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. ‘S
he 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.’
The subtext was that Dodi was not right for the butler, who saw his position increasingly under threat. During Diana’s last summer, Burrell had sensed the way the wind was blowing and concluded that it was not in his favour. Even before she met Dodi, the Princess was spending less and less time at Kensington Palace. In fact, during her last year, she performed more official engagements abroad than at home – a trip to Leicester in April 1997 was her first home engagement outside London in eighteen months. The successful sale of her royal dresses was an obvious sign of the way she was clearing the decks of her royal life. In reality, Paul Burrell, her ‘rock’, was the only relic from an unhappy time in her life – and their bond was rapidly crumbling. ‘At the time of her death the relationship between Diana and Burrell was at its lowest ebb,’ stated her friend Vivienne Parry, a view endorsed by several Kensington Palace staff, including the chef Darren McGrady. Now, their already highly charged association was further threatened by the presence of the Fayeds, who had their own butlers and domestic staff.
Concerned about his future with the Princess, Burrell had registered with several employment agencies and had made overtures to various Americans, notably Tom Hanks, with whom he had struck up a friendship. Even Donald Trump was interested in ‘Di’s Guy’. As Burrell’s one-time agent, the lawyer Richard Greene commented, ‘He felt that his time was coming to an end and that she no longer needed him. During that last year Paul was looking for work outside. He wanted to take care of himself and his family. Her dalliance with Dodi provoked genuine fears.’
For the last few years, ‘Abroad’ had become a familiar conversational thread, as much psychological as geographical, the Princess seeing America in particular as a place of ‘options, optimism and openness’. During the last year of her life she made around twenty overseas trips and was away from Britain for more than twelve weeks.
Her references to moving to Australia, then to South Africa and finally the States were part of a wider disenchantment with British society, a disillusion fed by her own experiences as well as the commercial success of the Duchess of York, who had reinvented herself to an appreciative American audience. David Puttnam had long conversations with Diana about her buying a home in Martha’s Vineyard where she had enjoyed a summer holiday. ‘She felt that she could recreate her life in America,’ he remembered. ‘She liked the way she was treated by press, liked the people, and the sense of freedom.’ While she had turned down a proposal from Revlon to represent them, and laughingly rejected Kevin Costner’s offer of a part in the sequel to The Bodyguard, it was clear that the trajectory of her life was moving away from Britain. ‘She loved Americans and loved America,’ said Richard Greene. ‘She felt a sense of freedom in America and was thinking, Why not America? The whole of life was opening up for her.’ Certainly her brother Earl Spencer believed that one day she would have ended up in the States.
As the Princess wearily told the media during the first days of her holiday in St Tropez, ‘My boys are urging me continually to leave the country. They say it is the only way. They want me to live abroad. I sit in London all the time and I am abused and followed wherever I go. I cannot win.’ It was significant that she mentioned the boys, the anchors of her life, as giving her the go-ahead to look elsewhere. In earlier complaints about harassment she said that it was only the boys who kept her in Britain. Now those ties were loosening.
When the Princess started poring over architect’s plans for Julie Andrews’s former house in Malibu the alarm bells really started ringing. She had even chosen rooms for the boys. The fact that the house was now owned by Dodi made it an even more serious proposition. Before, she had merely dreamed – of opening a riding school with James Hewitt; buying a farm in Tuscany with Oliver Hoare; settling into a home in Cape Town with Hasnat Khan. For the first time she was looking at a place that existed outside her imagination.
Was she going to marry? It is a question that is as intriguing and contradictory as the lady herself. Dodi’s father contended that his son had proposed, and claimed that he had sent three cases of champagne to Kensington Palace to toast the bride-to-be.
However, his assertions of a dynastic union are diluted by the fact that he also ardently believed that Diana was expecting Dodi’s child, a claim vigorously denied by Rosa Monckton who said that Diana had had her period while she was with her in Greece. The official coroner Dr John Burton was brutally emphatic. ‘I have seen inside her womb. I know she wasn’t pregnant.’
Others, including Burrell, are equally dismissive. Her friend Lana Marks claims that Diana telephoned to say Dodi would soon be ‘a past chapter’ of her life, while another friend, Gulu Lalvani, said he had joked with her about saving up for a wedding present only to be told by Diana that while she was having a lot of fun, no marriage was planned. Other friends were concerned that she may be making the wrong choice – again. Her former boyfriend Teddy Forstmann phoned her on the Fayed boat and asked her ‘what the hell she was playing at’. As a friend of Forstmann explained: ‘He is very protective of those people he cares about and he thought that Diana could do much better for herself than Dodi.’ The Princess placated him by saying that the romance was simply a ‘summer fling’. It appears that the Princess was telling her friends what they wanted to hear, depending on their take on the romance.
The most intriguing testimony comes from her local parish priest Father Gelli, the curate of St Mary Abbott’s Church in Kensington, whom she met after she was criticized for taking William and Harry to see the movie, The Devil’s Own, a film about IRA terrorists, in May 1997. He wrote her a letter of support and as a result she invited him for tea where their conversation ranged over many spiritual issues, including exorcism, the Devil and Sufism. She was most concerned to know about marriage between Christians and Muslims and whether they would be allowed to m
arry in church.
Later she talked to him about another parishioner, Dodi Fayed, sharing with him her hopes and dreams. She felt Dodi could take care of her and offer her the love and security she had never really known. In the last week of her life she called the priest again, this time from the deck of the Jonikal. She asked him about marriage and a church wedding. ‘Diana was so very happy and very much in love,’ Gelli said. ‘I honestly believe if they were alive today, they would be married.’
While the controversy over her feelings for Dodi will never be resolved, one area of agreement is that Diana had made considerable strides, emotionally, physically and spiritually. In the first year of her new life as a free woman she gave full expression to the real Diana, no longer inhibited by or afraid of those who had tried to shackle her during her royal life. ‘I had never seen her so happy, particularly over those last three months,’ recollected designer Jacques Azagury. ‘I was dealing with her a lot, seeing her almost every day. You could tell she was a happy woman.’
Those friends who had seen her wayward, disheartened and, at times, stumbling on her journey of self-discovery sensed that at last she was savouring a true taste of happiness and contentment. The woman who just a few years before was a nail-biting, round-shouldered, diffident creature was now confident in body, mind and heart. ‘I’m so strong now, I fear nothing, nothing,’ she told a friend. Higher heels and shorter skirts were a semaphore of the positive woman she was becoming. Her astrologer, Debbie Frank, who had counselled her since her separation, spoke of the transformation: ‘She was happy all the time – something that was unique. For Diana happiness usually lasted for just a day. I don’t think she’d ever known that before. Her life had never been quite so fulfilled. She was loving her work and she was so proud of her boys.’
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