Diana in Search of Herself

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Given his preoccupation with security, Dodi may have seemed the sort who could give Diana the “protection” she said she wanted. Yet such a wish seemed strange after the years Diana had chafed under her royal protectors; nor was Dodi intrinsically strong. Rather, it was his vulnerability that appealed to Diana, who readily identified with his feelings. As Dodi said to his friend Barbara Broccoli, “It’s so extraordinary that [Diana and I] don’t have to explain anything to each other.”

  Although they were from different worlds, Diana and Dodi were damaged in similar ways. They were separated from their mothers at an early age and suffered deep insecurities as a result. Diana had taken refuge in bingeing and purging, and Dodi in cocaine addiction. They were prone to romantic fantasies, using gifts as endearments. Fearing rejection, they had difficulty committing themselves and fled relationships without explanation. They were emotionally immature and intellectually superficial. They hated being alone and compensated by constantly talking on the telephone. Both Dodi and Diana tended to repeat rather than learn from their mistakes, and they took refuge in dishonesty when they were feeling threatened or insecure. It is easy to imagine their compulsive confessions to each other of childhood loneliness and of being misunderstood and abused by the arrogant establishment.

  “They were each in love with the fantasy about [the] other,” said Dodi’s friend Nona Summers. “Both were sweet, but they didn’t know what each other was. She made an adorable first impression, but she had intense addictive relationships. Dodi saw himself as the knight on the steed, ready to defend his princess against the paparazzi, Charles, and Camilla. They were in many ways ill-fated and the perfect awful couple.”

  From Diana’s standpoint, the very emptiness of Dodi’s life worked to her advantage. Because he had no daily responsibility, he had all the time in the world to devote to Diana. “This was something she had never had in her life,” said Lucia Flecha de Lima. He offered her distraction and entertainment: His immaturity came across as playful enthusiasm. He amused her with endless tales of Hollywood stars. They giggled together, and he made no intellectual demands. She told Rosa Monckton she was enchanted by “his wonderful voice,” and she said to her hairstylist Tess Rock, “I love his exotic accent, the way he says, ‘Di-yana, you’re so naughty.’ ”

  Diana’s head was also turned by the way the Fayeds spent their money. She had found the stinginess of the royal family irksome, and no man had ever treated her as lavishly as Dodi. Although Diana’s generous divorce settlement brought a hefty income, access to royal aircraft, and royal palaces, she was nevertheless impressed by those who seemed even wealthier. (Charles had shown the same weakness, accepting the beneficence of business tycoons Armand Hammer and John Latsis, whose yacht the Prince regularly used for holidays.) Diana wouldn’t hesitate to borrow a private plane from her friends the Palumbos or billionaires, such as Teddy Forstmann, who enjoyed doing her a favor. Now the Fayeds were offering her unlimited use of their homes in Scotland, France, England, and the United States, plus yachts, planes, and helicopters.

  Diana’s pattern with her lovers had been to meld as quickly as she could with their families. She became close to James Hewitt’s mother and sisters, and spent time with Oliver Hoare’s mother. She visited Hasnat Khan’s extended family in Pakistan and regularly saw his relatives in England. Mohamed Fayed made a point of emphasizing togetherness during Diana’s stay in Saint-Tropez. “[Mohamed’s wife] Heini is an elegant lady,” explained Andrew Neil. “There were other kids around, including Fayed’s deaf son, who Diana could look after. It was the warm embrace of the extended Arab family.”

  What Diana failed to appreciate was the subservience required of women in Fayed’s world, as well as the oppressiveness of the tightly monitored and security-conscious Fayed lifestyle that Dodi’s former wife found difficult to take. It was an atmosphere that would have made the British royal family seem positively easygoing.

  The spoiled and thoughtless aspects of Dodi would have doubtless grated on Diana eventually: A stickler for punctuality, she would have found “Dodi Time” intolerable. Nor could she have endured his inability to make decisions on his own, or the learned helplessness that forced his father’s aides to clean up Dodi’s messes. Dodi’s evasions would have stirred her mistrust, and when he tried to control her—as he invariably did with women—she would have withdrawn. In turn, Dodi would have tired of Diana’s volatility and her constant need for reassurance; Dodi also wanted to be nurtured, which Diana wasn’t equipped to do. But in Diana’s case, Dodi was willing to make a greater effort than he previously had with women. This time he could be certain that if he succeeded, his father’s money supply would never again be cut off.

  Chapter 27

  The evening after her romance hit the tabloids, Diana went to Dodi’s Park Lane apartment for dinner. When she emerged before midnight, she faced fifty photographers. The next day, Friday, August 8, she left for Bosnia with columnist William Deedes and her butler Paul Burrell on a jet loaned to her by billionaire George Soros.

  The land mine trip had been difficult to put together. At the end of July, Diana had to scrap her original plans after the embarrassing disclosure that the president of the local Red Cross in Bosnia was the wife of war criminal Radovan Karadzic. But Diana was determined to go, so with William Deedes’s help, she once again dropped the Red Cross and found new sponsors in the Land Mine Survivors Network and Norwegian People’s Aid, organizations devoted to assisting victims of land mines.

  After the Foreign Office determined that she could travel safely, the trip was announced on August 5, the day before her return to London with Dodi. Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, reaching out to his Labor constituency by writing “exclusively” in The Mirror, said Diana’s crusade “has captured public attention over a weapon that strikes hardest at civilians.… I publicly support her trip to Bosnia.”

  But from the moment Diana arrived in Sarajevo, her efforts to call attention to the land mine problem were thwarted by the press’s overwhelming interest in her new boyfriend. In Bosnia, she repeated much of what she had done to make her Angola trip such a success: an arduous three days of consoling victims, along with visits to the ruins of homes and the massive cemeteries for the war dead. She created vivid images of land mine destruction, and she provided comfort to people who were suffering, including a mother weeping at the grave of her son. “She was impressive in Bosnia,” said William Deedes. “She left thirty minutes for every interview [with victims] and we did eight to twelve of them. She decided on that. She understood they would have a lot to say, and she never cut it short. They poured out everything and she remained amazingly silent. Every now and then, she would put out her hand and touch a face or shoulder. It was brilliant.”

  Diana’s life had long been characterized by disconcerting juxtapositions of glamour and pathos. Four days after Robin Cook’s encomium to Diana’s good works appeared in the The Mirror, the same newspaper’s Sunday edition exploded on August 10 with ten pages of photographer Mario Brenna’s handiwork: “the most sensational pictures ever,” starting with THE KISS on page one, a grainy shot of Diana and Dodi embracing on the luxurious Fayed yacht: LOCKED IN HER LOVER’S ARMS, THE PRINCESS FINDS HAPPINESS AT LAST.

  Given the headlines in London, land mines couldn’t hold the attention of some one hundred reporters trailing Diana around Sarejevo and its environs. The Observer described the “air of farce” that resulted when she tried to deliver a pair of prosthetic feet to an injured man as a News of the World reporter shouted, “Isn’t it wonderful news about Dodi? What is it like to be in love again?” Noted The Observer, “The land mines issue had slipped down the agenda. The Princess in love had triumphed over the mission.… The real purpose was forgotten as Diana’s love life was laid bare.” Among the strangest efforts to bridge this gap was the Sunday Mirror’s fanciful report that “film producer Dodi has even decided to make a movie with Diana as coproducer—about an elephant crippled by a land mine.”

&
nbsp; Although Deedes felt that, professionally, Diana was “finding herself again, talking sense, meaning business, happy in herself,” he could also see that she was distracted as she had not been on the earlier trip. “She was on the phone all the time to Dodi,” Deedes recalled. Although he could “not be positive about anything about Diana,” he couldn’t believe the romance was serious. “I think she was figure skating with Dodi,” he said.

  On Monday, August 11, Diana flew back to London. En route, she and her butler Paul Burrell studied her press coverage from the previous days, including the KISS spread. “She was not at all resentful of the pictures that had been taken of her,” Deedes recalled. “She talked about the headlines. She went through the newspapers with Paul Burrell, with me as a witness, and she was not horrified.”

  By then, the tabloids had begun to sour on Dodi. Detailed reports had already cropped up about his trail of unpaid bills and the myriad legal actions against him in the Los Angeles courts. The same day as THE KISS, The Mail on Sunday revealed Dodi’s extravagance, as described in the American Express lawsuit, as well as one case that offered a “unique glimpse” into Dodi’s “impetuous nature”—a complicated wrangle over a $500,000 penthouse with a former girlfriend named Amy Diane Brown, who commented, “I would tell Diana to keep hold of the crown jewels and not let them out of her sight or he will sell them.… Even after all this time, it is still so terribly painful. I feel he ripped me off.”

  Days later, the coverage shifted to Dodi’s sex life, and the tone turned ugly. The Mirror disclosed that he dumped girlfriends by what his friends called “Air Dodi”—a one-way business-class airplane ticket home. A former girlfriend named Denice Lewis dissected his sexual inadequacies in the News of the World and concluded: “I would lie there in the dark thinking, ‘Is this it?’ ” But the explosion came on August 14 when a sobbing Kelly Fisher, with her mother and attorney Gloria Allred in tow, announced a lawsuit against Dodi after he jilted her to take up with Diana.

  Not only had Fisher suffered the humiliation of a broken engagement (her proof: a sapphire-and-diamond ring that she flashed for the cameras), she also accused Dodi of failing to pay her $440,000 in “premarital support” that, she claimed, he had pledged in return for her giving up modeling. (Exhibit A: a check for $200,000 that Dodi had written on a closed account.) Fisher subsequently sold her story for some $300,000 to $400,000 to the News of the World and The Sun. Among her claims: that while Diana was at Fayed’s home in Saint-Tropez, Fisher and Dodi were on one of the Fayed family yachts, making love. She said that Dodi kept an “astonishing array of weapons,” and that he was “flabby and out of shape” and so germ-obsessed that he traveled with oxygen tanks. (After Dodi’s death, Fisher would drop the lawsuit.)

  Suddenly Dodi was no longer a “gentle soul” (the Daily Mail, August 8), an “ideal husband” (The Sun, August 8), or a “generous caring spirit” (the Sunday Mirror, August 10), but a “Dodi Rotten Cheat” (The Mirror, August 15), “Oily Bedhopper” (The Sun, August 16), and “Dodgy Dodi” (The Mirror, August 18), with “enough skeletons in his cupboard to stock a large graveyard … Dodi … is simply not good enough for [Diana].… Dodgy [Dodi] is so cynical, shallow and spoilt you feel nostalgic for James Hewitt.”

  Diana was admittedly in an impossible situation. Any man in her life would be scrutinized, perhaps destroyed by the tabloids. But had she chosen someone more stable than Dodi Fayed, without his decadent past, her romance would not have kicked off such an orgy of salacious coverage.

  In their prurient frenzy, the tabloids exceeded anything ever written about Diana—even the earliest days of Di-Mania, the endless speculation about the royal marriage, the exposés of Camillagate, the Squidgy tapes, the phone pest scandal, and the “love rat” James Hewitt. No detail of Dodi’s debauchery or financial irresponsibility was too sordid to trot out, and Diana was torn down in the process. Throughout the three weeks in August after the relationship went public, the tabloids ran photos of Dodi and Diana in bathing suits as they embraced and lounged on the Jonikal, cruising the Mediterranean. Leering and snide captions left nothing to the imagination. The most egregious, in The Sun, featured dialogue—DODI: “How about a quick dip?” DIANA: “Not here, darling. The staff can see us. Let’s go for a swim instead.” Everything else about Diana fell away as she became a sexual object—stripped of all respect, discretion, mystery, and taste.

  At the same time, the tabloids cheerfully focused on the likelihood of marriage between Dodi and Diana. As early as August 10, the Sunday Mirror indicated an engagement was imminent—after Diana and Dodi had spent a mere seventeen days together, ten of them alone. Nigel Dempster and Richard Kay tried to apply the brakes in mid-month by recounting in the Daily Mail a conversation Diana had with Taki Theodoracopulos of The Spectator, in which she indicated marriage was not on her mind. “It took her a long time to get out of a loveless marriage, and she’s not about to get into another,” wrote Taki. The speculation persisted anyway.

  With the tabloids at a boil, Diana and Dodi retreated for some private moments—a day at Fayed’s estate in Surrey, two evenings in London. But the hacks pursued them when they took a Harrods helicopter to visit Diana’s psychic Rita Rogers. Shortly after Rogers began consulting with Diana, she had told her client that she would “meet a man with whom she would fall in love, and that they would be together on a boat.” When Diana and Dodi were on the Jonikal together, Diana had called Rogers to say, “I’m in the Mediterranean, with a man on a boat! Rita, you forecast this. You said this would happen!” Rogers later claimed that in her August 12 consultation she warned Dodi of a black car and a tunnel, which she said he “seemed to be taking in,” although Diana “was getting fidgety.”

  On August 15, the day Kelly Fisher’s allegations filled the tabloids, Diana and her friend Rosa Monckton flew off in one of Fayed’s jets—at Dodi’s insistence—for a five-day vacation in Greece. Two days later, Dodi went to California to consult with his lawyers about Fisher’s lawsuit. He stayed in his new Malibu home, kept a low profile, and visited a sick friend at Cedars Sinai Hospital. After thirty-six hours, he left, having accomplished little. Flying back to New York on a private plane, Dodi spoke guardedly about Diana to his friend Mark Canton. “He was happy the romance was blossoming,” said Canton. “He seemed superstitious, though. He didn’t want to go where it might lead.”

  Although Diana avidly read the tabloids, she dismissed the negative reports about Dodi. “By the time the stories came out, she was besotted by him and tried not to believe what she was hearing,” said one of her close friends. She sought reassurance not only from her psychic but from her astrologer Debbie Frank, who did Dodi’s chart. “I am so happy we are compatible,” Diana told Frank. “I have never before felt truly happy for more than just one day.”

  But on her holiday with Rosa Monckton, Diana was beginning to express reservations. “Look at this, Rosa, isn’t it awful?” Diana said, pointing to what Rosa described as tacky “plush pink seats” and “green pile carpet covered in pharaohs’ heads” in the Fayed jet. Diana said she understood that Dodi’s world was “far removed from reality” and she spoke of becoming “truly angry” when Dodi “would ring and recite a list of presents he had purchased for her.” As Diana told Rosa, “That’s not what I want … It makes me uneasy. I don’t want to be bought.… I just want someone to be there for me, to make me feel safe and secure.”

  Diana was back in London for scarcely a day before she and Dodi headed out again on August 21 for another cruise on the Jonikal, covering the same haunts from Nice to Sardinia. Dodi again treated Diana extravagantly. After spending a morning in Porto Cervo on Sardinia, they carried back a heap of cashmere sweaters—he had bought her one in every color—as well as several pairs of J. P. Tod’s shoes. “She only had to look at a thing, and he’d get it,” said Jonikal stewardess Debbie Gribble.

  Dodi also gave Diana a small silver plaque commissioned “from a distinguished silversmith” and inscribed with a poem
that he had written. According to Tina Sinatra, Dodi had borrowed such a plaque from her when they were dating in the eighties and never returned it, despite her repeated requests. Sinatra said she would “always wonder” whether it was the same plaque.

  As the Jonikal zigged and zagged around the Mediterranean for nine days, the paparazzi followed every movement, sending back numerous pictures showing the couple lounging on deck. In most of the shots, Diana was reclining, while Dodi nuzzled her or draped his arm across her. At least two of Diana’s friends were struck by the lack of demonstrativeness on her part. “The body language on the boat was wrong,” Cosima Somerset said.

  On August 26, Le Monde, the left-leaning French newspaper, published an interview conducted with Diana the previous June, in which she bitterly attacked the British press for criticizing her humanitarian efforts. Overseas, on the other hand, she said, “I’m welcomed with kindness. I’m taken for what I am … without looking for blunders.” She spoke of her “destiny” to help “vulnerable people” and said her use of touch “comes naturally … from the heart. It isn’t premeditated.” Once again, her views on land mines created controversy: “The Labor government’s position has always been clear,” she said. “It’s going to do terrific work. Its predecessor was absolutely hopeless.”

  Tory politicians reacted indignantly to her characterization, prompting Diana to spend several days of her holiday trying to contain the damage. The Daily Express called the situation “her most ferocious political row” as “senior Tories warned her to stay out of politics.” Diana shot back with a strong statement, insisting Annick Cojean, the French journalist, had misquoted her: “The Princess has made no such criticism.” The interview had been conducted partly in person and partly through written questions, and Diana’s office produced a copy of the article Le Monde had submitted for her approval, which did not contain the offending “hopeless” phrase. The French journalist and her editor countered that Diana had made the comment during the face-to-face interview, and that the phrase had been added after Kensington Palace had seen the draft. “I wrote exactly what she said and what I heard,” insisted Cojean.