Diana: In Pursuit of Love (34 page)

This time, as Diana and her sons boarded the Harrods executive Gulfstream IV jet bound for Nice with Mohamed, his wife Heini and their four children, it was Diana’s life that would be changed for ever. She had shown, time and again, how much she yearned for home, hearth and family – now she was being welcomed into what Andrew Neil, a friend of the Fayeds, described as ‘the warm embrace of the extended Arab family’.

While William and Harry raced each other around the bay at St Tropez on powerful jet skis, frantic photographers were in full pursuit, desperate to snap the royal party. Soon boatloads of media people were bobbing about near Fayed’s beach, much to the annoyance of Diana’s children. Typical of her robust policy
towards the media, Diana did not avoid the photographers – she confronted them. Wearing just a one-piece leopard-print swimsuit, she zoomed out in a speedboat for a showdown with a boatful of British pressmen. ‘How long do you intend to keep this up?’ she asked. ‘We’ve been watched every minute we’ve been here. There’s an obsessive interest in me and the children.’ She complained that her older son, who made no secret of his dislike of photographers, was ‘freaked out’ by the attention.

Before she left the press pack, she added cryptically, ‘You’re going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do’– a statement variously seen as signifying her intention to convert to Islam or to move to America. Much more likely though is that it was simply a throwaway remark that has gained greater resonance because of subsequent events.

While the media focused on her intriguing payoff line as well as the running comparison between Diana on holiday and the imminent fiftieth birthday party for Camilla, the arrival of Mohamed’s son Dodi passed without notice or comment. His father summoned him from Paris where he was staying with his fiancée, the model Kelly Fisher, and asked him to join the royal party. Fayed, a furiously determined man who had built his empire from nothing, harboured dynastic ambitions for his son. As Dodi’s step-uncle Hassan Yassin observed, ‘Any father would like to see his son get into the best circles, so he did what he could.’

At first glance, Dodi and Diana were an unlikely match. Generous, undemanding, and lethargic, Dodi was known for his beautiful manners and his collection of high-powered cars. At the age of fifteen he had his own chauffeured Rolls-Royce and bodyguard and spent a short while at Sandhurst, the officer training school, before working as a film producer in Hollywood. Like his father, Dodi lived a life of exaggerated security, surrounding himself with surveillance cameras and bodyguards. He and his father carried their precautions to such an extreme that before they had a meal, they had their plates wiped with lime to detect arsenic poisoning.

‘He was nice, polite but monumentally unserious,’ was the opinion of David Puttnam, who worked with him during the filming of the Oscar-winning movie
Chariots of Fire
. ‘He couldn’t
focus or concentrate. Unutterably superficial in a way that frustrated his father.’ On one occasion Puttnam threw Dodi off the set for offering cocaine to the staff. Others, mainly women, saw him differently, viewing him as a rather immature, somewhat damaged young man living in the shadow of his dynamic and overbearing father. ‘Kind’, ‘thoughtful’, ‘sweet’ and ‘sympathetic’ were epithets used by his female admirers, who included the actresses Brooke Shields, Joanne Whalley and Mimi Rogers. Hassan Yassin confirmed the general opinion: ‘He was a loner, very shy, better in the company of women. An introvert. Dodi was somewhat undefined. He was a late starter who wanted to live without being bothered.’

He seemed an unlikely suitor for the Princess. Certainly the contrast with her previous lover, Hasnat Khan, was marked; one a serious, career-minded surgeon who hated the limelight, the other a wealthy party animal who only dabbled in his work as he did in drugs and women. Apart from their Muslim heritage, their only shared characteristics seemed to be erratic time-keeping and an aversion to physical exercise. Unathletic and at 5 feet 9 inches, two inches shorter than Diana, who liked men taller than herself, Dodi, then forty-one, was pleasant but not exceptional. He was, apparently, also engaged to be married in four weeks’ time to Kelly Fisher. This came as a surprise to Hassan Yassin, who had met the couple on numerous occasions. ‘He was always surrounded by models from the fashion industry,’ he said, shrugging.

Dodi and Diana had met several times before – at a film première, a polo match and at a dinner party given by Raine Spencer in the spring of 1997. While they had rubbed shoulders, there was no obvious spark between them, Dodi politely treating the Princess with the deference due her status.

That was certainly the feeling on board the
Jonikal.
‘They got on well enough, but I didn’t think anything of it,’ recollected the steward Debbie Gribble. An unlikely food fight where the couple chased each other around deck like a couple of kids ended with them talking rather than teasing one another. From then on the crew often caught them deep in conversation, either alone or with his father.

It seemed that Diana was enjoying herself, free of the emotional turmoil of the last few months, protected and safe within a stable family which was so important for her. She liked the fact too that her boys warmed to Dodi, who had rented a disco in St Tropez on a couple of nights so that the party could have fun in peace. Her parish priest, Father Frank Gelli, later recalled, ‘She told me how fond Dodi was of her children and how much they enjoyed his company. That meant a lot to her.’

A couple of days later Kelly Fisher flew down to join her fiancé, but instead of staying in the villa, she was installed on board the Fayeds’ schooner, the
Sakhara
. For the rest of the holiday Dodi commuted between the villa, the schooner and his father’s yacht, spending the day with Diana, his nights with his fiancée. It was an unusual arrangement for a couple supposedly due to marry in just a few weeks. And they did display the trappings of a couple about to wed: Dodi had bought them a home, a $7 million estate in Malibu, California, once owned by the actress Julie Andrews; and he had presented Kelly, then thirty-one, with a £130,000 sapphire and diamond ring as well as a generous allowance. They were also talking about starting a family; according to Fisher, Dodi wanted two boys. ‘I had no idea what was going on,’ Kelly said later. ‘Dodi kept leaving me behind with the excuse that the Princess didn’t like to meet new people.’

She left after a couple of days for a modelling assignment in Nice. By the time she returned, Diana had gone, telling her host that it had been her ‘best holiday ever’. When the Princess arrived back at Kensington Palace there were four dozen roses and a £6,000 gold watch waiting for her – a gift from Dodi. A week later, at the end of July, she agreed to join him in Paris, ostensibly for a private viewing of the Villa Windsor, owned by his father, where the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson spent their years of exile. During their whirlwind weekend, Dodi and Diana dined together at a three-star Michelin restaurant but she slept alone in the Imperial Suite at the Ritz hotel while he retired to his apartment. Curiously, it seems that Diana, who made a point of spending as much time as she could with her boys, left them in the care of her staff at Kensington Palace while she was away.

With her apartment about to undergo redecoration she impulsively accepted another invitation from Dodi, this time to join him alone on board the
Jonikal
for a week’s Mediterranean cruise in early August. This time the Princess suggested that the boys head to Balmoral a few days early to join their father.

While the couple were initially assigned separate cabins, it was during this holiday in early August that the famous long-range ‘kiss’ pictures were taken by a well-informed paparazzo, who snapped Dodi and Diana embracing in the shallow waters at Isola Piana at the southern tip of Corsica. The photographs, taken just five days before Dodi was apparently due to marry, earned the photographer Mario Brenna and his partner Jason Fraser a substantial six-figure sum, in the process alerting the world – and Dodi’s bride-to-be – that the Princess was in the middle of a summer romance. ‘Locked in her lover’s arms, the Princess finds happiness at last,’ was the headline in the
Sunday Mirror
, which devoted a further ten pages to exploring the nuances of the budding relationship. Indeed, if the publicity-shy Mr Khan had felt any pangs of jealousy as a result of the publication of the pictures, he would have been grateful for the quiet life after seeing how his fellow Muslim was treated for daring to romance an Anglo-Saxon Princess. The early stories about Dodi being ‘sensitive, gentle and caring’ soon gave way to barely disguised racism as details about his past lovers and his drug abuse came to light. When a tearful Kelly Fisher paraded before the cameras claiming a broken engagement, Dodi soon went from ‘Mr Perfect’ to an ‘oily Egyptian bedhopper’. ‘You Dodi Rat’, yelled the
Daily Star
.

It was a scenario Diana had long anticipated and feared – ‘Who would take me on? Anyone who takes me on has to accept that they will be raked over in the papers.’ But the evening after the story of their romantic cruise became headline news, Diana had supper at Dodi’s Park Lane apartment in central London, on what would have been the night before his wedding, while fifty photographers waited outside. For once she seemed supremely unconcerned about the furore.

That the couple had made a genuine connection was apparent to their friends and family. Dodi’s worldly-wise step-uncle, Hassan
Yassin, who was fond of Dodi but realistic about his shortcomings, had phoned him a couple of times during their cruise. He jokingly told Dodi that he had just been called by Buckingham Palace and warned that if Dodi married Diana, he, Hassan, would be obliged to marry the Queen Mother. For a moment Dodi was nonplussed and took him at his word before realizing that he was joking. Hassan Yassin, who had watched his nephew drift through life, sensed a change: ‘He was very happy and I thought that he had found someone. For the first time in his life he was blossoming.’

In a later conversation Hassan issued his nephew with a benign warning to take ‘this golden girl’ seriously. ‘You’ve got to settle down,’ he said with mock gravity. Dodi replied, ‘I am going to.’ Dodi had made similar comments when he met medium Rita Rogers during a flying visit to her home in Derbyshire. She had earlier performed a reading for him via satellite telephone while he and Diana cruised alone on the
Jonikal
, and told him that he would never have another girlfriend. ‘I know. She is the one,’ he had replied.

Diana seemed equally smitten. Just before she went on holiday with Rosa Monckton to Greece, she spoke for an hour on the telephone to her stepmother, Raine Spencer, who was staying with friends in Antibes in the South of France. ‘She was blissfully, ecstatically happy, having really one of the best times in her life, and Dodi was very much part of that,’ recalled Raine Spencer. ‘One of the reasons Diana fell in love with him was because he was such a sweet, thoughtful person and he thought all the time about her. This she told me only a few weeks before she died. She said to me, “I’m so happy, at last here is somebody who thinks about me.”

‘If you see it in the context of her having become this person who is looking after sick people in hospitals, making speeches, it’s very rewarding but very draining. Sometimes you feel that people are draining you of your life blood. This is what happened to Diana. She was exhausted by people draining her. She needed a bit of time to build up her own self and I think Dodi helped her very much.’

Open, affectionate, kind and protective – qualities which she had been searching for in a man for much of her life. Diana, by turns needy and demanding, insatiable in her yearning for affection, was
now with a man who had all the time in the world for her. In many ways it was her first grown-up relationship. ‘She liked the feeling of having someone who not only so obviously cared for her, but was not afraid to be seen doing so,’ said Rosa Monckton. The woman who had longed for appreciation now found herself indulged by a cosseting lifestyle, showered with expensive gifts and constant attention. It was a seductive combination. ‘I have been so spoilt, so taken care of, all the things that I never, ever had,’ the Princess told Lady Elsa Bowker.

When the proposed trip to Milan with her American friend Lana Marks was cancelled because of the death of Lana’s father, Diana found herself at a loose end. Rather than stay at Kensington Palace, she accepted another invitation to join Dodi on board the
Jonikal
, arriving in Nice on 21 August. It was a blissful time, soaking up the sun, cruising from port to port, insulated from the rest of the world within the luxurious bubble of their yacht. When Dodi ordered her a ring from Alberto Repossi’s store in Monaco, there was speculation that they were to marry. The name of the range of rings, ‘Tell Me Yes’, added to the frenzy.

The more sober of her friends, however, described Diana’s infatuation as a ‘summer fling’, reminding the more excitable that they had only known each other for six weeks, and had spent only twenty-five days alone together. But neither, unfortunately, had she spent much time alone with Prince Charles. Indeed the two romances that form the book-ends of her life, the one with Prince Charles and the one with Dodi Fayed, were not only the shortest and most famous but both had parental figures in the background. The first was presided over by the Queen Mother and Lady Ruth Fermoy; the second had Mohamed Fayed pulling the strings.

Diana first started seeing Prince Charles at Balmoral in August 1980 and famously complained that they were never really alone during their courtship. Yet six months later, in February 1981, she accepted his offer of marriage.

During her romance with Dodi she was saying to friends like Lady Annabel Goldsmith that she needed another husband ‘like a bad rash’, while the possessive Paul Burrell was already voicing his disapproval. As she and Rosa Monckton prepared to depart from
Kensington Palace in August for their holiday touring the Greek islands he said to Rosa conspiratorially, ‘He’s not right for her, you know that.’