Chapter 24

During the last year of her life, Diana presented herself in public as a strong single woman advancing worthy causes. In private, it was a different story. Caught in her desperate love affair with Hasnat Khan, she behaved erratically, even to the point of wearing disguises. Her final downward trajectory began two months before her death, when she accepted the hospitality of Egyptian businessman Mohamed Fayed and his family.

In the late summer of 1996, just after her divorce became official, Diana decided to make a dramatic public gesture to break with her past. She called her American friend Marguerite Littman, head of the AIDS Crisis Trust, and said, “I have decided to give you my clothes.” “I didn’t think I dressed that badly,” cracked Marguerite. Diana explained that she and Prince William had been talking about what she might do with her life, and he had suggested she auction the clothes she no longer wanted and donate the proceeds to charity. “Don’t you think this would be a good idea for your charity?” asked Diana. “Come to lunch if you want them, tomorrow or the next day.”

Diana’s choice of beneficiary was significant: Marguerite Littman’s AIDS Crisis Trust, with which Diana had no affiliation, instead of the National AIDS Trust, which, only weeks earlier, Diana had endorsed as one of her six remaining patronages. The rationale for her decision remained mysterious. She had made a publicized visit to a National AIDS Trust clinic the previous June, and Michael Adler had praised Diana for her dedication to the AIDS cause. The visit had attracted some negative publicity because Diana was accompanied by AIDS victim Aileen Getty, an American crusader for the dangers of the disease to heterosexuals. “We’d love Di more if she didn’t let herself be used,” The Sun complained. Diana had been knocked more harshly many times, so media criticism seemed an unlikely cause for her defection. Still, Diana’s June visit turned out to be her last contact with the National AIDS Trust.

The most likely explanation was Diana’s affection for Marguerite Littman, along with her organization’s more glamorous profile. AIDS Crisis Trust raised funds primarily through film premieres, and its patrons were more social than Adler’s group. The social aspect interested Diana, who suggested to Marguerite that they take the dresses to Los Angeles and New York for a “road show, something fun that would make money.” “Diana had a childlike love of celebrities,” said one of her friends, noting how much the Princess enjoyed meeting film stars like Tom Hanks. Diana and Marguerite selected Christie’s auction house because its chairman, Christopher Balfour, was a mutual friend, and they chose June 1997 for the sale in New York City.

Michael Adler did not learn about the auction of seventy-nine evening dresses until it was announced in the press six months later. By then, he had even greater reason for dismay over Diana’s rebuff: “The National AIDS Trust was nearly bankrupt,” Adler said. “Not only was she sending the wrong sort of message to our community, that she was giving her dresses to an organization that had film premieres, but the organization of which she was a patron was about to go into liquidation.”

As Diana planned her gala charity auction, she made another important decision about her public role in the first months after her divorce: joining the movement to ban antipersonnel land mines. She later told reporters that she had been alerted to the problem when “a lot of information started arriving on my desk about land mines, and the pictures were so horrific that I felt it would help if I could be part of the team raising the profile around the world.” Left unsaid was the role another friend played in alerting Diana to the issue: Her energy healer Simone Simmons had visited a Red Cross worker in Bosnia during the summer of 1996. When Simmons returned from her ten days in Tuzla, she brought back photographs of mine victims to show Diana. “Do you think I could make a difference?” Diana asked.

Having dropped the Red Cross so dramatically in mid-July, Diana reversed course and returned to the organization because it was conducting a worldwide campaign to eradicate land mines. When Diana asked if the Red Cross would sponsor her on an overseas trip to raise awareness of land mine victims, director-general of the British Red Cross Mike Whitlam offered to be her official escort. At the same time, filmmaker Richard Attenborough, who had known Diana off and on for more than a decade, invited her to be the guest of honor at the premiere of his new film, In Love and War, to raise money for the British Red Cross Land Mines Appeal.

With Attenborough’s encouragement, Diana decided to make her own documentary on the subject, and he helped her negotiate a deal with the BBC that would enable camera crews to film her overseas trip. The Red Cross first suggested that Diana go to Cambodia, but the Foreign Office said her presence could interfere with delicate negotiations over a British hostage there. The British government vetoed Afghanistan as too dangerous, so Diana settled on war-ravaged Angola, where the grim statistics included one land mine for each of its 12 million inhabitants. The Foreign Office approved Diana’s trip in January 1997. “In a sense, the land mine issue was a dead lucky pick,” said Daily Telegraph columnist William Deedes, an eighty-three-year-old anti–land mine campaigner with whom Diana consulted. “She hit the subject, and the fact that all the victims die or are crippled singly meant there was never any public indignation.”

As indicated by Diana’s reliance on Prince William’s idea for the dress sale, along with his role in breaking the “HRH” logjam, she had come to lean on her sons more than ever—both as confidants and as supports when she was lonely and perplexed. By the fall of 1996, William and Harry were fourteen and twelve; William had been away at boarding school for six years, and Harry for four. William was intelligent and self-possessed, and like his mother, sensitive and instinctive. Diana considered him a “deep thinker.” He had begun showing signs of adolescent moodiness as well, and was clearly mature beyond his years. “He had the weight of the world on his shoulders,” said one friend of Diana’s. Harry, by contrast, was more high-spirited and mischievous. Both boys had learned to be “respectful but not ridiculous,” and had “natural manners,” in the view of one Palace official.

Diana had been living in an empty nest since the autumn of 1992, when Harry left to join William at Ludgrove, but Diana’s sons were often in her thoughts and conversation. When Nelson Shanks painted her portrait in 1994, he recalled that she talked of her sons “incessantly,” an observation shared by many of her friends. “Her world was illuminated by the boys, and her life revolved around them,” her friend Peter Palumbo said. Even at the peak of her royal duties, Diana made certain to carve out private time with her sons, and she frequently arranged her schedule to accommodate their activities. “She was always dashing down to Ludgrove to see if the boys were all right, to watch them perform in a drama,” recalled one of her friends.

Diana was probably no more devoted to her boys than any good mother, but she had a special gift for connecting with them. “She was attuned to what William and Harry felt, and she kept in close touch with them,” said her friend Cosima Somerset. “She really listened to her children and would value their opinions.” In the view of her friend Carolyn Bartholomew, Diana was “very responsible and responsive to their individual natures, and aware of their character differences.”

Above all, Diana wanted her sons to feel loved. “I hug my children to death,” she told Andrew Morton. “I always feed them love and affection.” Some critics accused Diana of smothering, but her friends felt her demonstrative ways were laudable given her background. “No one was the parent to her that she was trying to be to the boys,” said David Puttnam. Indeed, having her sons reciprocate her affection was vital to Diana. “The constant bear hugs and showerings of kisses were mutually beneficial,” in James Hewitt’s view. “She needed pure unconditional love as much as they did.… [It] reassured her that no matter what, she was fulfilling her role as a mother to the very best of her abilities.”

At times, Diana could be quite childlike, reveling in thrill rides at amusement parks in a way Prince Charles could not have managed. “She loved being with children,” said one of her friends. “In a way, she was very simple.” Once, on a visit with William at Ludgrove, she was so excited she jumped from one bed to another in his dormitory. After the mortification of the Gilbey tapes, her sons took to calling her Squidgy, “and she roared with laughter,” recalled a friend. Sometimes her enthusiasm exceeded good judgment, most notably when she exhorted William and Harry to race go-carts around Highgrove during a downpour.

Most of the time, Diana handled her boys in a responsible way. When Puttnam invited her to bring them to the Pinewood Film Studio, he noticed how “attentive and smart” she was. “She wanted them to be like well-behaved, normal kids, to line up in a queue for lunch, not to be served.” Another time, when she took Harry to the movies, he ordered a glass of mineral water at the concession stand. When the saleswoman handed him carbonated water, he asked for flat water instead. Afterward, Diana rebuked him, telling him “he should simply have thanked her for what he had been given,” because she didn’t want him to engage in behavior “that gave the royal family a bad name for being difficult.”

Diana was determined that her sons grow up in a more “normal” fashion than was customary for members of the royal family. She took them to McDonald’s and local movie theaters, and she introduced them to people from all walks of life. “I want them to have an understanding of people’s emotions, people’s insecurities, people’s distress, and people’s hopes and dreams,” she said in her Panorama interview. To that end, she took the boys to homeless shelters, and to see dying AIDS patients. Although William was developing a full-blown antipathy toward the press, Diana recognized that he needed to understand the tabloid mentality, so she introduced him to Piers Morgan of the Mirror. “She was trying so hard to teach her sons how to cope with media attention, how to accept that it was something they were going to have to live with,” said Liz Tilberis of Harper’s Bazaar. “William understood her fury with them, and he also understood that she courted them from time to time.”

Yet Diana’s powerful emotions had a profound impact on her sons, who in their formative years overheard numerous fights between their parents and grew accustomed to the sight of their mother weeping. One of the indelible images of William’s childhood was his reaction when Diana cried after a bitter disagreement with Charles early in 1992. Nine-year-old William followed his tearful mother upstairs, where she locked herself in the bathroom. Pushing tissues under the door, he said, “I hate to see you sad.” Beyond what they witnessed, William and Harry also had to cope with the searing Morton and Panorama revelations about their mother’s disturbing behavior.

Diana’s insecurities got the better of her when she dealt with various nannies. She grew resentful of Barbara Barnes, who joined them after William’s birth, because she felt the nanny was trying to usurp her maternal authority. Barbara Barnes’s successors, Ruth Wallace and Jessie Webb, also left after running afoul of Diana’s shifting moods. From the outset Diana mistrusted Tiggy Legge-Bourke, who came aboard after the separation, because Diana imagined that the young woman was trying to supplant her in her sons’ affections. According to Richard Kay, “[Diana] raged that Tiggy always seemed to be having fun with the boys.”

Diana’s rivalrous behavior with Charles caused the most serious problems for the two boys. Starting in the mid-eighties, Diana had tried to portray Charles in a poor light as a father—a campaign that culminated in her hurtful comments in the Morton book. She competed with Charles directly for the boys’ affection as well. When she and Charles were going through one of their bad periods, she would take the boys to her room for dinner, leaving Charles to eat alone in the dining room. As she told Andrew Morton, “I get into bed with them at night, hug them and say, ‘Who loves them most in the whole world?’ and they always say, ‘Mummy.’ ” This rivalry played out increasingly in various excuses and pretexts that prevented Charles from seeing his sons. Indeed, it was Diana’s refusal to allow William and Harry to join their father at Sandringham that triggered Charles’s decision to seek a separation.

After the separation, Diana became more dependent on her eldest son as a confidant. “Diana had a mother-and-son relationship and a mother-and-husband relationship with Prince William,” said her friend Roberto Devorik. “She told me she had with her son William very private and very profound conversations, and he was an extraordinary moral support.” Beyond William’s solace, Diana sought his guidance. “Diana used to ask William for advice all the time, about what she should do with her life,” said her friend Elsa Bowker. Diana felt compelled to unburden herself, according to her friend Rosa Monckton, because she “wanted William to hear the truth from her about her life, and the people she was seeing, and what they meant to her, rather than read a distorted, exaggerated, and frequently untrue version in the tabloid press.” But by confiding in William as much as she did, Diana was placing a significant emotional burden on an adolescent boy.

Diana was aware that her status was directly tied to William’s position as heir to the throne, and she didn’t disguise her desire to see Charles bypassed as king in favor of William. She told Andrew Morton as early as 1991, “William is going to be in his position much earlier than people think now.” Diana added that she hoped Charles would “go away with his lady” and leave her with the two boys “to carry the Wales name through to the time William ascends the throne.”

Between his duties and his urge to escape an unhappy marriage, Charles had probably spent too much time away from his sons from the mid-eighties until the separation in 1992. But in his own way, Charles had been a good father. When they were younger, the boys had loved playing “Big Bad Wolf” with him, and during Highgrove weekends, he spent hours with them outdoors. They followed him around in the gardens, and he talked to them about plants and animals. Diana often rebelled at such moments, retreating to her room to listen to music, read magazines, and talk on the phone.

Charles approached children on a more adult level than Diana did, explaining, querying, and drawing out their ideas. As they grew older, he took the boys to Shakespeare productions at Stratford-upon-Avon. He also showed sensitivity to their moods; once, when William was apprehensive about returning to Ludgrove after Christmas vacation, Charles spent considerable time boosting his son’s confidence.

As teenagers, both boys clearly preferred their father’s country pursuits—hunting, shooting, and fishing—to Diana’s urban life of movies, shopping, and dining out. “Diana said to me, ‘All William wants to do is have a gun in his hand,’ ” one of her close friends recalled. “She could see that. But I don’t think she would have made them go to an AIDS hospice rather than go shoot with their father. She wouldn’t punish them in that way.”

In her Panorama interview, Diana defined the boundaries of her life with “I’ve got my boys, I’ve got my work.” According to Richard Kay, Diana regarded her sons as “the only men in her life who had never let her down and never wanted from her anything except for being herself.” That kind of standard was difficult to sustain, and as William and Harry became more independent, friction seemed inevitable. In the meantime, Diana tried to keep them close, calling them nearly every day at boarding school and taking them on vacations whenever she could.

Besides her sons, Diana looked to a dwindling number of friends she felt she could count on. Most of the castoffs didn’t know why she let them go, but the trigger was some kind of slight or betrayal, usually illusory. Those who remained trod carefully and yielded to Diana’s impulses for fear of disrupting the friendship.

She still depended on Annabel Goldsmith, Elsa Bowker, and Lucia Flecha de Lima as maternal figures, but had fallen out with Hayat Palumbo. While Lucia may have lived an ocean away, she continued to make time for Diana on the phone, adjusting her habits to accommodate their different time zones. Lucia would frequently stay up past midnight, reading and waiting for Diana to call when she awakened early.

Rosa Monckton and Marguerite Littman made themselves available as well, although Diana occasionally got perturbed when she sensed that Rosa “had other priorities.” Diana picked up a new friend in Cosima Somerset, a niece of Annabel Goldsmith’s, and for nearly a year they were extremely close, until Diana inexplicably dropped her. Since Diana’s 1993 reconciliation with her stepmother, Raine Spencer had occupied a unique niche, keeping company with Diana at lunches in Mayfair restaurants, providing entertainment and advice.

Several alternative therapists—energy healer Simone Simmons, psychic Rita Rogers, astrologer Debbie Frank, and two acupuncturists, Oonagh Toffolo and Dr. Lily Hua Yu—remained important to Diana, but she told friends that she had stopped seeing psychotherapist Susie Orbach in the spring of 1996. According to reporter Richard Kay, Diana said she ended the therapy “because she found herself analyzing the therapist’s problems rather than her own.” Media adviser Jane Atkinson recalled that Diana “talked about wanting to leave Susie Orbach, but she was terrified to reach her because Susie Orbach would have said, ‘Come and see me,’ and Diana didn’t want to. Then [Diana] did go to see her and was proud of the fact that she had finished. Whether she had finished, I don’t know, but she wanted everyone to think she had finished.” In fact, Diana did continue seeing Orbach at irregular intervals.

The autumn of 1996 also brought Diana’s final rupture with Sarah Ferguson. Diana and Sarah had formed a tight bond in the years leading up to their divorces, and Diana had become a regular Sunday visitor at Sarah’s home. “Sarah Ferguson was a very, very useful friend to the Princess during the months before the divorce,” said Jane Atkinson. “The Princess was very fond of her. If she hadn’t had her house to go to, she would have gone mad. ‘Sarah makes me laugh,’ she said.” Diana and Fergie had been together the day before the Panorama interview, and they had vacationed in France following the July announcement of Diana’s divorce.

But Sarah overstepped the bounds of friendship when she published her autobiography in November, and Diana cut her off without a word. The book’s references to Diana were mostly positive, although one passage patronizingly pointed out Diana’s “teary and reclusive” manner around the royal family at a time when Fergie was in their good graces. Fergie also tastelessly revealed that she had contracted warts from wearing Diana’s shoes, a story Diana considered “unkind.” During her book tour in the United States, Fergie answered personal questions about Diana—after Diana had specifically asked her not to. Not only did Diana stop speaking to Fergie, she wouldn’t permit Fergie’s name to be mentioned in her presence, and she refused to answer Fergie’s letters or take her phone calls. Nine months after the start of what their mutual friend David Tang called the “arctic freeze,” he tried to get them together at a dinner in Diana’s honor. “The Duchess of York is the one person who would not be welcome,” Diana replied.

Diana saw little of her immediate Spencer family after her separation. “She wasn’t as close,” said Richard Kay. “She was moving away from her own family, and from the royal family. She was looking for something else. She was very restless, even until the end.” Diana’s brother, Charles, had relocated to South Africa; her mother seldom ventured from her remote redoubt in Scotland; and the estrangement from her sister Jane persisted. When Diana told one of her friends that she wasn’t speaking to Jane, he said, “This is an absurd situation,” and quoted the biblical admonition: “You mustn’t let the sun go down upon your wrath.” Diana replied, “I know. I know,” but her friend didn’t feel she had taken in his advice. Sarah remained the closest of the siblings, still joining Diana on occasional trips as a lady-in-waiting. But Sarah had her life in the country, although she tried to maintain contact with Diana by phone most days.

Professionally, Diana suffered from the lack of an adviser experienced in politics and public relations. After Jane Atkinson’s departure, Diana hired Michael Gibbins, a fifty-three-year-old former accountant, as her private secretary. While Gibbins had the financial expertise Diana needed to manage her divorce settlement, he was less experienced in negotiating with government bureaucrats and Palace courtiers, nor did he have the public relations savvy to deal with the tabloids.

For help in fielding press inquiries, Diana turned to her junior assistant Victoria Mendham, and Paul Burrell, her butler. As Diana’s staff diminished, Burrell had become a jack-of-all-trades, and Diana took to calling him “my rock,” as she had with her former private secretary Patrick Jephson. Burrell had been fiercely loyal since siding with Diana in the breakup of her marriage. He was skilled at assessing her moods, and he continued to call her “Your Royal Highness.” In the year after the divorce, he found himself conveying messages to certain members of the press when Diana couldn’t do it herself. “I was a go-between,” said Burrell. “I dealt with Clive Goodman [of the News of the World], and in general with people whenever she needed me.”

Outwardly, Diana’s single status did not affect her relationship with Hasnat Khan. Because of his aversion to publicity, they remained underground. It was during her romance with Khan that Diana took to wearing disguises, including an array of custom-made wigs and glasses with nonoptical lenses. They went undetected to jazz clubs and restaurants in Soho or Camden Town, but they spent most of their time together at Kensington Palace. Since Diana’s Pakistan trip in February, the tabloids had left Khan alone—with the exception of one sighting by the News of the World in August, when a photographer caught Diana and Khan in a “furtive roadside rendezvous” near Royal Brompton Hospital, which Khan had left several months earlier to work at Harefield Hospital thirteen miles outside London.

The relationship between Diana and Khan deepened after her divorce, and she considered him a vital anchor in her life. “She was emotionally more stable when she was with him,” said a friend of Diana’s. “He taught her that she could be loved.” Diana told friends she was especially pleased that Khan admired her empathy with the sick. As Diana confessed to Elsa Bowker, “I found my peace. He has given me all the things I need.”

But as was so often the case with Diana, love was accompanied by possessiveness. This time, she tried to advance Khan’s career and, in the process, the prospects for their life together. When Diana went to Rimini, Italy, in October 1996 to accept a humanitarian award, she befriended South African heart surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard, another award recipient. Diana told Barnard about Khan and asked if the surgeon could help find him a position in South Africa. Diana revealed to Barnard that she wanted to marry Khan and “have a pair of girls. There was no doubt in my mind that she was very much in love with Khan and would’ve wed him if he’d agreed,” Barnard recalled. “She said she wanted to move away from London with him. South Africa was her first choice because her brother was here.”

On Diana’s return to London, she telephoned, faxed, and wrote to Barnard about job possibilities for Khan. Barnard came to Kensington Palace twice to talk further with Diana, and he met Khan at London’s Grosvenor House hotel. “In the meeting I had with him I could not work out whether he loved her in the same way, but he clearly knew she loved him very much,” Barnard recalled. “He just told me he couldn’t handle the publicity.”

As with Charles and other lovers, Diana tried to control Khan, fearing he would reject her. Energy healer Simone Simmons remembered when Diana “was so impatient to have Hasnat’s undivided attention that if he used the Kensington Palace telephones to speak to his family or friends in Pakistan for more than ten minutes, Diana would turn her music up or dance before him to distract his attention.” Diana also frequently phoned Khan at the hospital and “was often upset if he was in the operating theater and couldn’t talk to her,” Simmons said.

Diana even traveled halfway around the world to demonstrate her dedication to his work. She announced her planned trip to Australia the day after her divorce became final. She was to be the guest of honor at a dinner to raise money for the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney on October 31, 1996. The charity was hardly a household name in Britain, and Diana’s choice prompted some head-scratching. She didn’t mention that Chang, a cardiac specialist, had been Hasnat Khan’s mentor during his early surgical training in Australia. In a bungled kidnapping attempt, Chang had been murdered, a traumatic experience for Khan.

Buckingham Palace officials raised no objections to Diana’s trip, although privately they were displeased that it would coincide with the Queen’s state visit to Thailand that had been scheduled for more than a year. Diana acquitted herself well on her four-day trip, with the usual round of hospital visits and charity engagements—“from triumph to triumph … she was magnificent,” said James Whitaker in the Daily Mirror. But the trip was poorly organized, and Diana was perturbed that some sponsors of fund-raising events had sought to financially exploit her name through commercial endorsements. Even worse, the Sunday Mirror burst into print with a “world exclusive” that Diana was in love with “shy caring heart surgeon” Hasnat Khan and wanted to “have his babies.” The tabloid revealed that Diana had even entertained Khan’s grandmother at Kensington Palace.

Knowing how much Khan hated publicity, Diana vehemently denied the report, but in an unintentionally cruel manner. Not only did she tell Richard Kay that she and Khan were “friends … in an entirely professional way,” but she characterized the notion of being in love with Khan as “bullshit” and said she and her aides were “laughing ourselves silly” over the idea. That comment injured Khan, and afterward, Simone Simmons asked of Diana, “Why didn’t she just tell Richard the truth? … Her reply was sad…. How, she asked, could she start telling the truth now, when to do so would expose all the lies of the past?” The tabloids backed off, and the romance survived, propelled by Diana’s fantasy about making a new life with a simple middle-class Pakistani who only wanted to get on with his work.

During the remainder of 1996, Diana popped up unpredictably in various places around the world. One day she was darting off to Greece on a Learjet to attend the funeral of a twenty-seven-year-old man who had died of cystic fibrosis; she had often visited him at Royal Brompton Hospital, and she described him as a “dear friend.” Another day she was in Italy receiving her humanitarian award with Dr. Christiaan Barnard and making a short speech on the need to appreciate the elderly for their “wisdom and experience” and to reject the definition of old age “as a disease.”

She visited the United States twice, first to raise money at a Washington gala for the Nina Hyde Center for Breast Cancer Research, a charity named for The Washington Post’s late fashion editor and backed by Diana’s new friend Katharine Graham. Before a sellout crowd of 800 luminaries from society and fashion, Diana read a favorite verse, as she had the previous December in New York: “Life is mostly froth and bubble, two things stand in stone: kindness in another’s trouble, courage in your own.” Graham also honored Diana at a luncheon, and Hillary Clinton did the same at a White House breakfast for 110, where Diana received a standing ovation.

Three months later, Diana was back in the United States as the guest of honor at a benefit for the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a tribute to designer Christian Dior chaired by editor Liz Tilberis of Harper’s Bazaar. Tilberis had first met Diana ten years earlier when she became editor of British Vogue and subsequently supervised several photo shoots of the Princess for the magazine. The two women became friends at the end of 1993, when Tilberis was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and Diana provided moral support with frequent phone calls. As a favor to Tilberis, Diana had traveled to New York in early 1995 to give the editor an award at the Council of Fashion Designers of America dinner. When Tilberis requested her presence again at the Costume Institute, several friends advised Diana to decline because another such event might make her seem frivolous when Diana was trying to appear more serious.

Diana made no remarks at the museum gala, but she created a stir with a $15,000 Dior gown of midnight-blue satin trimmed with lace that resembled a close-fitting nightgown. Diana later told an acquaintance that the John Galliano–designed dress had initially been too tight, but that she had easily lost three pounds in three days so it would “fit like a glove.” She didn’t mention how she shed the weight, but such a sudden loss was commonplace for victims of eating disorders. Diana sat through the dinner for 900 (ticket price: $1,000) and then slipped out a side door at 11:00 P.M., disappointing an additional 2,000 guests who had paid $150 each to see her at the after-dinner dance. I’M OUT THE DIOR, said the headline in the next morning’s Daily Star.

By year’s end, Diana had appeared at just three events in five months for her chosen charities: a conference for Centrepoint, where she talked about homeless runaways; the annual meeting of the International Federation of Anti-Leprosy Associations, where she cautioned against complacency about the disease; and a benefit dinner and performance by the English National Ballet at St. James’s Palace, the first time she used the state apartments for a charity function.

The ballet fund-raiser was especially significant, but not for Diana’s commitment to her charity. During the dinner, she announced that the company’s new production of The Nutcracker would be sponsored by Harrods. Mohamed Fayed, owner of the famous department store, beamed with pleasure. He had underwritten other causes that were important to her—Royal Brompton Hospital and the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children, for example. The previous March, Diana had attended a fund-raising dinner at Harrods that Fayed gave to support the work of Hasnat Khan’s supervisor, the heart surgeon Sir Magdi Yacoub. But this was the first time Fayed had played such a public role as her benefactor. Two weeks later, at Fayed’s invitation, Diana hosted her annual staff Christmas party in the Georgian Restaurant at Harrods.

By 1996, Mohamed Fayed was one of the more notorious figures on the British scene. He had a famously foul mouth, and he was known to make outrageously insulting statements. (“They’re all fuggers, these politicians,” he once exclaimed.) The Egyptian-born son of an Alexandria schoolteacher, Fayed started his career at a furniture-importing company owned by Adnan Khashoggi, his Saudi Arabian brother-in-law who would later become a multimillionaire arms dealer. After falling out with Khashoggi, Fayed built an international business by investing in ships, hotels, and real estate, and he made his fortune by constructing a commercial port in Dubai to handle the country’s burgeoning oil business.

In 1979, he bought the Ritz Hotel in Paris, and in 1985, took over Harrods after a bruising fight with R. W. “Tiny” Rowland, a rival tycoon. At Rowland’s urging, the government’s Department of Trade and Industry investigated the circumstances of Fayed’s purchase. In 1988, the DTI issued a devastating 752-page report concluding that Fayed had significantly misrepresented his background and business practices. Among the findings was Fayed’s false claim to have been born into an old Egyptian family enriched by shipping, land, and industry, and his phony aristocratic affectation, calling himself “Mohamed al Fayed.”

Fayed was subsequently denied his application for British citizenship, and he sought revenge on the Tory government by revealing that he had paid prominent Conservative members of Parliament to raise questions in the House of Commons relating to his business interests. This “cash for questions” scandal sullied Fayed as much as it did Prime Minister John Major’s government. A subsequent Vanity Fair profile of Fayed published in 1995 described his racism, sexual harassment of women, telephone bugging, and mistreatment of staff.

Yet Fayed’s unsavory reputation didn’t seem to faze Diana, who had been acquainted with him for some years. He had cultivated her father and Raine from the time he bought the Ritz. The couple stayed at the hotel frequently, and Fayed always made certain they received red-carpet treatment. Harrods also happened to be Johnnie’s favorite store, where he was a cosseted customer. The Spencers entertained the Harrods board for lunch at Althorp, and in 1991, when Fayed produced a book about the history of the store, Johnnie made the introductory speech at the publishing party. According to Tom Bower’s book Fayed: The Unauthorized Biography, Fayed “showered gifts” on Johnnie and Raine, who was especially enamored of Fayed’s generosity and hospitality. In 1996, Raine became a paid director of Harrods International, which supervises the store’s duty-free shops as well as outlets in Japan.

Diana had not known Fayed directly through her father and Raine; she had actually met the Egyptian businessman during the eighties at polo matches sponsored by Harrods. But Fayed often said that before Johnnie Spencer died in 1992, he had asked Fayed to “keep an eye” on Diana and her siblings. Fayed frequently took liberties with the truth, and there was no way to verify what he said. Still, around the time of the Wales separation, Diana became friendly enough with Fayed to visit him from time to time when she shopped at Harrods. Through their conversations, Fayed claimed to have engineered Raine’s rapprochement with Diana in 1993. “He helped bring them together,” said former Sunday Times editor Andrew Neil, who worked as a consultant for Fayed. “He wanted to build a new environment for Diana, and he helped facilitate the reconciliation.”

“Diana liked Mohamed’s outrageousness,” said Mark Hollingsworth, who collaborated with Fayed on a proposed memoir in 1998. “I don’t think he cleaned up his language at all for her. She would go and pour out her heart to him.” Andrew Neil believed that Fayed “made friends with Diana by cultivating the idea that both were outsiders and had the same enemies.” Fayed further ingratiated himself with Diana by supporting her causes, and after her divorce, he began regularly inviting her to tea on the Harrods terrace to “talk about their common interest in various charities.”

Fayed misstepped once that September when he asked Diana to join the Harrods board. She politely turned him down, explaining that she couldn’t be involved in any commercial enterprise. At that point, Fayed tapped Raine instead. Fayed also frequently proffered invitations to Diana to take vacations at his homes in Gstaad, Scotland, and the south of France, all of which she declined. Yet when she was later asked about their relationship, she defiantly proclaimed Mohamed Fayed a “close friend.”