by Tim Clayton
More holiday pictures were splashed across the world’s front pages, outshining the coverage of Camilla Parker Bowles, whose fiftieth birthday party was hosted by the Prince at Highgrove on 18 July.
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The day after Diana’s conversation with the British photographers, Fayed telephoned his eldest son Dodi and asked him to join the party. Dodi Al Fayed was forty-one years old and had spent the better part of his life spending his father’s money: on celebrity girlfriends, on fast cars, on cocaine and, occasionally, on producing movies. However, Dodi’s American friends described him as generous and affectionate, given to sudden declarations of friendship or of love. Several bad debts had arisen from this enthusiasm for handing out expensive gifts. He was also said to be charming and a good listener.
Dodi had been staying at his apartment in Paris along with his girlfriend, an American model called Kelly Fisher. The relationship had lasted eight months, almost as long as Dodi’s marriage in 1986 to another model, Suzanne Gregard. Dodi had given Fisher a ring and they were planning to live together in a new apartment in Malibu, California. Fisher and her family considered the couple engaged, although this would later be contested, and she was planning a wedding ceremony in Los Angeles.
Dodi received the phone call from his father, as a result of which he told Fisher he had to go to London. Instead, he flew immediately to St Tropez. In a later phone conversation with Dodi, Fisher discovered that he wasn’t where he had said he was. They argued and then, two days later, Dodi sent a private plane to bring her to the South of France to join him. While Fayed, father and son, entertained Diana and the children at their villa and on board the Jonikal, Kelly Fisher was kept out of sight on another family boat, moored close to the house. One evening Dodi rented a disco just for Diana and her sons. He spent the days and evenings with his father’s guests and spent the nights with Fisher. At the end of the holiday, she flew home to America unaware that a romance between Dodi and Diana had started yards from where she was staying.
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Some of Diana’s friends later suggested that she romanced Dodi Fayed to make Hasnat Khan jealous and so force his hand in marriage. But things were not that simple. Diana did have qualities in common with Dodi, the ability quickly to form an emotional attachment being one of them. They shared an interest in movies and movie stars too, and both enjoyed lying in the sun reading magazines and exchanging endearments. And Dodi had one crucial advantage over Diana’s previous boyfriends: he had ‘all the toys’, as she put it. He was able to keep up with Diana’s own lifestyle, lavishing time, attention and money on her and offering her protection and privacy when she wanted it. Lucia Flecha da Lima believed that she was captivated by a man who had no full-time occupation and could dedicate all of his time to her, something she had never had in her life before then.
Diana and her sons returned to London on 20 July. Hasnat Khan, unaware that Dodi and Diana had grown close, informed her that he had decided to end their relationship. During these same few days, piles of gifts and flowers arrived from Dodi, accompanied by requests for further meetings.
Diana made a brief visit to Paris to see him on 26 July. She stayed in the luxurious Imperial Suite of the Fayed-owned Ritz hotel in the Place Vendôme. A Fayed family chauffeur, Philippe Dourneau, saw the couple walk hand in hand along the River Seine. Diana and Dodi were then together in London for a few days before flying back to the South of France on 31 July for a second holiday, alone this time, cruising to Corsica and Sardinia aboard the Jonikal. René Delorm, Dodi’s butler, observed them happily lying around in the sun, reading, talking and being very affectionate. Meanwhile Kelly Fisher was back in Los Angeles planning her wedding, scheduled for 8 August.
The author Kate Snell believes that Diana was in shock at the news from Khan and wanted to make him jealous. This, she says, was Diana’s motive for helping Mario Brenna take a photograph of the couple kissing during this cruise. Brenna acted on a tip-off from his London colleague, photographer Jason Fraser. The day before Diana left, Fraser received a call from someone close to her, telling him that the Princess was on her way to the Mediterranean. He was told the name of the boat, who she was with and approximately where the couple could be found. The caller made it clear that there would be no complaints if photographs were taken. All Brenna had to do was to shadow the boat to Corsica and wait for the right moment. Some of his pictures were taken from just ten yards away. Brenna then telephoned Fraser in London, who contacted the press. A furious bidding war broke out, which the Sunday Mirror won.
The Jonikal visited Monaco, where Dodi took Diana to the Repossi jeweller to choose a ring from the ‘Tell Me Yes’ range. The manager promised that it would be ready for collection from his Paris shop on 30 August.
Brenna’s kiss photo was the hottest property in years, as Ken Lennox was quick to realise:
Diana kissing Dodi, a million pounds. I think it earned in total three million pounds around the world. We were the first daily to get it. It went to a Sunday before us. We paid a sensational amount of money for it. Most I’ve ever been involved in. In fact it’s ten times anything I’ve ever been involved in and I was there at the Sun for nearly seven years.
On 7 August, the Mirror published the first news of the couple’s romance with the headline ‘Di’s New Man is Al Fayed’s Son’. ‘Hasnat broke her heart’ three months ago, it told readers. Three days later, the Sunday Mirror published the Brenna photographs of the couple locked in an embrace. The paper speculated that an engagement was forthcoming, quoting some of Diana’s unnamed London friends. ‘Dodi’s to Di for,’ said the Sun the next day, reproducing, on page three, Brenna’s picture. They protected their spectacular investment in the pictures with the warning ‘(Any reproduction prohibited) OUR LAWYERS ARE WATCHING’. Kelly Fisher received a fax of a British newspaper front page. Her wedding was obviously off. She called Dodi in London but never spoke to him. Mohamed Al Fayed took the call and, she says, told her never to call him or his son again. On 14 August, Kelly sued Dodi in Los Angeles, claiming he had dumped her after insisting she give up her career for him. She then told her story of duplicity and abandonment to the News of the World.
Quite what Diana was trying to do remains mysterious. Some level-headed friends like Lord Palumbo thought she was merely having fun:
I thought that it wasn’t serious, but that she was probably just having a good time. After all, she was divorced and why shouldn’t she? The Al Fayeds are controversial people and to some extent she was controversial too. So I think they found a certain amount of common ground on that basis. I don’t think myself that it would have led anywhere. I think she was going through one of her periods of confusion and at the end of it, had the tragedy not happened, she would have sorted it out. I thought that she was very much on the rebound from Hasnat Khan.
When the Sunday Mirror published the photographs, Diana was in Bosnia, further promoting the Red Cross landmine campaign. The trip, lasting from 7 to 10 August, was run jointly by Norwegian People’s Aid and the Landmine Survivors’ Network of Washington. Diana visited landmine projects in Travnic, Sarajevo and Zenezica. Bill Deedes accompanied her. Like Lamb in Angola, the veteran reporter Deedes was struck by Diana’s silent stillness, how good she was at hearing and dealing with grief, simply stretching out a hand to touch, applying her own brand of soothing tranquillity, even in the face of stories that made Deedes, a journalist with fifty years of war experience, blanch. One afternoon he saw her embrace a woman by a graveside and stand motionless with her for what seemed like half an hour. He thought – as Mike Whitlam had thought in Angola – that there was no one else in the world who could have fulfilled this role. Deedes described Diana as a human being with ordinary faults, but an unusually big heart.
She returned to London on 11 August and made Rosa Monckton listen to Dodi’s voice on her answering machine. On 12 August she flew with Dodi in the Harrods helicopter to see Rita Rogers, her psychic. Rogers had previously told Diana that sh
e would meet a dark man at sea, and Diana wanted to show her this first-hand evidence of her prognostic skill.
Lana Marks was surprised by the incessant press coverage.
I asked her what she had thought about the press reports. And she said, ‘Lana, I really can’t sit at home and watch the four walls of Kensington Palace. To get out and have a good time is just so nice for me.’ There’s one thing that people don’t understand about Diana’s personality – if she did permit you to enter her life she was very warm and loving and trusting. And this was so badly misinterpreted by people who really didn’t understand Diana. She was just showing somebody, who she was having a good time with, some warmth.
Diana then flew with Rosa Monckton to Athens on the Harrods Gulfstream jet. There the two women boarded another yacht for a holiday cruising around the Greek islands. She told Monckton all about Dodi and appeared to be very much in love. She spoke about his many presents of jewellery and anticipated the arrival of a ring – which was destined, she said, for the fourth finger of her right hand, not her left. She said how nice it was for her to be made welcome by the whole Fayed family, and how nice to be with a man who obviously cared for her and wanted to share that with the world, rather than being embarrassed or ashamed to be seen with her.
They came back on 20 August. Dodi had gone to America the day before to see his lawyers about Kelly Fisher’s lawsuit. Diana had planned to see Lana Marks next.
Diana had spoken to me twice about going on vacation with her. We finally got both of our schedules together and decided we would go to Milan. I’d told her so much about the Four Seasons Hotel in Milan, and La Scala, how lovely it was, and Lake Como too. We had decided to spend four days together at that time. The reservations were made and we had booked flights. Then my father passed away very, very suddenly and I had to dash down to South Africa for his funeral. Diana was so supportive and kind and sympathetic and she completely understood.
But this left her with a free week at the end of her summer. And when Dodi asked whether she would come back to the South of France, she agreed.
On 21 August, Diana saw Dr Lily Hua Yu, her Chinese medicine specialist, in London and gave her a positive health report: ‘she told me she had never felt so physically well in all her life.’ Later that day Diana returned to the Mediterranean on the Harrods jet for her second private holiday with Dodi on board the Jonikal. Bodyguards Kez Wingfield and Trevor Rees-Jones accompanied them. Dodi also brought his Los Angeles masseur and therapist, Myriah Daniels, who described herself as a ‘Missionary of Natural Spiritualism’.
Once more Jason Fraser was tipped off. But this time the calls didn’t come from an intermediary but from Diana herself. Fraser came to France to take his own photographs. The Jonikal was moored at Portofino, where Fraser photographed Diana on a bed of yellow cushions with Dodi. The following morning Diana called Fraser in his hotel room to ask why the pictures had been so grainy. Fraser wasn’t the only one to enjoy Diana’s collaboration. French photographer Jean-Louis Macault was also still in close attendance:
She came down, I started taking photos. We were really very close to each other. I had my feet in the water, she came right above me, click-click, zap-zap. I started taking photos for all I am worth and she looked at me and slowed down. She slowed down for Dodi to catch up with her . . . so I kept taking photos at which point there was a slight gust of wind and she made a movement like that, put her hair back in place, at one side. Then she looked at me and made a little smile.
She had often encouraged happy holiday snaps, but never before with a lover. Once again she seemed keen for the world to see her happiness.
Diana spent a lot of this week on the telephone. Annabel Goldsmith later wrote an article saying that she, Elsa Bowker and Robert Devorik were all called and told that Dodi was Diana’s ‘summer fling’. Goldsmith also said that Diana rang members of Hasnat Khan’s family in Britain during the week to say that there was ‘nothing in it’ and that she was hoping to see them all again soon.
But those who downplay the Dodi relationship choose to ignore his attraction. Here was a man who demonstrably worshipped Diana. No more sneaking about, no more 2 a.m. denials to Richard Kay of what she knew to be the truth. It must have been liberating to be loved so straightforwardly at last, and by someone who made few demands in return. Perhaps that was all the reason Diana needed for wanting the world to share her pleasure. ‘Here I am,’ the pictures said, ‘happy at last, with a good-looking boyfriend and on a millionaire’s yacht to boot.’ That was what Ken Lennox, one of the men paying for the pictures, believed.
She wanted to show Prince Charles she was having a great time . . . It was, ‘You’ve got Camilla, you’ve got the Rottweiler, but look at me!’ It was there in so many pictures. And she was a beautiful woman. She looked sensational in those swimming costumes.
In the care of the Fayed family, Diana thought that she could control the press’s access to her at last. When she wanted them, they would come. When she didn’t, she could disappear into the private jets, luxury suites, the family’s hideaways in Paris, Malibu and the Swiss Alps. Diana had worked hard in Angola and then skulked around London in the back of Hasnat Khan’s old car. But here with Dodi was the fun side of being rich and famous, and she was letting her hair down, luxuriating in the Imperial Suite, champagne on ice.
On 28 August the New York Times printed a long and favourable profile of Mohamed Al Fayed. In the passages about Dodi’s relationship with Diana its interview stressed parallels with Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson. Perhaps this romantic royal reject was also finding love in a world of millionaires’ yachts and Paris villas. That evening Diana and Dodi toasted the first anniversary of her divorce on a deserted Sardinian beach under the stars. For the Fayeds the summer was going perfectly. For Diana too. ‘Yes, it’s bliss,’ she told Rosa Monckton on her mobile.
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Annick Cojean was in Washington when her feature about Diana and the photograph appeared in Le Monde.
There was a knock at the door. It was the director of the hotel, who said, ‘What is going on? I’d like you to tell me who you are! The telephone exchange can’t handle it! People have been asking for you throughout the night and there are several television crews downstairs who want to meet you.’ I replied, ‘I’m not at all famous but I interviewed Princess Diana and it has set something off in Europe and I’m not quite sure what it is.’
It was a small hotel, and as soon as I arrived in the foyer there were people following me with a camera. The questions came thick and fast: ‘Why did the Princess give you an interview?’ ‘Do you know that it’s the first time that she has done this?’ ‘Why does she want to talk about politics?’ ‘Why did she criticise the Major government?’
And I kept saying, ‘But it isn’t a scoop. She has been campaigning against landmines and so she’s delighted and cheers when the government decides to ban them, and she says that the previous government, which didn’t want to ban them, was wrong. Where’s the surprise? Where are the revelations?’
I sensed that they wanted to whip up a storm. I remember sitting on my bed and saying to myself, ‘But it’s incredible, it’s incredible!’ Kensington Palace was distancing itself from it all, saying, ‘The Princess never criticised the Conservative government.’
All of a sudden I was in the public eye. One paper published two photos, of me and Diana, facing each other, with the caption: ‘Two women, one word, “hopeless” ’. I could have cried, I was totally overwhelmed. I wanted to telephone Diana at that point. But how could I? Who was I to ring her? But I really wanted to say to her, ‘Wait, I didn’t want this. You know what took place during our conversation, you know that I was very respectful of your words.’
And then all of a sudden it was being turned into something controversial, incendiary, explosive. It was horrifying. I had just realised the nature of the British press.
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Mohamed Al Fayed says that he spoke to Dodi on the Jonikal and
his son told him that he and Diana were going to get married, and would soon go to Repossi’s in Paris to pick up the ring. Rings can mean different things to different people, as Kelly Fisher had recently discovered, and it is far from clear that Diana was aware of this particular ring’s importance to Dodi.
Dodi, says his father, added that he also wanted to take Diana around the Windsor villa in Paris (Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson’s old home, now a Fayed property) because he planned to live there with her once they were married. But however warm the feelings between the couple, an engagement after a month doesn’t sound like Diana’s style. She would surely have wanted to talk it over with her sons. Diana’s friends tell various stories. Vivienne Parry:
She wrote to me to say that she had never been happier and I was thrilled for her. But I was also concerned about her, because this was very short term. I do not believe for an instant that she planned to marry him. And in fact even Diana, in the first flush of romance, could see that marrying Dodi would cause immense problems.
No one will ever know how long Diana and Dodi would have lasted, but it seems wrong to dismiss their relationship. Diana told as many people she adored the Egyptian as she told it was a simple fling. She talked to Joseph Sanders at length from the Jonikal and he’s convinced that the relationship could have continued.
I think Diana wanted to find a husband and she wanted to find a new family. And I think she felt at one with Dodi. I think she could have got married, and it could have been the fairytale ending that she wanted.
