Diana in Search of Herself (69 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diana felt “
bitterly let down” and “stitched up” (double-crossed). As Rosa Monckton later explained, “
The … reaction in the British press was disproportionate and fiercely critical of Diana. Her response was cold fury. She postponed her return to England.” Instead of flying directly home on Saturday, August 30, Diana agreed to instead spend that night with Dodi in Paris. Monckton last spoke to the Princess on August 28, and as she recounted later, Diana’s recurring theme was “
betrayal, and being misunderstood.”

Diana and Dodi left for Paris at midday on August 30, a change in plans that was approved by Fayed himself. Their jittery comings and goings the rest of that day and evening were
relayed to Fayed in England by his Ritz managers as well. Diana and Dodi moved around Paris in rapid bursts, followed always by a large pack of paparazzi. From the airport they went to the Villa Windsor, where they
stayed less than a half hour.
A Fayed employee took their luggage to Dodi’s apartment, where they planned to spend the night, while the couple headed for the Ritz to rest in the Imperial Suite.

That day, according to Fayed spokesman Michael Cole, Diana gave Dodi a gold cigar clipper, inscribed “
From Diana with love,” and her father’s gold cuff links—the same pair she had earlier given to Oliver Hoare. “
They were her most precious possession,” said Elsa Bowker. “I couldn’t believe she gave them to Dodi so quickly.” Dodi intended to give Diana a garish diamond-encrusted ring that he purchased for $200,000 from the Repossi Jewelers on the Place Vendôme late in the afternoon.
Alberto Repossi said Diana helped choose the ring when they twice visited the jeweler’s Monaco store during their
Jonikal
cruises, although her friends protested that it wasn’t her taste. Richard Kay called it “
vulgar.”

In the early evening, Dodi and Diana left via the Ritz’s rear door to drive to his apartment.
As usual, they rode in a Mercedes limousine driven
by Dodi’s personal chauffeur Philippe Dourneau, followed by Dodi’s Range Rover bearing two security guards, Trevor Rees-Jones and Kes Wingfield. When they arrived at the apartment building, Dodi and Diana had to struggle through a paparazzi mob to reach the front door. Two hours later, the couple left the apartment, intending to have dinner at the fashionable Chez Benoit restaurant. En route, Dodi was so exasperated by the crush of photographers shadowing the car that he abruptly changed plans. Instead of Chez Benoit, they would dine at the Ritz. On their arrival at the hotel,
they were again thronged by the paparazzi, some pressing within inches of Diana’s face—an indignity she had suffered many times, although such pressure was new to Dodi, who was visibly rattled.