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 then 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 with 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.

At twenty-five, Dodi was feckless and undisciplined. He began taking cocaine, stayed out late at clubs most nights, and slept until the early afternoon. He ran afoul of the producers of both Allied films when he brought cocaine to the set. Puttnam actually ejected Dodi, telling him, “Don’t ever come back again.”

Chariots of Fire was a hit on its release in 1981 and won the Academy Award for best picture. With his prominent listing as executive producer, Dodi was poised to be a major player in Hollywood, but instead he did nothing for three years, leading a decadent life in London, Paris, and the south of France. “He was into cocaine,” said his friend Nona Summers, whose problems with the drug sent her into a rehab program. “He didn’t tell the truth about many things, but he told me he had done it, that he got himself in trouble and stopped.” Among his mishaps was a fall down a cliff from a restaurant in Sardinia at 2:00 A.M. that resulted in several broken ribs.

During this period, Dodi spent more time with his Khashoggi relatives, and he tried to get to know the mother he had seen so rarely. He called her frequently and visited her in Cairo, but they didn’t become especially close. “When he was around his mother, he was serious, reverential, more quiet than usual,” said his friend Jack Martin. “She was a combination of doting and demanding.” Samira was “warm but very strong,” recalled interior designer Corinna Gordon, a friend for many years. “I think Dodi was a little intimidated.” In the mid-1980s, Samira became ill with cancer. When she died in the autumn of 1986, Dodi brooded for a long while. One former girlfriend said he went into an “emotional free fall.”

Dodi was back in the film business by then, this time in Hollywood. In 1983, Mohamed had set him up with Jack Weiner, a former Columbia Pictures executive turned producer. Mohamed agreed to provide funding to Weiner and Dodi for options and scripts, while Weiner would guide Dodi through the basics of film production. Their seven-year partnership produced two successes, F/X and a sequel, both thrillers about a special-effects man, but only Weiner actually worked on the films. Dodi lacked the discipline to see a film through the difficult stages of budgeting and production, sometimes showing up on the sets at lunchtime and attending the odd meeting. “He had a passion to make movies, but he didn’t see his role as being there every day,” said Weiner. Scriptwriters and others who encountered Dodi in meetings realized he was simply playacting, “keeping up a particular image,” in the words of one producer.

By now in his early thirties, Dodi was more dependent than ever on his strong-willed father, a predicament he found emotionally and professionally crippling. To prove himself to such a formidable father, he would need to work doubly hard, but Dodi never did. Mohamed, in recognizing his son’s limitations and trying to protect him, put Dodi in an impossible trap. “It’s like when you are training a dog and you use a choke chain,” said a producer who worked with Dodi. “You give a little freedom, then you need to give a pull.”

Winging his way on private jets and cruising on 200-foot yachts, Dodi had no “real life.” His father owned the apartments on Park Lane in London and just off the Champs-Élysées in Paris where Dodi often stayed. Dodi moved from one rented house to the next in Los Angeles, and used his family’s vacation homes in Saint-Tropez, Gstaad, and Scotland. “I have no idea where Dodi thought was home,” his friend Michael White said. “Around the office we used to always say, ‘Dodi is a character in a movie,’ ” recalled Weiner. A sense of unreality touched everything Dodi did; in many ways, he was the victim of his own misguided, romantic dreams.

Despite his extravagant allowance, Dodi wildly overspent, leasing homes in Beverly Hills and Malibu for $25,000 a month, riding in chauffeur-driven cars and hiring costly security guards—all to impress his friends. A spending binge by Dodi was usually followed by Mohamed’s declining to pick up certain bills. “Dodi would commit himself and then the funds were not there, and he would try to talk his way out of it,” said a producer in Hollywood. When confronted, Dodi would apologetically promise payment, but frequently, the check would bounce. A number of Dodi’s creditors sued him. American Express filed a lawsuit against Dodi for failing to pay a $116,890 debt. Other creditors walked away bitterly, including one prominent Hollywood actress who had to reupholster every piece of furniture in her Malibu beach house because of the damage done by Dodi’s dogs.

Even with all his financial travails, Dodi’s impulsive generosity became one of his hallmarks. “He was after acceptance, people enjoying his company, or prestige,” said his friend Peter Riva. Dodi also indulged himself, collecting expensive cars, including five Ferraris, largely for show. Many of his preoccupations were childish. His Park Lane apartment featured a collection of baseball caps, and he was obsessed with military memorabilia. When he visited Los Angeles, he drove a $90,000 Hummer.

Dodi was fanatically concerned with personal security. Wherever he went, he insisted on having one or more bodyguards and a backup security car in tow. He was also hypochondriacal; like his father, Dodi carried scented disposable hand wipes for fear of germs.

One of Dodi’s most perplexing traits was his tendency to exaggerate the extent of his wealth and privilege. When he rented a house, he would say he owned it. “I don’t think a word of truth came out when he talked about possessions,” said Nona Summers. “He was gentle and kind but a complete liar. He wanted to impress people.”

His friends learned to live on “Dodi Time,” knowing that he would either fail to appear as promised or arrive hopelessly late. “He didn’t have the ability to say, ‘No, I can’t do that’ or ‘I don’t have that,’ ” said Michael White. “His way of getting out of things was not to be around or not to answer the phone.” His friends’ tolerance reinforced Dodi’s belief that he could talk his way out of anything.

With the exception of some jilted lovers, the women in Dodi Fayed’s life took the most forgiving view of his fantasies and fibs. “He had an innocence that was very appealing, attractive, and gentle,” said model Marie Helvin, who was impressed that Dodi—unlike his father—did not use profanities and disliked dirty jokes. Dodi poured out his troubles to Helvin and other women who served as sister/mother figures. But for all the jewelry, furs, and flowers he gave women, he didn’t know how to make emotional commitments. “He sabotaged his relationships because he was always looking for a bigger and better deal,” said a close female friend.

In the mid-1980s, Dodi met Suzanne Gregard, a twenty-six-year-old model, and he courted her avidly, flying her by Concorde to London for weekends, even buying the adjacent seat so she could have privacy. Dodi worshipped Gregard, who told her brother, “You know, he gets down on the ground and kisses my feet.” Shortly before the end of 1986, Dodi proposed, and they were married on New Year’s Eve in Vail, Colorado. After a Malibu honeymoon, they settled in a rented Manhattan town house. Gregard tried to make a home for them, but she managed to decorate only the living room, bedroom, guest room, and office, leaving the rest of the house empty.

Although Gregard earned a good living as a model, Dodi insisted on putting her on an allowance, refusing to discuss money with her. She continued her career, and he traveled on his own. After eight months, they decided to divorce. One reason, Gregard later admitted, was the intrusiveness of Dodi’s heavy security. “We were never alone,” she said.

Following the divorce, Dodi resumed his rootless life in London and Hollywood. In 1989, Mohamed tried to involve Dodi in business at Harrods, but he lasted all of three weeks in the training program in retailing and accounting. Dodi also tried to jump-start his film career after Jack Weiner left Allied Stars in 1990. Although he logged production credits on two movies, Hook, in 1991, and The Scarlet Letter, in 1995, Dodi had virtually no role in either film beyond writing checks with his father’s funds. Dodi’s finances had become impossibly tangled during these years. By 1997, the dockets of Los Angeles Superior and Municipal Courts were filled with cases in which Dodi was named as defendant—including suits over back taxes as well as damages to various properties he had rented.

By the spring of 1997, Dodi was still fantasizing about new film projects and earnestly talking about settling down. He had been dating Kelly Fisher since the previous summer, and by her account, had proposed no fewer than four times. On June 20, Dodi bought Julie Andrews’s five-acre compound in Malibu for $7.3 million. (The owner of record was Highcrest Investments Ltd.) According to Fisher, the couple planned to live there as husband and wife.

Three weeks later, Dodi was introduced to Diana in Saint-Tropez by his father. The two had met once briefly, during a polo match in 1987 in which Dodi was playing for the Harrods team, but Diana’s knowledge of Dodi was based on his father’s glowing reports. “Diana saw Dodi through Mohamed Fayed’s words,” said one of her close friends. “She never cared to find out anything more.” There was little opportunity for Diana to learn much. In July 1997, Dodi was scarcely known outside Hollywood and jet-set circles. His name had sporadically surfaced in gossip columns, and then only in connection with film premieres or liaisons with assorted models or starlets.

Although Diana and Dodi were hardly on their own, they spent some time together in quiet conversation. “Dodi couldn’t bear to leave her alone,” said Debbie Gribble, chief stewardess on the Jonikal. As Dodi listened intently, Diana described her travels to Pakistan and Africa and her work on the land mine campaign. Mohamed’s wife, Heini, later said that Diana and Dodi also talked eagerly about movies. On two evenings, Dodi made the oddly flamboyant gesture of renting a disco for William and Harry to enjoy privately. By day, as the group swam, Jet Skied, and relaxed on the Jonikal, the paparazzi took numerous photographs, but no one noticed Dodi. “We thought he was a sailor,” said Jean-Louis Macault, one of the freelance paparazzi.

On July 16, Dodi greeted his fiancée, Kelly Fisher, in the port of Saint-Tropez. For the next two days, he moved back and forth between the Fayed villa and the yachts Cujo and Sakara, where he and Fisher alternately spent their first two nights together. Explaining his frequent daytime absences, Dodi told Fisher his father insisted on his presence to keep Diana amused. “I knew his father was important to him, and he had to do what he said,” Fisher said. “But I was livid…. They basically kept me hidden.” Fisher took the Cujo to Nice on the eighteenth for a previously scheduled modeling assignment that kept her occupied for three days and freed Dodi to be with Diana.

The paparazzi and hacks were primarily interested in how Diana would behave in the days leading up to July 18, the date of Camilla’s fiftieth-birthday party. “We ran postcards to Camilla from Diana, which Diana had faxed [from her London office] and roared with laughter,” said Piers Morgan of the Mirror. “She found it amusing, and she knew the power of what she was doing.” On the morning of the eighteenth, the tabloids were filled with photographs of Diana at play, “stealing the spotlight with a … 30-minute nonstop performance” of diving, swimming, and riding behind Harry on his Jet Ski. She “leaned forward, revealing a breathtaking cleavage,” wrote James Whitaker in The Mirror, “and preened herself on Mohamed’s beach.”

Mohamed Fayed gave an interview to The Mail on Sunday that appeared on July 20. Speaking to Brian Vine, Fayed said, “Diana’s attitude to all the criticism is that those people can go to hell if they don’t like it. Like me, she can see through all the hypocrisy of some of the critics.” He claimed that Diana “felt at home” in the Fayed “family atmosphere,” and said, “Diana’s sons are having a great time, and any critics can just go and suck lemons.” But Fayed went too far when he added, “As for Camilla, Diana doesn’t think or care about her.… Camilla’s like something from a Dracula film compared with the vividly beautiful Diana, who is so full of life.”

Diana and the boys left at sunset that day. The next morning, Dodi filled her Kensington Palace apartment with pink roses and sent the first of numerous extravagant gifts: an $11,000 gold Cartier Panther watch. Harrods delivered a large box of exotic fruit from Mohamed as well. But Diana said little to her friends about Dodi. “The first I heard of her going off with Dodi was when I read it in the newspapers,” said one of her close friends. “She didn’t tell me.” Diana did tell astrologer Debbie Frank that she had “the best holiday [she’d] ever had,” and “I’ve met someone.”

Unknown to Diana, Dodi was still sailing in the Mediterranean with his fiancée. The couple flew to Paris on July 23, and the next day, Fisher traveled, as planned, to Los Angeles, while Dodi returned to London. Diana, meanwhile, flew to Milan on the twenty-second to attend a memorial service for fashion designer Gianni Versace, who had been murdered a week earlier in Miami Beach by serial killer Andrew Cunanan. Diana was seated in the front row next to Elton John. Although she had fallen out with both the singer and his close friend Versace six months earlier, she took the opportunity to repair relations with John. As he sobbed quietly, she comforted him with her hand on his arm.

Three days later, Diana was off with Dodi on a Harrods helicopter to Paris for the weekend. Their visit to Fayed’s Ritz Hotel was held in strict secrecy. Dodi gave Diana the $10,000-a-night Imperial Suite and treated her to dinner at the three-star Lucas Carton restaurant. On Saturday, they toured the villa where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had lived in exile. Eleven years earlier, Fayed had leased the villa, which he had since restored. Dodi and Diana also stopped by Fayed’s apartment off the Champs-Élysées and took a midnight stroll along the Seine. On Sunday, July 27, they returned to London undetected.

For the next month, Diana was almost continually on the move. With William and Harry at Balmoral for August, she was free to come and go, which she did more impulsively than usual. She made her first move on Thursday, July 31, stealing away with Dodi for a six-day cruise off Sardinia and Corsica on the Jonikal, where their love affair began. Drawing on his penchant for the romantic, Dodi pampered Diana with her preferred diet, which included carrot juice in the morning, fruit at lunch, and fish in the evening, as well as plenty of champagne, caviar, and pâté de foie gras. For background music, he provided two of her favorites, the sound track from the film The English Patient and George Michael’s album Older, plus some Frank Sinatra. The couple talked and whispered nonstop, prompting Dodi’s valet Rene Delorm to wonder, “How can people have so much to say to each other?” After several days, Dodi gave Diana a diamond bracelet, and when they went ashore in Monaco, they spent the day shopping for more jewelry. “It was as close to paradise as you can get,” said Jonikal stewardess Debbie Gribble. But according to Antonia Grant, one of Dodi’s chefs, “There was always [Mohamed] Fayed in the background. It was obvious that strings were being pulled.”

On August 4, Italian paparazzo Mario Brenna located the couple on the Jonikal after receiving a tip, probably from someone close to Diana or Dodi. He clicked off a series of shots showing them sunbathing, swimming, and embracing, some taken from a small yacht positioned a mere ten yards away, others with a long lens. After a spirited auction, Brenna and his partner Jason Fraser pocketed more than $2 million from the London red tops.

The tabloids broke the story of the romance on Thursday, August 7, the day after Diana and Dodi returned to London. DI’S SECRET HOL WITH HARRODS HUNK DODI, headlined The Sun. Dodi was quoted in The Mirror as saying with a smile, “We relaxed. We had a great time.… We are very good friends.” An evidently proud Mohamed Fayed told the Evening Standard, “I give them my blessing. They are both adults.”

The tipoff came, as usual, from Richard Kay, who wrote in the Daily Mail that Dodi was “the first man who can openly be described as a boyfriend.… The Princess herself was yesterday astonishingly relaxed over the revelation of their closeness and the prospect of intimate photographs … being published.” Kay recounted that Diana had said during “despairing moments” in recent months, “I so understand why Jackie married Onassis. She felt alone and in need of protection—I often feel like that.” Quoting the ubiquitous “close friend,” Kay wrote, “She wants to get a life—a real life. She is single and so is he. She’s sick of all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Why shouldn’t she have a man in her life, and for people to know about it?”

It was a message meant for one reader, Hasnat Khan, according to Diana’s friends. After some eighteen months in hiding with Khan, Diana intended to be as flagrantly public with Dodi as she could—at least in part to provoke Khan. “She was on the rebound from Hasnat Khan,” said Elsa Bowker. “She started with Dodi to make Hasnat jealous.” Added another close friend, “Dodi was a bolt out of the blue.”

Many believed Diana was motivated by a more general urge for revenge as well. What better way to annoy the British establishment than by taking up with a man whose father’s garish wealth and business manner made him an outsider among the upper classes? Her choice of the son of an Egyptian father and Saudi mother may have shocked the establishment, but to those who knew the history of Diana’s recent attachments, Dodi was consistent with her taste for Eastern friends—from her Panorama interviewer Martin Bashir to Hasnat Khan and Gulu Lalvani, as well as women friends Elsa Bowker and Hayat Palumbo. Diana seemed to find an element of comfort and trust in non-Westerners.

Diana was infatuated with Dodi, initially described in the tabloids as “Mr. Perfect … caring, rich and irresistible to women.” Kay, in the Mail, went out of his way to draw distinctions between Fayed and his son. Quoting “a friend,” Kay wrote, “Dodi is not his father. He is very different, a gentle and sensitive man and that is part of his attraction for Diana.” Dodi, according to his friends, was predictably intoxicated by Diana. For a man whose identity and purpose were shaped by his women, she represented his lifetime achievement. Winning her affection would finally prove Dodi’s worth to his demanding father.

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.