Diana in Search of Herself (68 page)

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.

Chapter 27

T
he evening after her romance hit the tabloids, Diana went to Dodi’s Park Lane apartment for dinner. When she emerged before midnight, she faced fifty photographers. The next day, Friday, August 8, she left for Bosnia with columnist William Deedes and her butler Paul Burrell on a jet loaned to her by billionaire George Soros.

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

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

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