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Remembering
Diana
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The
Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown will hit bookshelves in Pakistan soon.
Being touted as one of the most insightful books on the princess whose
life and death continue to make headlines, it is written by a former
Vanity Fair editor who knew Princess Diana. Today, the People's Princess
would have been 46 years old. Instep brings you excerpts from the
must read biography that focus on the last days of her short, unforgettable
life...
Paris. 31 August, 1997. The car that sped into the Point de l' Alma
tunnel at 23 minutes past midnight was carrying the most famous woman
in the world. You could see her displeasure in the tight expression
caught by the security camera as she pushed quickly through the revolving
doors of the Ritz hotel's back exit. Arthur Edwards, the dean of royal
photographers, knew that look well. For 16 years there hadn't beea
mood of the Princess |
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he
had not been witness to. He had taken the very first picture of Lady
Diana Spencer at a polo match one year before she married Prince Charles,
and he was one of the first British photographers to arrive at the
gates of the Pitie-Salpetriere hospital in Paris where she died. Like
every other photographer in Fleet Street throughout the 1980s and
1990s, Edwards lived for - and on - Diana's smile.
On that last night in Paris with Dodi Fayed, the Princess knew things
were out of control. So Edwards, a genuine favourite of Diana's, recalls
today.
'She wanted to get home. She wanted to see the boys. She wasn't pop
star. She was a princess. She was used to the front door, a red carpet.
That whole Dodi thing - decoy cars, back entrances - that wasn't Diana's
style.'
Edwards is wrong about that. The chaos of her last night was increasingly
Diana's style, ever since the divorce which had transformed her from
a protected royal princess into a free-floating global celebrity.
The fact that she was rattling around Paris with a haphazard playboy
like Dodi at the end of August was proof of it.
Dodi had used of a lavish apartment in a building belonging to his
father overlooking the Champs Elysees, so what need did they have
of a hotel suite? They were at the Ritz that night only because Dodi
was intent on showing Diana every one of the trophies his father's
prodigious wealth could offer.
No one pursued by paparazzi would otherwise choose this venue as a
hideout. During the seasonal exit from town, Paris' most prestigious
hotel is crawling with tourists. Even its more exclusive areas, such
as its restaurant, L' Espadon, have a louche air of rootless extravagance.
South American call girls with hirsute operators from emerging markets
can be seen poring over the wine list under the trompe d'oeil of its
opulent ceiling. Dinner for two sets you back 400 pounds.
The ambience this place typifies was exactly the kind Diana couldn't
stand. She had just auctioned off all the grand and glittering dresses
of her old life for charity at Christie's in New York. When she crossed
the Atlantic for the opening preview in July 1997, Anna Wintour and
I had lunch with her at the Four Seasons on Park Avenue.
'I've kept a few things,' Diana said about the upcoming auction, 'but
you know that Catherine Walker with all the bugle beads? People in
England don't wear those kinds of clothes any more.'
What struck me was how much celebrity itself had transformed her appearance.
I have come to think that being looked at obsessively by people you
don't know actually changes the way your face and body are assembled
- not just in the obvious ways of enhanced fashion sense or tricks
of charm and self-possession, but in the illusion of size.
The heads of world -class celebrities literally seem to enlarge. The
years of limelight to inflated the circumference of Jackie O's cranium,
it seemed her real face must be concealed by an oversized Halloween
mask. If you looked into her eyes, you could see her in there, somewhere,
screaming.
In the case of Diana, it was as if everything had been elongated and
hand-coloured. The tall, soft-cheeked English rose I first met at
the American Embassy in 1981, when she was a new bride, had become
as phosphorescent as a cartoon. Striding on three-inch heels across
the high ceilinged grill room of the Four Seasons, she towered like
Barbarella. Her Chanel suit was a sharp, animated green, her tan as
flawless as if it had been airbrushed on. The gently flushed skin
of her face wasn't just peachy, it was softer than a child's velveteen
rabbit. Her instinct was to move to America, and it was spot on. She
would only ever feel at home now in the culture that invented fame
the size of hers.
Diana was already worrying at lunch about where she might go in August.
Putting out a deckchair at Kensington Palace was not an option for
someone with an aversion to books. Besides, it would be lonely. 'It
will be so difficult' she said, 'without the boys.'
For William and Harry, August meant Balmoral with their father and
deluxe vagrancy for their mother. Everyone from her old life had withdrawn
to family lodges in the Scottish heather or rambling villas in Tuscany.
Diana, no longer HRH, was not so welcome in such circles now. The
moneyed players of her newer London circle didn't rush to ask her
to stay in August either. Who could face the palaver? It would be
worse than having Madonna.
Not because Diana herself was spoilt or demanding. On the contrary,
her notion of hedonism was to iron her own and her hostesses' clothes
herself. ('I've finished my ironing. Would you like me to do yours?'
she called downstairs to Lady Annabel Goldsmith and Jemima Khan on
a private visit to Pakistan in 1996).
But it was one thing to enjoy the luster of having the Princess of
Wales to dinner in London, quite another to put up with her houseguest
requirements for longer than a weekend. It needed a fortress to keep
the press and the loonies at bay. Only Dodi's father, Mohamed Al Fayed,
was keen and rich enough to take on the aggravation.
The Egyptian merchant, who in 1985 had bought the Mecca of London
shopping, Harrods, in the hope of storming the British Establishment,
still dreamed about royal connections. His yacht, his Cliffside compound
in the South of France, his Ritz hotel in Paris were Diana's new castles
in the air. 'He has all the toys,' she told a friend.
The result was that her last two weeks with Dodi had been like a made-for-TV
version of her honeymoon with Prince Charles in 1981. Instead of the
royal yacht Britannia with its Royal Marine band and crew of 220,
there was Mohamed Al Fayed's feverishly refurbished Jonikal, acquired
for 12 million pounds the day after Diana wrote to confirm her invitation,
and the piped-in music of Julio Iglesias.
Instead of a black-tie dinner on board Britannia for Egyptian President
Anwar Sadat, it was smooching with Egyptian lounge lizard Dodi Fayed
over caviar and candles. Instead of the disciplined, floating privacy
of a closely guarded royal destination, it was a pestered cruise of
the Mediterranean's highest-profile resorts in a shark pond of paparazzi.
There were similarities between the first and last men in Diana's
life. Both were cowed by powerful fathers. The heir to Harrods, like
the Prince of Wales, pursued Diana primarily because his father encouraged
him to. Even the two bodyguards on the Paris trip, Trevor Rees Jones
and Alexander 'Kes' Wingfield, reported not to Dodi but his dad.
Dodi had been all set to marry a Calvin Klein model named Kelly Fisher
on 9 August 1997, until, on 14 July, his father summoned him from
Paris to join the first holiday with the Princess and made wooing
her an urgent imperative. The baffled Fisher was kept out of sight
in St Tropez on board Al Fayed's B-list boat, the Cujo. Dodi visited
her at night in secret until she wised up to the subterfuge and tried
to sue for breach of contract. But it didn't matter to Diana if Dodi
was his father's puppet as long as he picked up the tab and was nice
to her. She told one of her confidantes, Lady Elsa Bowker, that with
Dodi, she felt so 'taken care of.' Diana needed that.
In August of 1997, Diana was seeking to replace what she had possessed
as a still married princess with a superstar's version of the same,
a life of guarded insulation. She had swapped the stiff upper rictus
of courtiers for the Hollywood equivalent: the celebrity servant class
of healing therapists, astrologers, acupuncturists, hairdressers,
colonic irrigationists, aromatherapists, shoe designers and fashion
stylists. Even her 17 million pound divorce settlement could feel
strained by this ever expanding support network. She sometimes had
as many as four therapy treatments a day at 200 pounds a throw.
The problem for Diana now was that her new court could preserve her
ego but not her person. Because she stubbornly refused to retain her
police protection officers, seeing them as spies for the enemy camp,
she was doomed to seek protection from the paranoid rich.
Mohamed Al Fayed supported a costly apparatus of bodyguards, surveillance
cameras and informers. On his own trips to Paris, he traveled with
eight bodyguards and was transported from the airport in a bullet-proof
Mercedes with a medically equipped back-up car. Dodi, it seems had
inherited his father's obsession. A former girlfriend, the model Marie
Helvin, was both irked and amused that a night out with Dodi always
featured security goons with pockets stuffed with 'bungs' as they
called the wads of cash they were handed to buy off any trouble, alerting
each other on walkie-talkies of Dodi's imminent arrivals and departures
- as if he was a head of state with dangerous enemies, instead of
an affable, slightly hopeless party boy.
For Diana the hunted, the security was a powerful attraction. So was
the bonhomous atmosphere of the Fayeds' extended family. Alienated
from her own, she was relaxed by the warmth as much as the wealth.
For women over 35, glamour has three Stations of the Cross: denial,
disguise and compromise. As she entered her 37th year, Diana told
herself she was looking for love. But what she was really seeking
was a guy with a Gulfstream. Her needs at this juncture had more in
common with those of second-act sirens like Elizabeth Hurely than
with those of anyone currently residing in Balmoral.
She was reaching the point at which she could no longer kid herself
that men of large seriousness and modest means, like Hasnat Khan,
would be able to spirit her away from her fame to a life of low-key
normality. She had enjoyed escapist idylls with him that worked only
when, and because, they were secret.
Khan, hidden under a blanket in Burrell's car, would arrive at Kensiongton
Palace with Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner a deux with the Princess.
When he took her on a date she wore a black wig and glasses, and thrilled
to the excitement of standing undetected in a line at Ronnie Scott's
jazz club. 'I'm queuing!' she crowed happily into her mobile phone
to her 'healing therapist' Simone Simmons. 'It's wonderful!'
Diana saw this as the cosy index of her future life with Khan. But
it was Marie Antoinette stuff, a daydream that would have exploded
when it collided with reality. In the multimedia age, downsizing was
unfeasible. Besides, she would have died of boredom.
And so Diana - like her role model Jackie Kennedy, who tired to re-create
the fortress of the American presidency with the playthings of Aristotle
Onassis - was scouring in her last days for a new kind of prince,
one who could under-write the needs of global celebrity. Aboard the
Jonikal, where she was supposed to be wrapped in dreams of becoming
Mrs Fayed, Diana was appraising the CVs of suitors with better long-term
prospects than the affable Dodi.
She still called Khan's apartment and left him messages, because she
loved him and couldn't help herself, but she also kept other possibilities
on the boil, such as the New York financier Theodore Forstmann, who
owned not only a Gulfstream aircraft but also the company that manufactured
it. From the boat she was deep in discussion with the Chinese entreprenueur
David Tang, who was helping her make plans for a three-day visit to
Hong Kong is September. Tang was not a boyfriend, but Diana's new
interest in China was also stoked by Gulu Lalvani. The 58-year-old
Hong Kong-based electronics entrepreneur was founder of Binatone,
a company valued at some 300 million pounds.
Friends called him 'the Crater of Tranquility' because of his could
disposition and pitted complexion. In June, Diana took him dancing
at Annabel's, the Berkeley Square nightclub, in the hope of making
Hasnat Khan jealous. She did not understand that it was just this
kind of exposure that her medical hear-throb most derided and dreaded.
The deluge of trashy images from the Jonikal must have filled the
earnest Khan less with regret than with relief that he was not part
of the madness. It was the prospect of just such career-trivialising
photo ops that had made him run for the hills.
To Diana, the 42-year-old Dodi seemed perfectly cast for a romance
of retaliation against both her ex-lover and her ex-husband. 'She
just wanted to make the people at Balmoral as angry as possible,'
her friend Lord Palumbo told me.
Her choice of agent provocateur was actually a gentle soul whose childhood
in Egypt and expensive European boarding schools had been as lonely
as Prince Charles's. Dodi's parents were divorced when he was two,
with Al Fayed winning custody, but the father was almost never home.
'He spoiled Dodi, which is not the same as being there for him,' said
the film producer David Puttnam.
When Dodi was 24, his father set him up in a film company, which meant
he could date actresses and call himself an executive producer. He
got lucky with his very first project, Puttnam's Oscar-winning Chariots
Of Fire, in which his father invested 2 million pounds. It gave him
the right to hang around the set until Puttnam threw him off for handing
out coke to the cast.
The indeterminate nature of the movie business suited his temperament.
His house in Beverly Hills was party central, a magnet for freeloaders,
gold diggers and deal jockeys exploiting his childlike generosity.
He threw, on average, four parties a week. 'He was good at being rich,'
Marie Helvin said fondly. 'He was always sending me long-stemmed roses
and boxes of mangoes.'
In the course of his six-week relationship with Diana, he showered
her with a multi-stranded seed pearl bracelet, a Jaeger-LeCoultre
wristwatch studded with diamonds and a gold dress ring with pave diamonds
that was on her finger at the time of the accident.
Dodi's cash came from his father, not from business success. Like
many coke users, he was terminally indecisive. His butler once waited
three months in an apartment in Switzerland for Dodi to decide whether
he wanted to live in Paris, London or Gstaad. Girlfriends would sit
all day packed and ready for Dodi to show up to take them to LA on
the private plane.
His bodyguards found his ever more erratic movements a source of rising
consternation. Working for him was a nightmare at the best of time.
'He hated sitting in traffic, always wanted to push through, jump,
lanes, to try to get somewhere more quickly,' said Trevor Rees Jones.
'He's order me to speed up when I knew there was a speed camera coming.'
Rees-Jones began to feel sorry for the Princess; he believed she deserved
better. On the first Al Fayed vacation at his St Tropez estate in
July, with William and Harry in tow, Rees-Jones had been touched at
how carefree and warm she was wandering around a funfair and going
on the rides with her kinds. 'She was lovely,' he reflected. 'And
her children were fantastic. She could do miles better than this guy,
for Christ's sake.'
Prince William shared Rees-Jones's view. He felt mounting dismay at
his mother's relationship with Dodi and was uncomfortable with the
Al Fayed Displays of conspicuous consumption. The pictures of her
frolicking aboard the Jonikal in a August led to a blow-up on the
phone. The 15-year-old was dreading the commentary from schoolmates
when he returned to Eton for the autumn term.
It's doubtful whether Dodi could have long withstood William's disapproval.
Nor would Diana herself have withstood any indication of Dodi's renewed
drug abuse, which she abhorred. Unreliability of any kind annoyed
her. In her role as Princess she was crisply decisive and punctilious
in obligation.
What happened to that Diana on this extended summer folly? When we
lunched together in New York in July, she was so self-possessed, so
exhilaratingly focused. She saw Tony Blair's election as Prime Minister
as a new broom that would sweep her old life away and entrust her
with a humanitarian mission. Blair told me he had Diana in mind to
boost efforts for overseas aid and debt cancellation.
Only months before the Jonikal left on its pleasure cruise, she had
undertaken the most courageous mission of her life, campaigning against
anti-personnel mines. As recently as 8 August, she had flown to Bosnia
with Lord Deedes, the venerable former editor of the Daily Telegraph,
who was impressed by her 'silent stillness, how good she was at hearing
and dealing with grief, simply stretching out a hand to touch, applying
her own brand of soothing tranquility.'
Yet, just three weeks after her stellar performance in Bosnia, here
she was on a hot night in August, reveling in high-life flash, pursued
by the farting motorbikes of the international press. While her boys
were nestling in the bosom of the Windsor family at Balmoral and she
was floating, Wallis-Simpson-like, around the pleasure spots of the
Mediterranean.
So thoroughly have Diana's last hours been refracted through the prism
of competing recriminations, it is easy to forget why she accepted
the invitation to go on holiday with the Fayeds in the first place:
she believed they offered protection. Yet it seems that she died because
they weren't looking after her.
Not Dodi, whose plans were as chaotic as he was; not Al Fayed, if
he approved his son's cockamamie notion of using HenriPaul to drive
them instead of a qualified chauffeur; not Henri Paul himself, who
was found to be concealing a blood alcohol level three times the legal
limit. Little wonder that Mohamed Al Fayed's storm of grief at the
loss of his son has been so volcanic in its projection of blame.
It has often been said that, by the end, Diana was in a spiral of
self-destruction. I prefer to think of her last exhibitionist weeks
as a relapse, a wounded and wounding gesture triggered by the ruin,
once again, of all her romantic hopes it is one of the saddest ironies
of her life that, just when she was on the point of casting off the
most toxic elements of celebrity culture and using her fame as collateral
for daring social activism, she should be locked by death in a freeze-frame
of deadly glitz.
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