by Kitty Kelley
A young woman in a T-shirt and jeans approached the palace gate in tears and left her offering: a picture of the princess in a tiara pasted above a few lines of poetry by W. H. Auden:
[She] was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
In among the flowers and stuffed animals was a smashed camera with a card that read: “This is the murder weapon that killed our beloved princess.”
Many people blamed the paparazzi for Diana’s death and, like her brother, held the media responsible. The public fury abated slightly after the French police released results of a blood alcohol test showing that the driver, Henri Paul, head of security for the Ritz Hotel, was intoxicated at three times the legal limit.
Some people took comfort from Diana’s relationship with the new man in her life, Emad Mohamed al-Fayed, known to friends as Dodi. She had been enjoying the last night of their vacation—their fourth in five weeks—when both of them were killed. Earlier, she had taken a five-day trip to Greece with her friend Rosa Monckton, and, to Diana’s delight, Dodi called her constantly. “She was happy, enjoying herself, and liked the feeling of having someone who not only so obviously cared for her, but was not afraid to be seen doing so,” Rosa wrote in an article after Diana’s death. But she also recalled Diana’s irritation when Dodi recited a list of the presents he had purchased for her, including a Cartier pearl-twist bracelet with a pearl-and-diamond dragon clasp and a reversible Jaeger-Le Coultre wristwatch.
“That’s not what I want, Rosa,” she was quoted as saying. “It makes me uneasy. I don’t want to be bought. I have everything I want. I just want someone to be there for me, to make me feel safe and secure.” She meant, of course, emotionally secure.
The two women spoke by mobile telephone on the afternoon of August 27, four days before Diana’s death.
“Just tell me, is it bliss?” asked Rosa.
“Yes, bliss,” replied the Princess.
When their romance started in the summer of 1997, pictures of the multimillionaire son of Mohamed al-Fayed* were splashed all over the newspapers. He was described by the News of the World, Britain’s largest-circulation weekly, as a forty-one-year-old playboy, who was “unfit” to marry into Britain’s aristocracy. “He excels at giving lavish parties, smoking expensive cigars and dating beautiful women,” said the paper. “He is an unsuitable choice to become the stepfather to the future king of England.” Noting the dismissive tone of the British press toward Diana’s new suitor, The New York Times described Dodi as “a young, wealthy outsider in Britain’s class-obsessed society.”
His romance with Diana had started when his father invited the Princess and her two sons to visit his family at their villa on the French Riviera. Diana accepted the invitation, despite the advice of her best friends, who felt the senior al-Fayed was socially unacceptable. The British press criticized her for lending her presence to a man who had been denied citizenship by the British government. Al-Fayed, who was born in Egypt, had admitted bribing Members of Parliament to ask questions during the Prime Minister’s weekly sessions that contributed to the defeat of the ruling Conservative Party in 1997. But he said the real reason he was not accepted by the British was ethnic discrimination.
“I am a victim of the British establishment,” he told Time magazine. “You can’t believe what I am fighting here. They can’t get over the fact that I own Harrods. It’s an Egyptian, not a Briton, who built this store, this fantasy. How can a bloody Egyptian come from another planet and do this?”
Despite his contributions to charity, the tycoon was disparaged by British newspapers as a social-climbing braggart not worthy of royal patronage. “Mr. Fayed is not the sort of person in whose debt a public figure such as the princess should knowingly place herself and her sons,” pronounced the Daily Telegraph. The next day, photographs of Diana with her arm around Mohamed al-Fayed aboard his yacht were plastered on the front pages of several newspapers. She was smiling happily, if not defiantly.
During that trip, she had approached the British reporters who dogged her to St. Tropez and asked them for some privacy, then warned that they should prepare themselves for startling news. “You’ll see,” she said. “You are going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do….
“My boys are urging me to leave the country. They say it is the only way. Maybe that’s what I should do. They want me to live abroad. I sit in London all the time and I am abused and followed wherever I go. Now I am being forced to move from here. William is stressed. William gets really freaked out. I was hoping to keep this visit all covered up and quiet.”
Despite the press intrusion, Diana later told Michael Cole, the al-Fayed spokesman for Harrods, that she and her children had had an idyllic vacation. “I’ve never had such a wonderful time,” he quoted her as saying. She told the reporter Richard Kay that she intended to bow out of public life to pursue personal interests. “She would then,” he wrote later, “be able to live as she always wanted to live, not as an icon—how she hated to be called one—but as a private person.”
Pictures of Dodi and Diana dominated the world’s tabloids, and the grainy photograph of them kissing, captured by a telephoto lens, reportedly fetched $5 million. The Sunday Mirror told its readers that the couple had found soul mates in each other: “They are both outsiders who have clashed with the British establishment.”
At the end of August, after a day cruising off Sardinia on his father’s yacht, the couple flew to Paris on his father’s plane. They visited the former villa of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, which his father owned. Later, they dined at the Ritz, his father’s hotel. The next day, Diana was scheduled to fly to London on the al-Fayed private plane to be with her boys before they returned to school. They had been vacationing with their father and the rest of the royal family in Scotland. But Diana did not live to see her children again.
Days later, on Saturday, September 6, the young princes, William and Harry, walked with their father, their grandfather, and their uncle, Diana’s brother, from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey to say good-bye to their mother. The Princess of Wales was not accorded a grand state funeral with gun carriages and muffled drums, although the Queen had the authority to give her such homage. Instead, the Palace promised a farewell that would be “a unique ritual for a unique person.” Two thousand people received invitations to attend the funeral in the abbey where English sovereigns had been crowned and buried for one thousand years. Those invited were to represent every facet of Diana’s short, bright life—from royalty to reality. Later, the Princess was to be privately interred on an island at Althorp, the Spencer family’s estate, in the village of Brington.
America’s official representative at the funeral was First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Other celebrities included Luciano Pavarotti, Steven Spielberg, Diana Ross, Tom Hanks, and Tom Cruise. Diana’s favorite dress designers—Ralph Lauren, Zandra Rhodes, Bruce Oldfield, Catherine Walker, Valentino, and Karl Lagerfeld—sat with 470 representatives of her favorite charities.
But outside the abbey, the hundreds of thousands of commoners who lined the streets seemed to represent a greater tribute to the young woman who gave more to the idea of royalty than she ever received in return. The BBC estimated the crowds to be the largest assembled in London since World War II.
Around the world, an estimated 2.5 billion people in 187 countries gathered in front of their televisions to watch Diana’s funeral. In the U.S., people arose at 4 A.M. to watch the service.
“We were there at the beginning of the fairy tale,” said a woman in New York City who had watched the royal wedding in 1981. “The
least we can do is be there for her at the end.”
Shortly after the Welsh Guards carried Diana’s coffin to the front altar of the abbey, Elton John sang his farewell to England’s rose. His lyricist had rewritten “Candle in the Wind,” originally an elegy for Marilyn Monroe, to pay homage to the Princess of Wales. That song, which the singer re-recorded and released a few days later, became the largest-selling single in history. He donated the proceeds ($65 million by 1998) to the memorial fund established in Diana’s name to benefit her favorite charities. He was later knighted by the Queen, who is said to have been moved by his haunting song. Although she had prohibited television coverage of the royal family inside the abbey, some funeral guests said they had seen tears* in the Queen’s eyes when Elton John sang about Diana as “our nation’s golden child.”
Moments after his song, Her Majesty was publicly chastened by the Earl Spencer, Diana’s brother. His eloquent eulogy did not cloak his fury as he drew a hard line between Diana’s real family and the royal family. Addressing his dead sister, he said, “… on behalf of your mother and sisters, I pledge that we, your blood family, will do all we can to continue the imaginative way in which you were steering these two exceptional young men so that their souls are not simply immersed by duty and tradition but can sing openly as you planned.” It was a none too subtle slap at the royal family.
The Earl drew resounding applause from inside and outside the abbey when he inveighed against the media. He said his sister had talked endlessly of getting away from England, because of the treatment she received at the hands of newspapers and television.
“I don’t think she ever understood why her genuinely good intentions were sneered at by the media, why there appeared to be a permanent quest on their behalf to bring her down,” he said. “It is baffling. My own, and only, explanation is that genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum. It is a point to remember that, of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this: a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age.”
The eulogy was praised as courageous and hailed as an example of Britain’s finest oratory. In the fevered atmosphere of Diana’s funeral, her brother’s eloquence was compared to Winston Churchill’s. But within days, the Earl Spencer was denounced as a cur and a bounder.
The British press retaliated against him by reporting the lurid details of his impending divorce in South Africa. They published pictures of his various mistresses, plus extracts from letters he had sent to lovers during his marriage. He was portrayed as a “serial adulterer,” who had brutally tormented his emotionally fragile wife with his philanderings, driving her to a nervous breakdown. He reportedly had barred her from attending his sister’s funeral. The newspapers called him “a liar” and “a cheat,” and his wife depicted him as an intolerant, terrifying bully who never allowed her “an opinion or a voice.” She was quoted as saying that he “increasingly criticised, undermined, bullied and belittled me until eventually I lost all confidence and became very scared of him.” The Daily Mail even ran a story comparing him to his father and grandfather, which was entitled “Why the Spencer Men Treat Their Wives as Mere Chattels.”
Charles Spencer asserted that his wife had become addicted to drugs while traveling the world as a top fashion model and would be unable to resist the lure of drugs if he gave her more money. So he rejected paying alimony. He demanded total custody of the couple’s four children and threatened to go to trial. But after the barrage of negative publicity, he backed down and settled out of court. The newspapers declared victory for his wife, who shared custody and received a lump sum payment of $3 million.
The Earl Spencer was again criticized when he announced plans to build a shrine to Diana at Althorp and charge tourists $15 to view the island where she is buried. He said the site would be opened annually from her birthday, July 1, through August 30, the eve of her death. The anniversary of her death, August 31, will be preserved as a private day for the family to remember her. He posted a message on a new Althorp House Web site: “Diana is safely back at home, where her mortal remains can be cared for, and where her memory lives on forever.” Eight million calls jammed telephone hotlines as people around the world tried to book tickets. The Daily Mail reported the story as “A Ticket to Mourn.”
The Earl said he was not exploiting his sister’s death but merely responding to the public’s desire to honor her memory. When he announced plans to erect a temple at the lake’s edge so visitors could leave floral tributes, one British columnist sniped, “It’s right near the manger where she was born.” When Spencer said he planned to convert an eighteenth-century stable into a museum filled with memorabilia celebrating Diana’s life, the same columnist inquired about pony rides and a petting zoo.
“NOW HE’S GONE TOO FAR” was the headline announcing his plans to stage a rock concert near his sister’s grave in honor of what would have been her thirty-seventh birthday. Even Diana’s favorite performers, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, and George Michael, said they could not participate owing to their previous engagements.
In the sad days after Dodi’s and Diana’s deaths, Michael Cole, the al-Fayed spokesman, appeared on television to talk mawkishly of the couple’s “enduring” love and the “probability” of their eventual marriage. He said they had exchanged gifts on their last day together: Diana gave Dodi a pair of gold cuff links that had belonged to her father and a gold cigar cutter inscribed “With love from Diana.” Dodi gave her a $205,000 ring that they had selected from Repossi Jewelers on the Place Vendome in Paris. The al-Fayed spokesman also said Dodi had a sterling silver plaque inscribed with a poem* that he had placed under her pillow in his apartment, where they had planned to spend the night.
As French magistrates investigated the fatal crash, bizarre conspiracy theories sprang up. Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi accused British intelligence agents of killing the Princess and her Egyptian lover to prevent a possible marriage that could have embarrassed the British royal family by producing children with Muslim names.
Dodi’s father, Mohamed al-Fayed, was the main source for Death of a Princess, a book that claimed Diana was pregnant and about to convert to Islam when she died. He intimated something sinister about the collision that killed her and his son. “It [their relationship] was a very serious matter,” he told the book’s authors, who worked for Time magazine. “Maybe the future king is going to have a half brother who is a ‘nigger,’ and Mohamed al-Fayed is going to be the stepgrandfather of the future king. This is how they think, this Establishment. They are a completely different type of human being.”
Maddened by grief, he raged against Earl Spencer, Prince Charles, and Prince Philip because they had not sent him condolences. “I feel hurt, upset, used,” al-Fayed told the press. “My only crime is that I am the father of the man who Diana fell in love with and who made her happier than she had ever been.”
Prime Minister Blair publicly criticized the Arab tycoon for “sensational speculation” and labeled the Diana death industry of memorial stamps, mugs, coins, books, and films as “tasteless and inappropriate.” The Queen and Prince Charles let it be known that they “enthusiastically endorsed” the Prime Minister. Diana’s family and friends went even further; they said al-Fayed’s claims were irresponsible and reprehensible, and they tried to refute them in published articles. But even without evidence of any plot to kill the Princess, the scary scenarios grew, especially in Egypt. “Conspiracy theories are a stock in trade here,” Tim Sullivan, a political science professor at American University in Cairo, told Newsweek. “When you think you don’t have control over your life and over events, then conspiracy theories explain what is happening.”
Preposterous tales were posted on the Internet about small bombs hidden on the roof of the Mercedes S-280 in which Diana and Dodi were traveling; these bombs were supposedly triggered by a remote-control device that locked the whee
ls and steering column at the flick of a switch from some far-off location like, say, Buckingham Palace.
The conspiracy theories were posted by people who saw a twisted connection between the royal family’s disdain toward the Princess and her horrible death.
Ironically, it was Diana’s death that breathed life into the moribund British monarchy. Her inexplicable magic seemed to enfold her son William like a giant halo. People gulped as the young man, who looked so much like his mother, was seen walking into church with his head bowed on the day she was buried. Touched by his sadness, people recalled her desire to see him become king. Nothing seemed more important on the day of her funeral than to make that dream come true for the beautiful princess who had bestowed so much kindness on her country’s dispossessed. As Shakespeare said, “Beauty lives with kindness.”
More than any other member of the royal family, Diana had understood what it meant to be a princess in the twentieth century. She had reached out to those who needed help most. What she always extended to the poor and the sick was a golden hand—without the white gloves of royalty. Despite her position of privilege, she did not condescend or patronize. She shared her vulnerabilities and in doing so, she gave people a measure of hope in coping with their own unhappiness. By allowing people to see her personal failures and successes, she gave them reason to believe that they, too, could rise above rejection, and survive, even triumph over misfortune. She did not dash dreams but rather she did what royalty was supposed to do: she made people feel better about themselves.
The Princess of Wales brought light into every room she entered, which is why people around the world suddenly felt so desolate when she was gone. They realized that they had lost someone who was truly irreplaceable.