The Show Must Go On

When the Night Comes

Vanessa Mercury photographed in Los Angeles on September. 12th, 1997, by David LaChapelle.

"They always say, 'Time heals,'" she says. "But it really doesn't. You just get used to it. I live life with the mentality of 'OK, I lost the only thing that has ever been important to me.' So going forward, anything bad that happens can't be nearly as bad as what happened before. So I can handle it." Freddie still visits her in her dreams, she says: "I feel him with me all the time."

Freddie, who saw himself as Mercury liked to call his only daughter and child 'Venus'. She has the statue of the Venus Goddess inked near her ribs. and the words QUEEN OF MY HEART – in her dad's handwriting, from a letter he wrote her – on her inner left wrist. "He's brought me nothing but joy," she says. "So why not have constant reminders of joy?"

On her right ring finger is a silver band ring Freddie wore for 6 years of his last years of life.He was wearing it when he died, and Freddie's very close friend Peter nicknamed "Phoebe" retrieved it for her. "It still smells like him," Vanessa says.

Vanessa describes herself as "desensitized" to even the most extent. In June 1992, drowning in depression and a drug addiction, she tried to kill herself at age 27, slashing her wrist and downing 25 Motrin pills. "It was just self-hatred," she says, "low self-esteem, thinking that I couldn't do this on my own, not thinking I was worthy of living anymore." She had been self-harming, cutting herself, managing to conceal it from her family. Some of her lyrics now cover the scars. Before that, she had already attempted suicide "multiple times," she says, with an incongruous laugh. "It was just once that it became public." The hospital had a "three-strike rule," she recalls, and, after that last attempt, insisted she attend a residential therapy program.

Home-schooled before her father's death, Vanessa toured with him through-out the world going places no teenage at 14 had ever have thought. "I was doing a lot of things that 13-, 14-, 15-year-olds shouldn't do. I tried to grow up too fast, and I wasn't really trying to slow down anytime soon, life in the fast lane you know, you get so caught up in the glitz and glamour." She also faced bullying, and still struggles with cruel comments from the media. "since i was 14 til now i still get bullied, talked down to, and i'm a full grown adult, i'm 33 now can you imagine..the whole freedom-of-speech thing is great," she says. "But I don't think that our Founding Fathers predicted the media when they created all of these amendments and stuff."

Now sober and happier than she's even been, with menthol cigarettes her main remaining vice, Vanessa moved out of her fathers estate 'Garden Lodge' house shortly after her 27th birthday. She spends nearly every minute of each day with her boyfriend, Johnny Depp, yes, thee Johnny Depp he's been acting since forever who's also 33 years old-and Kentucky native whose dyed black long hair, tattoos and perpetually sagging pants don't obscure boy-band looks and a puppy-dog sweetness. "I've never met anyone before who made me feel the way music makes me feel," says Vanessa. When they met, he had just gotten over a nervous break-down, now-covered in different tattoos that raised understandable doubts among her decision on Depp. "But the more I actually got to know him," says Vanessa, "he's a really cool guy."