to Staines and tried to do the right thing by continuing to care for adorable Oscar.
“Freddie died and I was moving from London,” she recalls. “I thought I should probably tell somebody that I had one of Freddie’s cats, so I contacted the Queen fan club to see if they could pass a message on to whoever needed to know Oscar had been living with me.
“I then got a phone call from a guy called Jim to ask if I had taken the cat to the vet and saying how I had upset Freddie because I had taken his cat from him.
“I said the cat chose to move in with me and I had no idea whose cat it was. He basically told me, ‘If you take the cat, we will be taking legal advice and make sure the cat’s returned!’”
I had no idea whose cat it was and no idea why he chose me’
There were also harsh words exchanged with Freddie’s former fiancée Mary Austin, who claimed ownership of Oscar, despite the cat not living at the property for more than 18 months.
“Our conversation ended in quite terse comments to each other,” says Jo. “I called her a b**** or something.”
On the day Jo was due to leave, she contacted Freddie’s longtime Irish boyfriend Jim Hutton to collect the cat.
“Oscar was in the corner of the room going round in circles and hissed when Jim walked into the room.”
The reluctant cat returned to the property, but it wasn’t long before Jo got a call from her old neighbours telling her Oscar was sitting at her former flat’s window every day.
So Jo returned to London to collect the heartsick moggy but made a point of contacting
TheSun’s showbiz reporter, now media tycoon Piers Morgan, concerned she’d be sued and asking for his help.
In a few days, her plight was highlighted in a weeklong campaign with daily front-page articles, including an interview with Oscar via an animal psychologist and even cosmic endorsement from beyond the grave.
“They got in contact with Freddie’s spirit. He said how Oscar didn’t have long to live and should stay with me.”
After a resounding public poll in favour of Jo keeping Oscar, the forlorn feline – who was even credited in the dedication of Freddie’s only solo studio album
MrBadGuy – shifted into her new home, but his days, as predicted, were numbered. Within three months, his elderly body succumbed to liver cancer.
“The vet said the kindest thing we could do was to get him put down, so we duly did and then I had a little casket with his ashes put in it.”
Jo reveals it was only recently, after watching the award-winning biopic
Bohemian Rhapsody, that she finally discovered the identity of those people she butted heads with during the extraordinary stoush nearly 30 years ago.
Jo says there were no further legal implications, but watching the Queen movie helped piece together many strands of the unusual episode.
“I didn’t realise Jim was actually Freddie’s boyfriend – I thought he was just one of his aides! It was fascinating watching Bohemian Rhapsody because Oscar was in it! I went, ‘Oh, my God, there he is!’”
While the story she fell into on her big OE seems far-fetched, Jo says people believe her crazy tale because “it’s just so unbelievable that it has to be true”!
She tells, “I was a bit naive at the time, but the way I was treated was appalling, to be honest. I was a Kiwi living in London with virtually nothing to my name and I had no powers against these people other than a potty mouth. Right place or wrong place at the right time, it’s just what happened.”