There was real sexual chemistry between them, said one journalist when shown intimate photographs of the couple taken aboard the
Jonikal.
“They are oblivious to everyone and everything around them!”
One of the photographs to which he was referring—of the bikini-clad princess kissing Dodi on the deck of the
Jonikal
—was splashed all over the front page of the
Mirror.
Editor Piers Morgan had bought it on a one-day-exclusive basis from an Italian paparazzi photographer who had staked out the yacht. The following day the picture was bought by other national newspapers and given similar treatment. It made the photographer more than £1 million—an indication of the incredible interest in their romance at the time. Publication of the grainy photographs did not cause the princess’s smile to dim by even a fraction. Uncharacteristically, she didn’t appear to give a damn that her privacy had been invaded. There was almost a sense of relief that the romance was right out in the open. Their caress was a world away from Diana’s rigid embraces with Prince Charles. There was no pretense, no guile; just a very genuine passion and sexuality which proved her feelings for Dodi better than any words might have done.
Some friends believed she might be contemplating a Jackie Kennedy-style marriage. Jackie married Aristotle Onassis because it gave her financial and physical security. In the palace, the comments continued to focus on her “bad judgment” in her choice of friends, and on Dodi being an unsuitable escort for the mother of the future king. The slightest suggestion of marriage between the princess and the son of Mohamed Al Fayed sent shudders of revulsion through the ranks of palace courtiers. They were not impressed by the remark of Dodi’s friend, who said, “With him, Diana can have everything the royal family gave her—without having the annoyance of the royal family.”
Said Raine Spencer, “I get very upset when people try to dismiss it as ‘the summer romance’. That is understating the depth of the happiness they found together, the depth of their need for each other and the depth of a tremendous friendship, because that is all part of a love affair. All I know is that she was tremendously happy and very much in love.”
On August 8, Diana was photographed leaving Dodi’s apartment next door to the Dorchester Hotel at one o’clock in the morning, even though only hours later she was flying, in her new persona as Queen of Hearts, to Bosnia to publicize her fight against the use of land mines. She had not only become a troublesome stone in the shoe of the royal family, she was already considered a serious menace by large sections of the international armaments industry, and her visit to Bosnia was dramatically to step up her threat to their billions in profits.
Radiant, and looking like a love-struck teenager, Princess Diana was greeted by over sixty cameramen when she arrived in war-scarred Bosnia. This beautiful woman, who just couldn’t stop smiling, was able, with scarcely an effort, to focus the world’s attention on the horror of land mines. She wanted to show that the human misery caused by land mines was not confined to the developing world, but affected many thousands in Europe too. Most Bosnian mines remained unmapped, and the casualty rate was increasing as refugees returned to their abandoned homes which had been part of the battlefield.
For three days she talked to surviving victims of uncleared mines: men, women and children who had lost arms, legs or sight. Some of the children were so recently maimed that their entrails were still exposed. She hugged them as they died, and let her tears mingle with theirs and they—and the whole world—adored her. Pictures of her visit, which appeared in newspapers around the globe, encouraged people to put pressure on their leaders to support a ban on land mines. And the world leaders, including Bill Clinton, responded by confirming their intention to make such a ban unanimous.
One newspaper referred to her as “Mother Teresa with a crown,” and experienced opinion-makers were staggered that this not-very-eloquent woman had become the most influential single personality in the world. The response to her simple appeal was unprecedented.
In the Pentagon in Washington, and among some of America’s wealthiest arms dealers, it began to dawn on people that the Princess of Wales had not only become the most visible and intractable opponent of their policies, but she now represented the most serious current threat to their agendas. Former British government minister Lord Howe described her as “a loose cannon.”
Given Diana’s strong personal influence on American president Bill Clinton, and the added pressure which his wife Hillary, a committed devotee to the princess’s campaign, could exert on him, it would have become clear, a former intelligence officer told me, that there was little chance of opponents to the land mines ban persuading him to change his mind while she remained able to keep him in line. “Getting rid of Diana was becoming their only viable option,” he said.
While Diana was devoting all her energies, temporarily, to her Queen of Hearts campaign, Dodi took the opportunity to fly to Los Angeles to supervise construction of the house he was building in Paradise Cove, Malibu. The £4.5 million mansion stood in five acres of tropical gardens and had a superb private beach. From photographs he had shown her, Diana had already specifically suggested alterations he might make. To his great delight she had suggested they make the Paradise Cove home their major residence. She would retain Kensington Palace as a base for her official charity work, but she preferred to be based in America. She had already advised key staff they would be moving to California, she told him. (Early in 2004, Diana’s close confidante and friend, dream analyst Joan Hanger, confirmed the princess’s plans. She said that on a visit to Kensington Palace, Diana spoke to her of moving to live in Los Angeles where Dodi had a house. “She sparkled when she spoke about Dodi,” said Miss Hanger.)
Dodi was thrilled to pass on her ideas to the builders. She wanted to live with him there, and he was eager to make his home as attractive and as comfortable as possible for her. Diana genuinely appreciated good design. She had no real education, having left private school with few qualifications, but she did have an instinctive feel for design—a talent about which Prince Charles used to scoff.
Reunited after their brief separation, Diana and Dodi stuck to each other like superglue. If she didn’t spend the night at Dodi’s apartment, he slept at Kensington Palace. That they were inseparable did not prevent “friends” and servants trying to pry them apart. One of the people who did not like Dodi was Diana’s so-called “rock,” Paul Burrell. Nodding toward the closed door, behind which Dodi was sleeping, he peevishly told a visitor to Kensington Palace, “You know he isn’t right for her, don’t you?”
Strangely enough, when Burrell boasts he was spending nights sitting on the stairs discussing Dodi with the princess as her equal, and advising her on whether she should accept Fayed’s proposal of marriage, the butler was not actually being spoken to by Diana, according to a fellow servant. He had been discovered, yet again, nosing through Diana’s private correspondence, and had been given the silent treatment, one of the princess’s favored punishments for troublesome staff. Diana’s former housekeeper, Wendy Berry, recalled that at a staff lunch in San Lorenzo at the end of April, Paul Burrell had seemed on edge and had whispered conspiratorially to her that the princess wasn’t speaking to him any more.
One reason that has been suggested why Burrell did not approve of Dodi Fayed, is because the gossip-gathering servant, so full of his own self-importance, felt unfairly treated. Dodi never included Burrell in the invitations extended to the princess. The Fayeds had servants aplenty, and believed Burrell to be superfluous to their requirements. Nor did Diana ever ask that he be allowed to accompany her, making somewhat suspect his claims about his indispensability and her utter reliance on him. Said Darren McGrady, “Paul thought he was above being a butler. He had what the Queen Mum used to call ‘red-carpet fever’. He thought he was more important than he was.”
What is clear is that Princess Diana clearly believed Dodi was very much the right man for her. After the kiss pictures were published, Dodi had flown in his butler of six years, René Delorme, from Paris to look after them in his London home and at the Fayed complex in Oxted, Surrey, where he arranged caviar and candlelit dinners in the gardens. On one trip to Oxted by helicopter, Dodi organized a secret visit to Derbyshire to meet Diana’s psychic, Rita Rogers. The visit was important only because it was the first time Diana had ever introduced a man to one of her secret inner circle of valued spiritual advisers, and was a further pointer to how attached they had become.
On August 15, Diana flew to Greece for a cruise with her good friend Rosa Monckton, and borrowed Dodi’s father’s private Gulfstream IV jet to take them there. Dodi, meanwhile, made another lightning visit to Los Angeles. Both were back in London on August 21. Diana flew back from Greece to Stansted airport in the Al Fayed jet, and transferred to Battersea Heliport in Dodi’s helicopter. From there she dashed to Kensington Palace, allowing only enough time to freshen up before returning to Battersea with Dodi to helicopter back to Stansted and the refueled Gulfstream, which would fly them to the
Jonikal
for yet another holiday together on the Côte d’Azur. From Nice airport the couple were whisked by car and tender to where the
Jonikal
awaited them offshore at St. Laurent-de-Var, and while they relaxed in the master stateroom, which stretched the yacht’s full width, the captain, Luigi del Tevere, motored south toward St. Tropez where they dropped anchor at 2
A.M.
Early the next morning they headed to Pamplona Bay where Dodi and Diana joined Mohamed Al Fayed and his wife and four children for a late lunch. By the time they left, late that afternoon, the
Jonikal
was being tailed by a small flotilla of press boats.
Once again the presence of paparazzi didn’t appear to faze Diana in the slightest. The next morning, as became their pattern, Diana was up and about long before Dodi. Bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones remembers she looked stunning in her bathing suit and made no effort to hide from photographers.
By late afternoon they were anchored off St. Jean Cap Ferrat, from where Dodi had planned to take Diana shopping and sightseeing in nearby Monaco. During their trip ashore, Dodi’s butler René says they gave their bodyguards the slip while they toured the chic part of Monte Carlo and popped into Alberto Repossi, Dodi’s favorite jewelery store in the prestigious Hermitage Hotel. The bodyguards, laughed Dodi, couldn’t admit they had mislaid their charges, because to have done so would have constituted a sackable offence in the Al Fayed code. In his book, Trevor Rees-Jones denies a visit was made to Repossi’s, even though Mohamed Al Fayed obtained the CCTV film of the couple actually in the store. Ultimately it doesn’t matter either way: the ring, which Dodi would collect from the jeweler’s Paris branch a week later, was real enough.
The following day, off Portofino in Italy, the young lovers chose to stay aboard as the paparazzi were visible in force on shore. It did not appear to create any hardship for the pair who, the
Jonikal
’s crew noted, showed no embarrassment about being seen kissing and cuddling during their sunbathing sessions on deck. Their intimate display of affection aboard their personal love boat didn’t stop even when they knew they were in full sight of photographers. “It was amazing,” said paparazzo Jason Fraser. “Diana just let go.”
Photographers in their small boats shadowed them to Porto Venere, to Elba and finally to the tiny island of Molara off Sardinia where, with excellent security planning, they managed to enjoy a spectacular beach barbecue away from the prying camera lenses. But by August 26, the paparazzi had brought in helicopters to buzz the yacht periodically and keep closer tabs on their targets.
By Friday, August 29, they were anchored off Cala di Volpe, a private Sardinian resort, where they were able to slip ashore virtually unmolested. But the paparazzi attention was becoming oppressive and the couple decided it was time to move on. The decision to fly to Paris was made early that evening, and a flight plan filed from Sardinia’s Olbia Airport for the following day. Staff were told they would be spending only twenty-four hours in Paris before going on to London.
When the Ritz Hotel was advised from the Fayed London nerve center that Dodi and the princess would be arriving in Paris on Saturday, a copy of the memo went to acting head of security Henri Paul. He immediately canceled a planned weekend away with friends and put himself back on the rota to be personally in charge of the airport reception, and involved in the day’s activities.
The main purpose in going to Paris, Dodi told the Harrods operations center in London, was to pick up a ring. Dodi would tell his step-uncle, Hussein Yassin, a former press attaché at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, who was staying in the Ritz that weekend, “Diana and I are getting married. You’ll know about it officially very soon.” Hussein’s niece, Joumana, who was also in Paris, received a similar call that Saturday evening. Dodi told her, “Our marriage will be founded on true love.”
A formal announcement would be made, Dodi told them, after the princess had broken the news to her two sons when they were reunited the following day. It was already decided that the ring he was collecting from Repossi, in the Place Vendôme, would be her engagement ring.
By the time the green and gold Gulfstream IV jet put down at Le Bourget airport in the northern suburbs of Paris at 3:22
P.M.
, Diana was as confident as she would ever be that she was truly in love, and ready for the whole world to know it. When their door opened onto the area reserved for private aircraft, the contrast with the Côte d’Azur could not have been greater. There was not the slightest breath of wind and the temperature was already soaring into the eighties.