Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Diana was also busy with the land mine crusade, which represented an earnest commitment as well as a diversion from her personal problems. In mid-June, she made speeches days apart in London and Washington, advocating efforts to “quicken the de-miners’ work” and help injured victims rebuild their lives. After her Washington speech on behalf of Red Cross assistance to land mine survivors, she flew by private jet to New York to see an ailing Mother Teresa, who left her wheelchair to stroll hand in hand with Diana in the Bronx—“her most amazing walkabout ever.” At the end of the month, Diana announced that she would go to Bosnia in August with the Red Cross to visit the “killing fields.”

  Diana’s land mine work was warmly endorsed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, who had been swept into office by the landslide Labor victory in the May 1 general election. After the Labor party took over, Diana met with the new foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who announced only three weeks after taking his post that Britain would destroy its stock of land mines by 2005 and redouble its efforts for a worldwide ban. Diana was among the “anti-mines campaigners” credited with shaping Labor’s move—a “significant shift from that of the former Conservative government which never made any undertaking to destroy all stocks by a fixed date.”

  Around the same time, Tony Blair invited Diana and Prince William to lunch at Chequers, the prime minister’s official country residence. She and Blair discussed ideas for her role as a goodwill ambassador, much as she had done any number of times with John Major and his foreign secretary Douglas Hurd, both of whom had encouraged her. This time, Diana was dealing with a man she found “very charismatic.” “At last,” she said afterward, “I will have someone who will know how to use me.”

  In the following weeks, Diana shared her perceptions of a possible role. According to her friend Gulu Lalvani, she said she saw herself as a “peacemaker.… She seriously felt she could have helped with the Northern Ireland situation.” In a luncheon conversation with Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker, Diana said she was thinking about traveling to China because Blair “wants me to go on some missions.… I’m very good at sorting people’s heads out.” Brown noted in The New Yorker that Diana’s manner was “devoid of irony.”

  Such talk showed that Diana was having difficulty seeing herself in a realistic way; she almost seemed to view her purpose as a global therapist. Lacking any reliable advisers, Diana was trying to get by on intuition alone, and her naïveté was breathtaking. The idea that she could “sort out” the likes of Chinese president Jiang Zemin would have been comic were it not so sad.

  Chapter 26

  Diana received ninety floral bouquets for her thirty-sixth birthday on July 1, including several dozen lilies from fashion designer Giorgio Armani, but no amount of flowers could dislodge the depression she always felt on her yearly milestone. She was cheered only by a call from Harry, who gathered a group of his classmates to sing a rousing “Happy Birthday” over the phone. After spending the day writing thank-you notes, she was the guest of honor at a fund-raising dinner for 500 at the Tate Gallery. Before leaving for the dinner, she told her hairstylist Natalie Symons, “It’s my birthday and I’m going to spend the evening with people I don’t know and don’t particularly like. The only exception is my brother.” Charles Spencer said afterward she “sparkled” at the dinner.

  Two days later, she was in good spirits when a visiting friend remarked on the extravagant floral display. “She said, ‘I really wish they wouldn’t. I wish it would go to charity,’ ” her friend recalled. “And then she giggled.” She told her friend she was going away for a vacation, but refused to say where. “She seemed relaxed, and happier than I had seen her,” her friend said. “I don’t say happy, but happier.”

  Diana’s mood sank that evening when she saw a TV documentary on Camilla Parker Bowles, who was turning fifty that month. Diana had previously made light of the party Charles was hosting at Highgrove on July 18 in Camilla’s honor. “Wouldn’t it be funny if I popped out of the birthday cake?” Diana said to Elsa Bowker. The TV program, which focused on Charles’s romance with Camilla, removed any trace of levity. “All the grief from my past is resurfacing,” Diana told her astrologer Debbie Frank in an anguished phone call. “I feel terrible.” “She sounded so tense again,” Frank recalled. “So frightened and needy. She sounded breathy, childlike again.” Diana’s tensions triggered a fierce argument with another employee, Louise Reid-Carr, hired only months earlier as a personal assistant. After the dispute, Reid-Carr left her position saying, “I have quit, and I am happy now.”

  A week later, Hasnat Khan broke off his relationship with Diana. The proximate cause was a Sunday Mirror article disclosing that Diana and Khan had become “unofficially engaged” after what the tabloid characterized as the “amazing ‘summit meeting’ with his family” in Pakistan the previous May. “He accused Diana of leaking the story, although she tearfully denied it,” said Natalie Symons, who witnessed the drama. “Diana was very, very sore and hurting,” recalled one friend she called for consolation. “It was the day before the trip [to Saint-Tropez] with Mohamed, and Diana told me it was over with Hasnat. She said it was no good, hopeless. They couldn’t go on. He couldn’t live with the pressure of the press, so he decided that was that.”

  The next morning, Friday, July 11, as Diana packed for her vacation in the south of France, she “was sobbing her heart out,” Symons said. “I could tell she was totally distraught because she didn’t have any mascara on, and she always puts her mascara on before she does anything else.” At noon, a green Harrods helicopter picked up Diana, William, Harry, and one of the detectives assigned to the princes, and by early evening, Fayed’s Gulfstream IV had transported them to his ten-acre estate above the sea at Saint-Tropez. Moored nearby were Fayed’s three yachts, the Cujo, a converted U.S. Coast Guard cutter; the two-masted schooner Sakara; and the motor-powered 140-foot Jonikal, which had just been purchased. Fayed installed Diana and the boys in the guest house adjacent to the main villa, where they had their own cook, maids, and swimming pool.

  It took only a day for the tabloids to surround Fayed’s compound with boats filled with hacks and paparazzi. Photographs of Diana and Fayed splashed the front pages of the Sunday tabloids. DI’S FREEBIE, announced the Sunday Mirror, noting that Diana had “sparked a political and royal row” by accepting a holiday from the Fayeds. “Good God,” said author and politician Jeffrey Archer, a fan of Diana’s. “It’s Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis all over again,” Archer told the Mirror. “Money has to be the main attraction.” The News of the World quoted an unnamed Buckingham Palace aide who said the royal family considered Fayed “a little unsafe in their terms.”

  Although initial reports indicated Diana’s destination was kept secret from the royal family, it turned out that because she was accompanied by the princes, she had sought and received permission. Given Diana’s willfulness, the Palace probably had little choice. After all, Fayed had elaborate security, including bodyguards recruited from the Royal Marines, and William and Harry were shadowed by two Scotland Yard detectives. Diana was scorched in the press, however, for imprudently aligning herself with such a controversial figure—and in so public a setting. “If Diana wanted privacy she could not have chosen a busier time to ‘hide away’ on the French Riviera,” said the Evening Standard, “timing her trip to coincide with the biggest national bank holiday weekend and … Bastille Day celebrations.”

  Only ten days earlier, the government had released Sir Gordon Downey’s official report on the “cash for questions” scandal. Downey “noted that Fayed was so dishonest that he could not accept his uncorroborated word on anything,” wrote Daily Mail columnist Simon Heffer. “What Fayed did is shortly to be made a criminal offense.… However, he has yet to be punished … for attempting to subvert [Parliament’s] workings through a systematic campaign of bribery.” If Diana had read the Downey report, or even “seen the comments made on those to whom [Fayed] had been hospitable and who had the
n not secured favors for him in return,” said Heffer, “even she might have thought twice.”

  To counteract the criticism, Diana called the Mail’s Nigel Dempster, who, unlike Richard Kay, had previously dealt with Fayed. “Mohamed was having a bad time,” recalled Dempster. “So Diana came on the phone and said, ‘Nigel, I was offered a holiday. My boys couldn’t spend the summer in Kensington Palace, and I wanted to get away. I am enjoying myself. It is an ideal holiday.’ Obviously Mohamed had said, ‘Ring Nigel Dempster.’ ” The next day, July 14, Dempster printed Diana’s defense, described as comments to “fellow guests,” including her assertion of a close friendship with Fayed “for the last five years.”

  As proof of her loyalty to Fayed, she posed for photographs with her hand on his shoulder and his arm wrapped around her waist—described by The Sun as DI’S AMAZING CUDDLE. Richard Kay, in a piece accompanying Dempster’s front-page exclusive, expressed his bewilderment: “It is her mood almost of defiance that is puzzling some friends…. She has been, as one says, ‘quite aggressive about justifying herself and fed up with being criticized all the time for getting things wrong.’ … Most people think she’s got it wrong again.”

  Diana seemed unconcerned about the photographers tracking her leaps into the Mediterranean and cruises on the Sakara and the Cujo. “She was happy to be seen,” recalled the Mirror’s Piers Morgan. “I offered to pull out of Saint-Tropez after two days, and her office said, ‘That won’t be necessary.’ After that, she did daily photo calls.”

  On Bastille Day, July 14, when the Mail ran Diana’s endorsement of Fayed, her behavior turned bizarre. After a morning of “relaxed and happy” Jet Skiing with her sons, Diana hopped into a launch with a bodyguard and headed for the Fancy, a fifty-three-foot motorboat carrying reporters from the The Mirror, The Sun, and the Daily Mail. Wearing a leopard-print bathing suit, Diana spent ten minutes with the reporters, talking “candidly about the dark side of her life as the ex-wife of Prince Charles,” James Whitaker recounted in The Mirror.

  She revealed that William was “distressed” and “really freaked out” by the press attention. “You are going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do,” she said. “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.” Diana further complained that her land mine work had been unfairly denounced. “I cannot win,” she said. She reiterated her fondness for her hosts, adding that Fayed “was my father’s best friend,” and “anyway, to be strictly correct, I am here with his wife.”

  Diana’s floating press conference seemed to flummox the hacks, who prided themselves on being ready for anything Diana threw their way. Writing in The Mirror, Whitaker claimed an exclusive interview—despite photographs showing Diana talking to the group—in which she “appeared upset” yet “joked and giggled.” Nick Craven of the Daily Mail found her “relaxed” and “comfortable.” Yet another version, the Evening Standard’s, had her “getting increasingly distraught and working herself up.”

  The next day, Diana’s actions were even more confounding. She issued a statement insisting she had no intention of making a “surprise” announcement about her life; she even denied giving interviews to reporters. At one moment, she was crawling along a balcony on Fayed’s villa, hiding behind a towel to avoid being seen. Shortly afterward, she was posing at the end of a jetty before skipping up some steps, clapping her hands and singing. Writing in The Sun, photographer Arthur Edwards said that in the seventeen years he had been snapping Diana, “[he had] never seen her act more bizarrely.… You cannot get much stranger than hiding from the camera one minute and walking around like a supermodel the next.”

  It is impossible to know what prompted Diana’s visit to the tabloid motorboat, but the combination of giddiness and furtiveness she displayed the following morning—the fourth day of her holiday—could probably be explained by the previous night’s arrival, just in time for the Bastille Day fireworks display, of Fayed’s forty-two-year-old son, Dodi. After a summons from his father, Dodi had bolted from Paris, leaving his fiancée, fashion model Kelly Fisher, with the vague excuse that he had business in London. As Fayed biographer Tom Bower explained it, Mohamed had “glimpsed Diana’s current unhappiness and profound loneliness.… He perceived the vacancy which he could fill” with “companionship, love and a man. To pamper the princess, he could provide the ideal candidate: his son.”

  In fact, Dodi Fayed was a poor match for Diana by nearly every measure. “Dodi was many things to many people,” said Tina Sinatra, a longtime friend with whom he had a brief romance in the 1980s. “His relationships were very varied and quite inconsistent.” A man-child with an estimated monthly allowance of $100,000, he led an aimless life without significant responsibilities. Lacking any real professional distinction, he defined himself by women—the more famous and beautiful, the better—although he had been unable to sustain a meaningful relationship. He had been seriously addicted to cocaine, and he told elaborate lies. He was insecure, unreliable, and impulsive, with a reputation for reneging on commitments to creditors. Intellectually dim and not very articulate, he had little curiosity about the world. At forty-two, he was thoroughly dominated by his father. Most who knew Dodi Fayed called him a “boy” and a “kid.”

  Dodi’s charm rested on a kind of juvenile sweetness, along with his lavish generosity. He was known for sending gifts of caviar, cashmere, and smoked salmon to his friends, and his manner was like a friendly puppy’s, always eager to please. “What endeared him was that he was without guile, although not without bullshit,” said Peter Riva, who knew Dodi for several decades. Women found Dodi appealing: He stood about five foot ten, had a soft voice with a slight Middle Eastern accent, curly black hair, and expressive light-brown eyes. “I didn’t think he was good-looking,” said Nona Summers, a friend from London. “But he was nicely dressed, wore lovely cashmere, nice shoes, very soigné. And he smelt nice. He loved to laugh.”

  Born in Alexandria, Egypt, Dodi’s given name was Emad, which in Arabic means “someone you can depend on.” Although his father was from a modest Egyptian background, his mother Samira was from the Khashoggi family in Saudi Arabia, where her father had been private physician to the Saudi king. In 1959, when Dodi was four, Mohamed and Samira underwent an acrimonious divorce, and Mohamed received custody of his son, according to Muslim custom. Dodi grew up in Alexandria under the care of relatives and servants, seldom seeing either his father or mother. Mohamed traveled the world building his business and later married a Finnish model, Heini Wathen, and had four more children. Dodi’s mother married her cousin and lived in Cairo, Paris, and Madrid.

  Shuttling between Egypt and the Côte d’Azur with Mohamed’s younger brother Salah—Dodi’s principal custodian—the young boy was showered with toys and treated to luxurious holidays, but was essentially lonely and withdrawn, a poor student who finished thirtieth in his class of thirty-eight at the College St. Marc primary school in Alexandria. Most accounts said that Dodi was raised a Muslim, though, oddly enough, he told Suzanne Gregard—his wife for eight months during the 1980s—that he considered himself a Catholic, perhaps the religion of some of the servants who raised him.

  In 1968, Mohamed sent thirteen-year-old Dodi to Le Rosey, a small Swiss boarding school famous for its unique three-month skiing term in Gstaad. Dodi left after one year, and even members of his family cannot account for the next five years of his life, when he lived in an apartment at 60 Park Lane in London, a building owned by his father, and received no further formal education.

  When Dodi reached nineteen, his father sent him to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst for the six-month course from January through June 1974. Dodi disliked the rigors of Sandhurst, although he did enjoy learning how to play polo, a sport that promised social cachet. As a player, however, “he was mediocre,” said a woman who knew him well in the late 1980s. “He didn’t stick wit
h it. He didn’t stick with much of anything, or anyone.”

  On receiving his Sandhurst commission—the equivalent of a second lieutenant—he served briefly as an attaché at the United Arab Emirates Embassy in London before becoming a full-time playboy. A frequent patron of Tramp, a members-only nightclub, Dodi fell in with a jet set crowd and embarked on a series of romances with actresses including Valerie Perrine, Brooke Shields, Mimi Rogers, and Tanya Roberts; models Marie Helvin, Koo Stark, Traci Lind, and Julia Tholstrup; and celebrities Tina Sinatra (a daughter of Frank Sinatra’s) and Charlotte Hambro (a granddaughter of Sir Winston Churchill). He pursued them with unabashed romanticism, idealized them, and sometimes spurned them. “He had the attitude that the woman he was with reflected on him,” said his longtime friend Michael White. “He had no discernible ego,” recalled Jack Martin, a Hollywood columnist who met Dodi in 1975. “He was painfully quiet and shy.”

  Dodi had been starstruck since the early seventies, when he befriended Barbara Broccoli, the daughter of Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, producer of the James Bond movies. The Broccolis, who lived around the corner from Dodi’s apartment, virtually adopted the rootless teenager. Dodi often spent entire weekends watching adventure films, and he loved to visit the James Bond sets at the Pinewood studios with Barbara.

  Seeking to capitalize on Dodi’s only evident interest, Mohamed worked with Broccoli to set up a film business for Dodi in 1979 called Allied Stars Ltd. Fayed made the financial decisions, while the producers and directors made the artistic choices. “Dodi’s role was not very involved,” said Clive Parsons, a British producer of Allied’s first film, Breaking Glass. Mohamed similarly called the shots on the second project, Chariots of Fire, which producer David Puttnam had brought to Mohamed. Dodi’s role consisted of a few visits to the set and the postproduction facility.