Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  Whitaker wrote a four-part series on Diana for the Star, urging Charles to marry her. “I took a decision, and I think some of my colleagues did, that she was a pretty suitable person to become the Princess of Wales.” The Star’s circulation shot up and the other tabloids followed. Diana became a superstar.

  “To DI For!” headlines declared.

  “Charles: Don’t Dither!” one headline demanded.

  “She’s 19 and a perfect English Rose,” declared the Sun.

  “Divine,” announced the Mirror.

  “There was to be no turning back for the Prince from now on,” Whitaker noted. “The great British public would have lynched him if their beloved Diana had been hurt in any way. She had grown more popular than he by now.”

  Indeed, the Royal Family saw Diana’s popularity as its possible salvation. The press and public were so uninterested in un-charismatic Windsors that the Royal Family—which has little real function other than one of public relations—was in danger of becoming obsolete. Prince Charles never much liked the media—he called reporters “gutter rats” and “bloody animals”—but he knew the Royal Family needed the good press that Diana would bring. “You know, the time we all have to worry is when you don’t write about me or want to take photographs,” he once said to a royal reporter. “Then there would be no great point in us being around.” The duty-bound Prince agreed to marry the smitten teenager that the people loved—even if he didn’t. The marriage was little more than a worldwide publicity stunt, but the romance of it temporarily silenced even the most cynical journalists. “Let’s talk about the size of Di’s feet,” Tom Brokaw said to a colleague during a commercial break of the broadcast of the royal wedding. “I mean, she’s got gunboats down there.” But even Brokaw seemed moved by the wedding kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, although it, too, was fake.

  “Give her a kiss,” Prince Andrew urged Charles.

  “I’m not getting into that caper,” Charles snapped.

  “Oh, go on, give her a kiss.”

  Charles turned to his mother. “May I?”

  The queen consented and the fairy tale was complete. For a while, everyone—the press, the public, the palace—was happy to believe in the fairy tale. Diana, however, grew increasingly unhappy about the disparity between the public facade and her private unhappiness. “The fairy tale was killing me,” she said, so she decided, “I’m going to kill the fairy tale.”

  Diana, like many celebrities, lived through her public image. While she did resent the constant intrusion of her privacy, she also depended on the press attention. “She got her emotional sustenance from the newspapers,” said biographer Andrew Morton. “She really defined herself in their terms. If they were nice to her she felt good.”

  Diana, photogenic and charismatic, understood the media and understood the power of images. She courted the media brilliantly. When the couple went on outings, royal handlers were reduced to pleading with photographers surrounding Diana to take a few shots of Charles. At a speech in Australia, Diana once upstaged her husband by merely crossing her legs. The photographers, eager to get a shot of a royal thigh, all rushed to the side of the stage where Diana was sitting, nearly toppling the platform where Charles was speaking. Charles started getting jealous of Diana’s good press. He accused Diana of being an exhibitionist, acting out her own celebrity fantasies when she danced onstage for his birthday.

  Diana often spoke of “my public” and her “special relationship with the people.” She was terrified of losing that public love. Before Prince Andrew got engaged, Diana worried that his bride would steal her spotlight. “I’m the flavor of the month,” she once said to photographer Edwards, “but if Andrew marries a black girl or a Catholic, they’ll be the story.” When Andrew married Sarah Ferguson, and the press briefly adored the vivacious redhead, Diana was jealous. “I suppose you’re going to drop me like a hot potato?” she fretted. “I suppose you’ll be fussing over Sarah now.”

  Meanwhile, Diana brilliantly planted favorable stories about herself, squelched negative ones, and cast herself as a victim of a cold, uncaring husband and an oppressive monarchy. When Diana refused to let Charles attend her thirtieth birthday party—her lover James Hewitt was a guest—he released the face-saving story that he had pressing business matters to attend to; she told reporters, off the record, that it was yet another example that his work was more important to him than she was. The tabs ran with her spin on the story. Buckingham Palace’s ploy to get good press through a loveless marriage had backfired.

  “They kept saying I was manipulative,” she told New Yorker editor Tina Brown. “What’s the alternative? To just sit there and have them make your image for you?”

  In addition to Whitaker, the Princess courted and regularly confided in Clive Goodman of the News of the World, Charles Rae of the Sun, and Robert Jobson of the Express. By the mid-1990s, Diana’s favorite confidante, however, was Richard Kay of the Daily Mail. Diana spoke with Kay almost every day. The journalist reported her agenda so faithfully that he was known among colleagues as Diana’s minister of propaganda. When the Princess was photographed sunbathing topless in Spain, Kay wrote stories blasting the media, quoting “a friend” of the princess saying that “it was as if the Princess had been raped.” The friend, of course, was Diana. Later, when the News of the World got a story that harassing phone calls to art dealer Oliver Hoare were traced back to Diana’s private phone lines, Kay tried to persuade the paper that Diana didn’t make the calls. A few hours later, the Princess was spotted in Kay’s car; the two had a three-hour strategy meeting. Diana ended up giving Kay an on-the-record interview. “Somewhere someone is trying to make out that I am mad,” Diana said. “Do you realize that whoever is trying to destroy me is inevitably damaging the institution of monarchy as well?”

  Usually, however, Diana’s press manipulation was conducted entirely behind the scenes. Once, when a paper was preparing an article on a private speech Diana gave on eating disorders, an editor there called Kensington Palace for comment. To his surprise, Diana got on the phone and spoke for forty minutes. “She told me exactly what she had been saying, what she hoped to achieve and what her own suffering had been in incredible detail,” he said. “The understanding was that I would not quote her directly, but to do it as a reported speech.” The editor was shocked, therefore, when the next day the Princess issued a statement, deploring the article as an invasion of her privacy. “I rang her immediately,” recalled the editor, “and congratulated her on a brilliant operation.”

  When Diana leaked her version of events to Andrew Morton for Diana: Her True Story, the Palace was almost successful in dismissing the book as “tabloid rubbish.” Diana confirmed the book by embracing one of Morton’s on-the-record sources; she also contacted photographers beforehand to make sure they were on the scene to record it all for the newspapers. The day the pictures were published, Diana appeared at a public event and broke down into sobs. “She said in the morning that she was going to burst into tears,” according to Morton, “just as a way of getting criticism off her.”

  Diana had conquered the tabloids and was on her way to coopting the broadsheets. She began a campaign of meeting with top editors in London. She would chat with them about Buckingham Palace’s war against her and would describe how editors could help her.

  “She was very entertaining company,” said one editor. “Her conversations were laced with confessions and revelations. It was pretty riveting stuff, but it was all on the understanding that you wouldn’t pass them on. After that we would be briefed regularly about what she was thinking and where she was going … off the record of course.”

  Rupert Murdoch was one of the editors Diana courted. After Murdoch’s Times of London serialized the Morton book, Diana thought he was squarely on her side. She invited Murdoch to lunch at Kensington Palace, but the publisher, according to several people who work with him, was not entirely charmed. “He kept his distance,” said one of his staff. “He
didn’t want her phoning him twice a day trying to influence his editors through him.” She learned just how much Murdoch was not on her side when his Sun published the “Squidgy” tapes of her in a conversation with James Gilbey.*

  Diana also courted Peter Stothard, the editor for the Times of London. They met for lunch on May 18, 1994, and the pattern was much the same as it was with most of the editors she wooed: personal revelations interwoven with tales of the plot against her by allies of Prince Charles. That day, the papers carried a story saying Diana spent 0,000 a week on grooming and personal care. As she sipped her bottled water, Diana explained to Stothard that the story was a leak from those inside Buckingham Palace who were trying to destroy her; she told Stothard that he and the Times could help save her. “She felt that her only recourse was to fight like with like, and on this day, she had a plan,” according to Stothard. “To my horror, she began to set out a complicated story about how she had helped a tramp who had fallen into the Regent’s Park canal and was going to see him in the hospital that very afternoon.” The next day, without Stothard’s help, the story about her heroism and kindness in rescuing the “tramp” was in all the papers.

  Diana was training Prince William in media manipulation; she brought her eldest son along with her to at least two of these meetings with journalists. “I just wanted to talk to you about a few things—get to know you,” Diana explained. “I think it would be useful for William to meet an editor.”

  “It is an undisputed fact that the Princess connived with the media and exploited it for her own interest, just as much as we exploited hers for ours,” observed Sir David English, editor-inchief of Associated Newspapers. English, like many editors, used to give Diana advice on how to deal with the media, but he grew exasperated when he realized that she was much more clever at it than he was. “You’re the finest P.R. operator, man or woman, I have ever met,” English told her.

  Princess Diana was so shrewd in shaping her public image that by early summer 1997, she was probably the most famous, most loved woman in the world. Her public persona bordered on sainthood, but her private life was a mess. She had packed on fifteen pounds after being dumped by Hasnat Khan, a Pakistani heart surgeon whose deeply religious Muslim parents didn’t approve of their romance. There were reports that she was calling him constantly.

  Diana was caught in the trap experienced by every celebrity who invites the media into their lives and then gets angry about the intrusion. She desperately wanted to be in a romance, but she had become a prisoner of the fame she worked so hard to cultivate. “I’m never going to meet anyone, because who would go out with me?” Diana complained to her friend Cindy Crawford. “I have my picture in the paper every single day. Who would want to take that on?”

  Dodi Fayed wanted to find that woman, he told friends, who could get him on the cover of People magazine. For years, the Egyptian playboy had desperately been trying to become famous, but his father’s immense wealth and his own meager accomplishments weren’t doing the trick. He had produced several movies—including Academy Award winner Chariots of Fire, Hook, The World According to Garp, Brenda Star, Reporter, and The Scarlet Letter—but his actual involvement in the films was only minimal, and certainly didn’t warrant much media coverage. Dodi would visit places like Elaine’s, a Manhattan restaurant favored by journalists, trying to get someone to do a story on him. He courted gossip columnists, like Mike Walker at the National Enquirer and Hollywood writer Jack Martin. “He was always bugging me to write something about him,” said Walker. “He was constantly sending me gifts, inviting me out, and trying to give me items about himself.” According to his former girlfriend Carole Mallory, he had a Hollywood columnist on his payroll.

  Dodi Fayed hired PMK, Hollywood’s most powerful public relations firm, to raise his profile. PMK would sometimes offer publications interviews with some of its bigger stars if they would do articles about the firm’s unknowns, but even with this sort of publicity muscle behind him, Dodi wasn’t getting much ink. The most press he got was for dating famous women. Dodi had been linked to Brooke Shields, Cathy Lee Crosby, Joanne Whalley, Julia Roberts, Britt Ekland, Mimi Rogers, Daryl Hannah, Stephanie Powers, Tina Sinatra, former Charlies’ Angel Tanya Roberts, Valerie Perrine, Prince Andrew’s ex-girlfriend Koo Stark, Winona Ryder, and O.J.’s ex, Tawny Kitaen.* Dodi was drawn to women in the news.

  Dodi Fayed worked for his father, Mohammed Al Fayed, but people who knew him say he was actually much closer to his uncle, arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, the brother of his late mother. Once, according to the London Times, Al Fayed discovered that his son had developed a taste for cocaine and after that, had Dodi regularly tested. “As far as I know, he always tested clean,” according to a business associate, who says Dodi never got the respect of his father, who would sometimes introduce him as “my useless son.”

  Despite a monthly allowance of $100,000, Dodi was always in debt. He was once sued for $1 million for allegedly selling film rights he didn’t own. He was served eviction papers after failing to pay rent on a $3 million Beverly Hills mansion. A New York nightclub claimed he had an unpaid $20,000 tab. Usually, his father’s money would make the problem go away, but not always. One man who sued Dodi for back rent was told he could collect the $135,000 he was owed if he would claim that the bill had been run up by an imposter. The outraged man refused. “Even for $135,000 I’m not going to say that he’s a stand-up guy,” he fumed. “That imposter trick is at least five years old,” said one reporter who knew Dodi well. At least one debt, however, was publicly blamed on an imposter.

  In Dodi’s courtship of Diana—as with many things in his life—his father did much of the behind-the-scenes work. Mohammed Al Fayed, a bonafide Anglophile, had been pursuing Princess Diana and her family for years. He had befriended Diana’s father, Earl Spencer, and made him a special guest at the Ritz. He had appointed Diana’s stepmother, Raine Spencer, to the board of Harrods. Although Mohammed Al Fayed barely knew Diana’s father when she became Princess, by the time the Earl died in 1992, Al Fayed claimed that the two had become so close that they were “like brothers.” He also said that shortly before he died, Diana’s father had asked him to “keep an eye” on his children. A1 Fayed would send expensive gifts to Diana’s sons, with a note inscribed “with love from Uncle Mohammed.” He had been trying to get Diana to take a vacation with his family for years, inviting her to come to his villas in Gstaad or Saint Tropez or to his castle in Scotland, but she always declined.

  On June 3, Mohammed Al Fayed sat next to Princess Diana at a benefit dinner at the Churchill Intercontinental Hotel. Over a dinner of roasted lamb and lentils, Mohammed invited Diana to vacation with him in Saint Tropez. To Al Fayed’s surprise, she accepted. Mohammed had his helicopter pick up Diana and her boys and he sent for his son, who was living with model Kelly Fisher in Los Angeles.

  Mohammed Al Fayed told Dodi that if he could land Diana, he could have the mansion in Paris that had been owned by the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Mohammed footed the bill for the romance, including paying for the ring Dodi bought for Diana. He also encouraged—or at the very least, didn’t discourage—the publicity about the romance. Brian Vine, an editor at the Daily Mail, telephoned the tycoon to ask if his reporters and photographers were annoying the vacationers. Al Fayed assured Vine that the Princess was not bothered by the attention. A week after Diana’s initial vacation in Saint Tropez, Mohammed gave Dodi carte blanche to use his helicopters, yachts, and villas to woo the Princess. On one of those cruises they had The Kiss.

  Some believe The Kiss in the Mediterranean was just as staged as the kiss between Charles and Diana on the balcony of Buckingham Palace sixteen years earlier. “A woman who’s been followed by the press as much as she has,” observed Newsweek Paris Bureau Chief Christopher Dickey, “does not embrace her Egyptian lover in public on a boat where she knows there are going to be people floating around offshore taking pictures unless she means to make a statement.”

  The
Kiss pictures weren’t even taken by a paparazzi—they were shot by fashion photographer Mario Brenna, who had frequently worked with Diana’s old friend Gianni Versace. Brenna, like the photographers at Saint Tropez, was shocked by how exhibitionistic Diana seemed. “They kissed for ten seconds and after that her head went back,” Brenna said. Diana pulled down the straps on her bathing suit and Dodi slowly rubbed suntan oil on her shoulders. “She looked so happy. It was almost like she was putting on a show for the camera.”

  Some believed Diana wasn’t the only one who wanted to make a statement. Dodi’s former publicist, Jim Sliman, suspected that Dodi had tipped off the press to give their whereabouts to make sure his picture would be plastered all over the world. “I don’t know if he loved her,” said columnist Jack Martin, who knew Dodi for nearly twenty years. “Actually, ‘like’ is better. Dodi went out with loads of famous women he didn’t like.”

  “She’s not reacting in the way she has in the past by getting upset at reports of the romance,” said her confidant Richard Kay. “Dodi has obviously said, ‘Look, I don’t care about the publicity, so she can relax.’ ” Kay compared Diana and Dodi Fayed to Jackie and Aristotle Onassis.

  The pictures sparked a bidding war among the tabloids. In the United States they were published by the Globe—which paid $200,000 for them. Within a few weeks, all the tabloids had The Kiss photos, along with breathless details about the romance. The stories, for the most part, depicted Dodi as an incredible lover and the man of Diana’s dreams.

  “It’s the best sex I’ve ever had,” Diana supposedly told a friend. “Being with Charles was never like this—I never knew it could be this good. I can’t get enough!”

  “For the first time, Di has seen fireworks!” read one tabloid.

  “He’s taken her to places she’s never been before,” one “friend” was quoted as saying, “and I don’t mean the Italian Riviera!”