DIANA ARRIVED IN Paris in the late afternoon of 31 July, and was met by a chauffeured limousine furnished by the Ritz Hotel, owned by Mohamed al Fayed, who had sent along a security guard. Trevor Rees-Jones was also on hand. Dodi was in the back seat, hidden from the press by tinted windows. Everything possible had been done to protect Diana’s person and privacy. They went first to the Ritz on the Place Vendôme. Originally it had been a magnificent town-house but in 1898 the Swiss-born César Ritz had converted it to “the luxury hotel of luxury hotels offering all the refinements that a prince could ask for in his own home.” Nearly a full century later it retained its regal claims.
Diana was given the hotel’s grandest suite of seven high-ceilinged, elegant rooms, decorated with French antiques and crystal chandeliers. It had been occupied previously by monarchs from many countries and was once Winston Churchill’s favourite Paris lodging. It now rented for $10,000 a night Diana, however, was a guest of Mohamed al Fayed. That afternoon, Diana and Dodi, driven by his Paris chauffeur, Philippe Dourneau, had been to see the Duke of Windsor’s villa at 4 Route du Champ d’Entrainement on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne near Neuilly. Dourneau cleverly out-foxed the paparazzi by using the hotel’s private rear entrance and switching cars. For a short while, anyway, they would have some private time together. The Windsor villa also belonged to al Fayed. Until this summer, the ground floor had been open for viewing while he occupied the luxurious second floor. Arrangements had been made for the sale of the furnishings with Sotheby’s, New York, the proceeds to be distributed among various charities. The house, therefore, was presently unoccupied.
This was no ordinary sightseeing visit: the al Fayeds, father and son, had discussed the possibility of Diana using the villa as a second home outside England. The idea had appealed to her, but she had not taken it too seriously. Dodi led her enthusiastically on a room-by-room tour. The walls were bare and huge packing-cases stood in many rooms, labelled and ready for their voyage to Sotheby’s auction rooms in New York. Diana was aware that the villa was being offered to her as an enticement either to cement her relationship with Dodi or for some reason that she didn’t yet know, and was wary of expressing more than interest in its history and appreciation of the beauty of the Windsors’ petit palms. Twenty minutes later, the couple returned to the Ritz where she telephoned the boys and Rosa Monckton. She had decided to spend the night with Dodi at his ten-room apartment on the rue Arsène Haussaye near the Arc de Triomphe, just a few doors down from the Champs Élysées.
Dodi’s apartment was furnished in an expensive, modern adaptation of art-deco design, but the colours and designs were somewhat garish. Nevertheless, it exuded comfort, with thick rugs, deep sofas and chairs. There was a control board for the lighting, which faded down to a soft, romantic glow. From the sitting-room windows there was a full view of the Arc de Triomphe and beyond that the glittering lights of the city.
Dodi spent about eight months a year in London, the remaining four in Paris, Los Angeles and New York. He had a home or an office in each city and had placed objects and memorabilia in them that would make them feel lived-in. Several photographs of his dead mother positioned to catch his eye in passing from one room to another. As a lonely child who had been shifted around so often that relatives did not know where he actually lived (nor did he), he had occupied his time by assembling model cars from kits. Examples of his expertise at this were displayed along with a collection of worn teddy bears. The building was a grand Paris landmark, with twenty-four-hour service. No one got further than the striated marble front lobby without being announced. Triple locks secured the front and back doors of Dodi’s apartment, and when he was there, a bodyguard was on duty at all times, as well as his long-term butler, René Delorm.
“Dodi was very cautious, you know,” his friend Johnny Gold, owner of Tramp nightclub in London, recalled, “even paranoic in his caution. I mean, I could talk to him while he was having a drink in the club. If he got up to go away from the table, he’d order a fresh drink. And I’d say, ‘Why do you do that?’ He’d say, ‘Well, you can never tell, in case someone puts something in your drink.’
“And he would always have his security around. Sometimes one, sometimes two … one upstairs with a walkie-talkie and one downstairs with a walkie-talkie.” Welshman Trevor Rees-Jones had worked for him for several years and was almost always by his side. Dodi trusted and liked him. Rees-Jones dressed well, was attractive and well-mannered, and looked more like a colleague than a guard. Diana had taken to him in St. Tropez.
At about nine o’clock, they were driven to the elegant, four-star restaurant Lucas-Carton on the Place de la Madeleine. They went in at the side entrance and up to the second floor, which contains several small dining rooms, popular with politicians and others who wanted a more private environment than the main floor provided. These rooms were named Le Cercle and were in Louis XVI décor, while downstairs the theme was art-nouveau. As Diana’s appearance caused people to wander curiously near their banquette, they did not linger over coffee, departing at about ten thirty and returning to Dodi’s apartment.
The following morning, with Dodi’s arm about Diana’s waist and Rees-Jones in attendance, they boarded the Harrods jet and flew to Nice. The Jonikal was anchored close by and, as twilight approached, it set sail for Porto Cervo in Sardinia. This was the evening of 1 August, a humid night, a mist veiling the stars in the night sky. The crew had been pared down to ten, but Rees-Jones had come aboard, with Alexander (Kes) Wingfield, two more of Mohamed al Fayed’s security men, René Delorm and Diana’s personal maid. There were no other passengers.
En route to their destination Diana and Dodi dined on caviar and lobster Thermidor. The mist lifted and they went up on deck, the soundtrack from the recent film The English Patient playing over the yacht’s sound system. “Have you seen the film?” Diana asked stewardess Debbie Gribble, who was serving them coffee and drinks. Gribble said she hadn’t “Well, you’ll cry when you do. I howled.” The sea was calm and they danced when the music segued into a series of Frank Sinatra songs. Later Gribble saw them kiss passionately, “But they still went back to their separate cabins.”
Although Sardinia is the second largest island after Sicily in the Mediterranean, thirty years earlier it was home only to fishermen in the villages along its coastline and bandits in the craggy mountains that constitute the greater part of the island. Since then, Karim Aga Khan and a syndicate had developed the north-east corner of the island into one of the most luxurious resorts in the world. It was called the Costa Smeralda (Emerald Coast) because it was edged by the sparkling green waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Porto Cervo, its sophisticated new harbour, was filled with some of the handsomest yachts that sailed the Mediterranean.
The Jonikal remained a little further out at sea than the other vessels. Diana was completely relaxed. She and Dodi swam and sunbathed the next day. That night they shared Dodi’s cabin, breakfasted in his suite and made calls from their mobile telephones, Diana to the boys and Rosa Monckton. By now she was confident of her feelings and wanting to let the world know. On their last day, photographers appeared in small craft in the waters around Porto Cervo and shot pictures of the couple as they drove one of the Jonikal’s speedboats to the beach on Corsica where they were photographed strolling hand in hand.
The famous, grainy picture of Diana and Dodi embracing in swim-wear was taken on the Jonikal, on 4 August, by a photographer with a long-range lens. Licensed for more than $1 million, its publication guaranteed that the lovers would be followed everywhere they went from now on by the voracious paparazzi. The image that was labelled “The Kiss” was an obvious personal statement. Certainly both Diana and Dodi knew that the paparazzi were within range and they could have had their passionate embrace in a more concealed spot on the boat. Neither did they seem surprised the next day to see the front page of the Sun emblazoned with five frames under the banner headline “Di and Dodi: The Love Album.”
“They were two people very much in love,” a member of staff explains, “and they seemed proud of it.”
To Max Clifford, the public-relations supremo, Dodi had confided via his mobile phone, “The fact that she loves me as much as I love her is just incredible.”
On the return voyage to Nice, the Jonikal anchored for several hours in Monte Carlo. Dodi and Diana ended up in an exclusive jeweller’s where Dodi bought her a diamond bracelet. Then they looked at ring designs. Dodi ordered a $205,400 diamond-encrusted one with a large, square-cut centre stone framed by four triangular ones mounted on a wide diamond and platinum, dome-shaped band. Its catalogue name was “Tell Me Yes.”
“As far as I could tell,” Alberto Repossi, the jeweller, recalled, “this was not an engagement ring that Mr. Fayed was buying for the Princess. The Princess had a rather large ring size and it had to be adjusted to fit her properly.” In fact, the ring was being made to fit the finger on her right hand, not her left.
By the time they returned to London on 6 August, the media was almost impossible to escape. “I can’t walk out of my apartment any more,” Dodi told his long-time friend Julian Senior, a Warner Brothers executive. “I was very moved by the whole nightmare [of the press deluge],” Senior recalled. “Somehow this gentle, polite man—it’s like comets colliding—touched the aura of this lady, and his life went upside down. [I told him] ‘But, Dodi, you love her.’ He said, ‘Yes, of course I love her.’ I told him that was the kind of life he was going to have to live with. He said, ‘I can’t do this. It’s just extraordinary. I can’t move without somebody taking pictures.” ’ Senior added, “In many ways Dodi was a man-child.”
That was easy enough to say, but even a man like Dodi, who loved being in the aura of famous women and was used to the media, had no conception of the bizarre public life Diana led. On their first tour, Prince Charles had been overwhelmed by the media’s fanatical attention to Diana. She was the most famous, most photographed woman in the world. Her image brought huge profits to photographers and their media outlets. She was being bought and sold on a scale unheard of previously. Diana never quite got used to it even when they worked on her behalf. “Why me? Why me?” she often cried. Dodi could not help but be overwhelmed by their mob tactics, but despite his protests to close friends, he remained controlled and protective with Diana.
On the morning of 8 August Diana prepared to leave for a three-day visit to Bosnia as part of her anti-landmine crusade. She planned to be with Dodi in London for a few days before she and Rosa Monckton embarked on their Greek cruise. Following that, Diana and Dodi would board the Jonikal again for a second cruise in the Mediterranean, this time for nine days.
Diana was certain that their feelings for each other were the real thing. Prince Charles surprisingly made the statement that “If she is happy, then I am happy.” Al Fayed commented: “I understand they had a wonderful time together and enjoyed themselves immensely [on their cruise]. I don’t know exactly what their plans are for the future but as long as they both remain happy, that warms my heart.” Diana did not conceal her joy, but she told Rosa and others close to her that she was not considering remarriage.
On Thursday evening, 7 August, shortly before eight o’clock, she arrived at Dodi’s Park Lane apartment with a small parcel in her hand, rushed past the crush of reporters at the gates of the building, and took the private lift to Dodi’s penthouse. As a gift for Dodi, Diana had brought with her a pair of her father’s gold and ruby cufflinks, a sign of her trust and love. They dined alone, and she departed at about midnight, Trevor Rees-Jones escorting her through the maze of waiting photographers who flung unanswered questions at her and exploded flashbulbs in her face.
The next morning she flew to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo in a privately hired Gulfstream jet, the guest of the Washington-based Land Mine Service Network founded by American Ken Rutherford, who had lost his right leg while working in the minefields in Somalia. Wearing a blue shirt, navy blazer and matching leggings, Diana looked calmly radiant as she descended the plane’s metal stairs. There was great anxiety about her safety during this trip, which followed, by only a fortnight, the shooting of a Bosnian Serb war criminal. Her first glimpse of Bosnia was of armed French legionnaires, Army troops and Bosnian police who circled the landing field. Once settled in a Land-Rover, she was shown the destruction in Sarajevo and the desperate conditions in which the population lived.
She went to work immediately visiting the poorly equipped hospitals, talking to victims as she sat by their beds, listening to their tragic stories of loss—children, husbands, wives, limbs. She never rushed these conversations, and always there was some form of personal contact, hand on hand, on shoulder where there were no hands. No patient ever saw her give way to tears or pull back in revulsion. But at night, in Red Cross headquarters where she stayed, she would appear shaken by the events and scenes of the day.
The next morning under heavy escort she was driven to the northern town of Tuzla, the scene of one of the worst Bosnian Serb mortar attacks. En route, her convoy stopped at the small town of Olovo, where there were a huge number of landmine victims. Bosnia was said to have over a million landmines scattered throughout it, the majority planted without maps so that their removal was hazardous. In Olovo she visited the modest apartment of Franjo Kresic, a forty-seven-year-old father of two daughters, who had been blinded in one eye and lost both legs from stepping on a hidden landmine not far from his home. “I could not believe it when the Princess walked in. She was so natural, so comforting. She wore a simple blouse and jeans. She asked my wife how she was able to manage, was there enough food. She sat down next to my wheelchair and placed her hand on my arm. I could hardly speak. There was something that transferred itself through her touch, like a warm wave. She stayed nearly half an hour. She didn’t seem to be in a rush. I felt like someone I had known for years was visiting us. ‘You are going to walk again,’ she said, when she left And I believe one day I will, with the help of artificial limbs.”
She put in three fifteen-hour days in grinding heat and choking dust. Wearing protective gear she trudged behind a mine-detecting team as they inched their way through suspect fields. In Tuzla, she hugged legless children and lovingly touched the stumps of those who entreated her to do so. She sat down to talk with a paraplegic volleyball team. “They are all so brave, so brave,” she told members of her party. She had a cold and was fast reaching the point of exhaustion, but she refused to quit before she had seen and accomplished all that had been planned for her. At night she called Dodi on her mobile telephone. “She laughed and laughed with him,” said Sandra Mott, a Red Cross worker stationed in Bosnia, who hosted her on the tour.
When she returned to London Dodi was waiting for her. She was elated to see him. They remained sequestered in his penthouse in the evenings rather than “keep running from the paparazzi” who were now desperate for a photo or a quote. Neither was forthcoming. Although Diana, by telephone, told Taki Theodoracopoulos, Britain’s well-known society columnist, “I haven’t taken such a long time to get out of one poor marriage to get into another.” That statement had a curious tone: she seemed unconvinced of Dodi’s suitability as a husband.
They knew that Kelly Fisher had been infuriated by the loving photographs taken of them on the cruise and that she was not going to fade easily into the night On 14 August, the day before Diana was to leave with Rosa Monckton for their Greek cruise, Fisher held an emotional press conference in Los Angeles. Holding up her left hand with Dodi’s $200,000 “engagement” ring, and with an earlier gift from him of a diamond and sapphire ring, worth $45,000, on her right hand, she revealed that she had filed a $1 million lawsuit against him. She also displayed a $200,000 cheque signed by Dodi and stamped “Account Closed.” She alleged that Dodi had agreed to pay her $500,000 in two instalments before their planned 9 August wedding, the first in January 1997, at the time of his proposal, the second six months later. This cash award was to compensate her for loss of work since he had insisted she give up her modelling career. By June she had not received the initial payment At the time he was in Europe, and when she pressed him for the money he wired her $60,000, saying, “This was the largest amount he could sent at the time, but that he would give her the rest when they next met” After she had joined him in Paris in early July, they had gone together to St. Tropez, planning to take a Mediterranean cruise. Instead, she alleged, he had left her alone on one of his father’s yachts while he entertained the Princess of Wales. He had rejoined her after the Princess left and then, a few days later, gave her the $200,000 and told her to return to Los Angeles. As far as she knew, the wedding was still on, although no formal plans had been made, no invitations sent and, except for her parents, no one else appeared to have been informed of the date of their intended union. Dodi had not joined her, as she believed he would, but had gone off on a cruise with the Princess of Wales. When Fisher deposited Dodi’s cheque, it bounced. She was therefore seeking payment in full of $440,000 plus the additional amount of $560,000 for damages, humiliation, a broken agreement (although there was nothing in writing to substantiate this), and the interruption to her career.
This performance, with her lawyer Gloria Allerd standing supportively at her side, was followed by her appearance on American television, in which she declared, “Dodi is just really in love with the media attention of being with Princess Diana. He loves it, his family loves it.”
Her brother, Brian Fisher, warned the press, “Kelly worked damned hard to get where she is today. If I know Kelly, this man Dodi will wish he never crossed her. She is a tough lady. She feels she has been wronged, and she won’t let him get away with this without a good fight.”
Dodi repeated his denials to Diana that he had never proposed to Kelly or promised her money to give up her career. The cheques he had given her were because she had claimed her relationship with him had taken her away from her modelling and had cost her bookings. He had felt that this was probably true. He also insisted he had not known that the account on which the $200,000 cheque had been written had been closed by his accountants just weeks before his trip to St. Tropez.
They spent an entire afternoon in his penthouse discussing the situation. Diana was shaken, but she believed him. She was also convinced he had cared for Kelly, but not in the way he felt now about her. She knew how generous with jewellery and gifts Dodi was, and that the ring he had ordered for her had not been to celebrate an engagement It seemed logical that Kelly’s ring, too, had been just a generous gift. Also Diana was well aware of Dodi’s disregard for money, his habit of letting his father pay his outstanding bills. His own money was tied up in such a fashion that he could not have free use of it.
Other debts were now humiliatingly exposed by the press: back taxes, an angry ex-landlord who claimed Dodi had left without paying several months’ rent, the 21 Club in New York where he had run up a considerable, and long overdue, tab.
The lovers parted on Saturday, 15 August, Dodi for Los Angeles to see a friend in hospital with cancer and to try to settle some of his financial problems there, while Diana, again travelling on the Harrods Gulfstream jet, departed for Athens where she and Rosa would board the small boat they had hired for their Greek cruise. As Dodi left his lawyers’ offices in Los Angeles, he was mobbed by a pack of paparazzi. “Why are you hiding?” one shouted at him.
“I’m not hiding! I’m not hiding!” he yelled, and broke into a frenzied run chased by photographers.
The cruise with Rosa Monckton was decidedly downscale from the ones Diana had taken on the Jonikal. The Della Grazzia was a small motor-cruiser with three crew: Captain Manolis, Vassilis the deckhand, and a young Greek woman as cook and maid. As soon as they boarded at Piraeus, Diana disappeared down to her unpretentious cabin. She reappeared ten minutes later. “I’ve nested, Rosa. Have you?” she asked. Monckton wrote that this meant “the photos of the boys would be stuck in the mirror, her clothes put away. She had brought very few clothes—some swimsuits, pants, shirts, a sweater in case the evening grew cool and a halter-top dress. She let her hair dry naturally.”
The two women stood on deck watching “the bare, shaven skulls of the surrounding hills slowly absorbing themselves into the night” The water was smooth and a mild breeze beginning to ease the airless heat of the late summer day.
Rosa (real name Rosamond) was managing director of Tiffany’s, London, and her husband, Dominic Lawson, a respected editor on the Sunday Telegraph. She and Diana were long-time friends; their relationship had grown strong through the tragedies and problems they had both surmounted. Rosa had miscarried a much-wanted pregnancy at six months, and Diana had “instinctively found the words to ease the pain, and at the same time knew I should name my daughter and bury her. She always remembered her anniversary and talked about her often. I will never, ever forget her face, her touch, her warmth and compassion on the day we buried Natalya,” Monckton recalled. “Similarly when my daughter Domenica was born and we learned that she had Down’s syndrome, she was at my bedside immediately with emotional support and practical help. She offered herself as her godmother, told me which doctors had experience in this field, and gave me the names of people to contact who had gone through the same thing.”
Some years older than Diana, Rosa had been there for her when her father had died, in her battle against bulimia, as a confidante during her most difficult times with Charles. In her present situation, Diana needed to talk to someone she could trust so the timing of their cruise could not have been better. Diana knew that these five days with Rosa would be important for her to work out, and talk out, some of the things that were worrying her. She spoke often of the boys, the effect the divorce might have had on them, how difficult it would be for her ever to leave England, however much she might want to, and her relationship with Dodi. She told Rosa she had not made any decisions about her future. “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.”
She also talked a lot about Bosnia. “She cried one night,” Rosa remembered, “while we were motoring along for three hours under the full moon, and told me what she had witnessed. She needed to digest the horrors she had seen, to make some sense of the ghastly stories she had been told.”
They left at night from Piraeus and cruised in the Gulf of Athens. Captain Manolis would ring his Mends around Greece to find out where the paparazzi were, and would steer them in the opposite direction. The news over the boat’s radio reported that they had been on the island of Khios, near Mykonos, where they had taken a plane for Naxos. This was on the other side of Greece in the Aegean Sea. Then it had been said that they were moving in a fleet of five boats and four helicopters and were going to fly to Turkey. None of it even resembled the truth. The captain remarkably managed for the most part to evade the massive numbers of journalists who were searching for them—the count said to be as high as 250 in the press corps and 10 press helicopters.
Almost immediately upon embarking, Diana tried to reach William and Harry on her mobile telephone. She got the switchboard at Balmoral but the boys were out With arched eyebrow and a perfect Scottish accent she imitated what she thought the operator would now be saying: “Och, there goes the Princess of Wales on yet another sunshine cruise.” She tried again, unsuccessfully, the following day. “Out killing things,” she said to Rosa. She did not condemn hunting. She was, after all, a country girl, and knew it was part of the culture and heritage.
On 17 August, they docked in the harbour of the small village of Kipazissi and went into a Greek Orthodox church and lit candles for their children. When they left Diana turned to Rosa and said, quite emotionally, “Oh, Rosa, I do so love my boys.” No one had seemed to recognize Diana. The townspeople apparently took them for ordinary tourists. “The rich people, they don’t come to Kipazissi in August,” one villager said. “Too hot.”
Hydra, which they reached two days later, was the only other stop they made before returning to Piraeus. In August Hydra was much hotter than the other islands in the Gulf of Athens. It was a popular tourist spot but the brutal heat discouraged tourists so late in the summer. A volcanic island, carved from barren rock, and waterless, Lawrence Durrell wrote of it, “It crouches there in the austere splendour of its nudity, glowering at you … as silent and watchful as a Mycenaean lion.”
The Della Grazzia had docked in Hydra’s little funnel of a harbour on the night of 18 August. Diana and Rosa were woken at dawn by the first arrival of fish and vegetables, “turning the whole waterfront into a coloured flower-bed.” The distant mountains were already burned white by the sun. By mid-morning, Diana had urged Rosa to go with her for a stroll in the town. Dressed in a sleeveless blue shift and wearing a red baseball cap, Diana, with Rosa in white T-shirt and shorts, left the boat, still reasonably sure that the paparazzi were a good distance away. There weren’t many people on the streets as the women followed the convolutions and curves of the town’s labyrinthine walls and coiling stone staircases. To get out of the fierce heat they stepped into the cool interior of a shop.
The shopkeeper recognized Diana and insisted the two women sit down. “Do you realize the whole country is looking for you?” he warned, and suggested they return to the safety of their boat.
As they passed a café on their way back to the Della Grazzia, a man recognized Diana, leaped out of his chair and took a picture. Diana grabbed Rosa’s arm and quickened her pace to a near run. She was furious. “That’s it,” she said. “All over the front pages tomorrow.” Rosa tried to reassure her that the man had been an ordinary tourist and that she was wrong.
That evening on the news they heard one newspaper had made an offer of 280 million drachmas (about $700,000) for any picture of Diana taken on this holiday. Neither could believe what they were hearing. It was as though a bounty had been put on her head.
For the majority of the cruise Diana had gone without makeup, but two hours before they were due to arrive in Piraeus she went into her cabin to put on her public face, blow-dry her hair, and iron the dress she had brought along, a chore she seemed content to do herself. Dodi was not in Piraeus to meet her, but one of the al Fayed limousines and several solid-looking bodyguards were. She needed them: her arrival in the harbour had sparked off a mob scene. The picture of the two women strolling through the streets of Hydra had already appeared in the morning editions of the press.
“It’s unbelievable,” Rosa cried.
“I’m being hunted, Rosa,” Diana replied. “When you get back to London I want you to write about it for Dominic.” Rosa promised she would. They flew on the Harrods jet to Nice where she was to meet Dodi, and Rosa would continue to London. When the stewardess brought each of them a tin of caviar, Diana gave hers to Rosa. “You see, I know I’ll be having some for dinner.” She smiled.
She was pleased to be reunited with Dodi. The two were to board the Jonikal the following day, 21 August, for their nine-day cruise. Since they had been apart they had spoken several times a day, their conversations filled with laughter. Once, when he had left a message on her mobile answering-machine, she had played it for Rosa to hear “his wonderful voice.” But when he left his next message, a list of expensive presents he had for her, she was angry. “That’s not what I want, Rosa. It makes me uneasy,” she confided. “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 was confident in her plans to go on with her work, “which will be more important than ever because the world that Dodi inhabits is so far removed from reality.”
She might have added that hers was, too.