On August 14, 1997, a woman sat before the cameras in Los Angeles wearing a sapphire and diamond ring. Four days earlier, the world had seen a photograph of the man who gave her that ring kissing the Princess of Wales on the deck of a yacht in the Mediterranean.
She said the wedding had been set for August 9. Nobody had told her it was off. She said she had been left to read about it in a newspaper like everybody else.
Seventeen days later, Dodi Fayed was dead in a tunnel in Paris beside the most famous woman on earth. Every word she had come to say was buried with him.
Dodi Fayed was born in Alexandria in the spring of 1955, into a marriage that had barely a year left in it. He was given the name Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Menahem Fayed, a long and serious name for a boy who would never be called any of it. He was Dodi from the beginning, and he was still Dodi at 42 in the back of a Mercedes in Paris.
His father was 26 years old and called himself simply Mohamed Fayed. He was the son of a primary school teacher from Asyut province. He had sold Coca-Cola on the streets of Alexandria as a boy, then Singer sewing machines door to door as a young man. In 1955, nothing about him suggested Harrods.
His mother was somebody else entirely. Samira Khashoggi was 20 and came from the center of Saudi power. Her father, Dr. Mohamed Khashoggi, was personal physician to King Abdulaziz. Her brother Adnan would become the most famous arms dealer of the 20th century. Her nephew Jamal would be murdered in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul more than 60 years later.
She was a writer of standing across the Arab world, publishing under the name Samira, daughter of the Arabian Peninsula. From 1972 she founded and edited the leading pan-Arab monthly magazine for women. From 1962 she led the first Saudi welfare association aimed at women, campaigning for girls to be educated.
Mohamed Fayed had been hired by her family in 1952, aged 23, to help run an import business. Within two years he had married the boss's daughter. Within another year there was a son. Within a year of that, the marriage was finished.
The reason given in the surviving accounts was his adultery. Whatever the cause, the outcome was total. He was expelled from the Khashoggi circle and did not go back. What he took with him was the boy.
That is the founding fact of Dodi Fayed's life. His mother, one of the most accomplished Arab women of her generation, effectively vanished from his childhood. She would go on writing and die in the autumn of 1986 at 51, by which time her son was 31 and her former husband owned the most famous shop in London.
The boy was raised instead by a man who had just been humiliated and who would spend the next four decades building a version of himself so grand that nobody could ever throw him out of anything again.
Mohamed Fayed added a prefix to the family name in the early 1970s, turning Fayed into Al Fayed, signaling a bloodline that did not exist. He would later tell journalists he had been born in 1933, shaving four years off his age. He would claim a family fortune in businesses his father, the school teacher, had never possessed.
The son grew up inside that construction project. He was not merely a witness to it. He was one of its exhibits, and he was raised to be seen.
There was in time a second family. Mohamed Fayed married the Finnish socialite Heini Wathén and had four more children: Jasmine, Karim, Camilla and Omar. A legitimate English household in a way the first marriage had never been allowed to be.
Dodi was the child of the disgrace. He was also the eldest and the heir apparent. He was never permitted to be securely either one. He arrived at boyhood carrying the two things that would define his whole life: access to absolutely everything, and ownership of absolutely nothing.
In 1968, at 13, he was sent to the most exclusive school in Switzerland and lasted about a year. Before that there had been Collège Saint-Marc in Alexandria, an elite French-speaking Catholic school where the sons of the city's merchant class were taught to hold themselves like Europeans.
Then came the Institut Le Rosey, founded in 1880 and known across the continent as the school of kings. Its alumni included King Albert II of Belgium, the Aga Khan and Prince Rainier of Monaco. By the early part of this century its fees were running at around 125,000 Swiss francs a year. It is the sort of place a self-made man buys for his son in order to buy something for himself. It did not take.
The school's director general told a magazine many years later that the boy had not distinguished himself. The word he used was mediocre.
Le Rosey gave way to England and to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, where Dodi took a short course from January to June 1974. He was 18. He came away with one surviving character sketch, given decades later by a roommate, Major Tim Coles.
He had a reasonable build, Coles said. He was not fat and pampered and soft and flabby. He walked gracefully and converted it into an upright military posture.
It is a defense against a charge nobody in the room had made. Even the warm memories of Dodi Fayed arrive already braced against the accusation of softness. That tells you what people assumed about him before he opened his mouth. He was the rich boy. He was the foreign rich boy whose father had paid for the uniform.
After Sandhurst came a brief attachment to the United Arab Emirates Air Force, then a post as an attaché at the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates in London. That job matters more than anything else in this period for one reason: it is the last position Dodi Fayed ever held that his father did not create for him.
He was 19 or 20 years old. Everything from that point onward, every company, every title, every desk, every boat, every flat, came out of Mohamed's pocket and could go back into it.
London in the middle 1970s was a good city for a young man in his situation. His father was moving through the higher reaches of it with real speed, advising the Sultan of Brunei and edging toward the deal that would make him notorious. The boy had a flat in Mayfair, given to him at around 15, and a Rolls-Royce to go with it. He had money that arrived without being earned and stopped without warning.
He wanted very badly to be liked, and he had discovered early that the fastest route to being liked was to pay. He gave things away. He picked up bills. He arranged surprises for people who had never had a surprise arranged for them before.
His friend Jack Martin later put the whole of it in two sentences. Dodi bought a lot more for others than himself, Martin said. That was part of his low self-esteem.
None of that is a criticism. It is a symptom. A man who is never required to produce anything and who is handed the means to buy affection at 15 learns a particular lesson about how relationships work. The lesson is that generosity is a substitute for the harder currencies.
It is a lesson that holds beautifully for about 20 years in the company of people happy to be bought dinner. Then it fails catastrophically the moment somebody wants something money cannot deliver.
By his early 20s he was in the film business in the loosest possible sense of the phrase. He liked cinema. He liked being around it. He liked Los Angeles, where nobody minded where the money came from as long as it arrived. His father, watching this, did what he did with everything else his son showed an interest in. He bought it.
In June 1979, Mohamed Fayed founded a film company, installed his son as chief executive at 24, and hired somebody else to run it. The company was called Allied Stars, a subsidiary of the family's shipping interests. One account puts the money Mohamed put into it at £1.2 million. The filmmaker Timothy Burrill was brought in to actually operate it. Every decision of consequence stayed with the father.
The first credit was Breaking Glass, released in 1980, into which Mohamed put £2 million, something like $2.5 million at the time. The second credit is the one everybody knows.
Chariots of Fire went out in 1981. Dodi's name is on it as executive producer. The producer who actually made it was David Puttnam. The budget has been put at £3 million and in one detailed accounting at £4,432,859. Goldcrest financed it at the start. Then the project passed to Allied Stars, with 20th Century Fox and Alan Ladd Jr.'s company adding finance and distribution.
It took almost $59 million in the United States and Canada, making it at the time the highest-grossing imported film in American history, ahead of a film called Meatballs at $43 million. Mohamed's profit from it has been reported at a minimum of $10 million. Allied Stars itself has separately been credited with £6 million.
At the Academy Awards in 1982, it won four of its seven nominations: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay for Colin Welland, Best Original Score for Vangelis, Best Costume Design for Milena Canonero. Dodi Fayed was in the room. He was 26 years old and he had his name on the best picture of the year.
From the stage, David Puttnam thanked him. The line has been quoted ever since. To Mohamed and Dodi Fayed, he said, who came through for us and put their money where my mouth was.
It is a generous thing to say, and it is a devastating thing to say, and the grammar is where the knife is. Their money, my mouth. Even in the thank-you, standing in front of the whole industry on the best night of his professional life, Dodi Fayed is the checkbook and somebody else is the artist.
Nobody meant it cruelly. That is simply what he was understood to be. And the understanding never changed.
What the industry actually thought of him came out later, on the record, from people who had no reason to be unkind. David Puttnam told a British newspaper in 2012 that during the making of Chariots of Fire he caught Dodi supplying cocaine to the cast and crew and threw him off the production.
With the best will in the world, Dodi, Puttnam recalled saying, this did not happen. And I never want to see you again around my cast and crew.
Puttnam went further. Dodi had other things on his mind than developing a film career for himself, he said, of which girls and drugs rated pretty highly, and not necessarily in that order. Then came the sentence that has followed the man's reputation ever since. He was one of the laziest human beings I have ever come across. He had the attention span of the average flea.
The Fayed side rejected all of it. In a statement in November 1997, Mohamed Al Fayed and Harrods called the magazine reporting on his son particularly cruel and despicable, a tawdry exploitation of a man who was not there to defend himself, and said flatly that Dodi had never been connected to drugs. The magazine stood by every word it had printed.
Puttnam added one more detail, and it is the detail that opens the next act of this story. The incident, he said, upset Mohamed Al Fayed terribly. Al Fayed had spent a huge amount of his life dealing with his son's problems and trying to contain them.
His producing partner of seven years, Jack Wiener, put it more gently. He had the passion to make movies, Wiener said, but he did not see his role as being there every day. The studio executive Mark Canton described him in meetings. He was sort of like a deer in the headlights.
The films kept coming and none of them changed the verdict. There was a film in 1986 on which he and Wiener each took a fee reported at $500,000 and on which Dodi was present for four of the 13 weeks of shooting. There was a sequel five years later. There was Hook in 1991, a $70 million picture that took around $300 million worldwide, on which his credit was executive producer and the deal-making was done by somebody else.
And there was The Scarlet Letter in 1995, a $46 million film that took $35 million, was savaged by almost every critic who saw it, and won the Golden Raspberry for the worst remake of the year.
There was worse than failure attached to that last one. During the production, according to the same magazine reporting, Dodi tried to sell European distribution rights he had no authority to sell. When the director confronted him, he denied it and then said the contracts had been forged.
Sixteen years in Hollywood, one Academy Award for Best Picture on the shelf, and the settled private opinion of an entire industry that the man attached to it had been a delivery mechanism for his father's money. He was 40 years old. He had never in his life had to make a living.
The allowance was $100,000 a month, and the American Express lawsuit was for $116,890. Both figures belong to the same man in the same period of his life, and the space between them is where Dodi Fayed actually lived.
The allowance is the number reported in the magazine investigation into his life published in 1997 and repeated in the newspaper coverage that followed. $100,000 a month arriving from his father for a man in his 30s and then his 40s who was under no obligation to produce anything in return. That is $1.2 million a year unearned in the currency of the 1980s and 90s.
Now set beside it what the court records show. American Express sued him in January 1994 for $116,890. In one stretch of three months he spent $12,835 on furs, $10,684 at Armani, $14,869 on jewelry, and $9,385 at Harrods, which is to say in his father's own shop. He wrote bad checks totaling $31,815.
Glenn Lane sued him for $135,575 in unpaid rent and property damage. He owed Larry Gordon over $150,000. He owed the Internal Revenue Service $93,053 in back taxes. He ran up a bill of $15,000 at the Ritz in Paris, a hotel his father had owned since 1979. By one account, he only paid when he was confronted directly and made to produce the cash.
In a single seven-week stretch in 1987, he spent over 700 hours and $34,023 on personal security. He rented rather than owned almost everywhere. Beverly Hills and Malibu at around $25,000 a month. A townhouse in Manhattan on East 62nd Street, also $25,000 a month.
He had a flat at 60 Park Lane in London that his father had given him as a boy and that his father would keep after his death exactly as it was. He had a 1928 Rolls-Royce, five Ferraris including a Testarossa valued at $182,000, a $90,000 Hummer, an Aston Martin, and a Honda motorcycle.
None of this is the portrait of a rich man. It is the portrait of a man standing next to a great deal of money.
The mechanism by which his father kept him there is the most important thing in this chapter, and it survives in a single sentence. When Dodi was staying at the Westwood Marquis Hotel in Los Angeles, Mohamed Al Fayed telephoned the management and told them he was not paying his son's bills.
Jack Wiener, who spent seven years working beside him, described the pattern without needing to be asked twice. Mohamed could be very strict with Dodi, he said, and the next moment could be extremely warm and generous. That kept Dodi off balance.
Off balance is exactly right. And it was not accidental. Wiener also recorded the terms of his own employment on those productions. They had to come to Mohamed, he said, with whatever they were interested in. And the instruction he was given about the man he was supposedly partnered with was this: Jack, please keep an eye on him and take good care of him.
He was in his 30s. He was being minded.
An unnamed producer who worked with him gave the sharpest image anybody has managed. It is like when you are training a dog and you use a choke chain, the producer said. You give a little freedom, then you need to give a pull. Dodi was encouraged to fly and then not allowed to.
The socialite Nona Summers observed that when Dodi had to see his father, everything stood still. He telephoned home constantly. If they were away, Wiener said, he would call his father every day or every other day and report in. He was 42 years old at the end, and that had never stopped.
Every venture followed the same arc. He joined the Harrods board in 1989, was given an executive suite, was invited to have opinions about window displays and restaurant concepts, and resigned after about 18 months. He sat on the board of a shirt maker and resigned after three years. His father bought a Ferrari dealership and installed him as a director.
There is a particular kind of damage this does, and it is not the damage people usually assume about rich sons. It is not that he was spoiled. It is that he was never allowed to be responsible for anything, which meant he was never once required to face the consequence of a broken promise. His father absorbed them all. Bills, contracts, lawsuits, angry directors, women.
He had never once been made to choose. That is the sentence to hold on to for the rest of this story, because in the summer of 1997 a situation arrived that could only be resolved by choosing, and he did what he had been trained for 42 years to do. He did neither thing and hoped both would keep.
He proposed to the model Suzanne Gregard in Vail, married her on the last day of 1986, and it was finished by August, eight months more or less. She was American. She was a model. The courtship had the quality everyone who knew him recognized immediately: it moved at the speed of a man who had never been told no and did not intend to give anyone time to think.
The details that survive are small and awful and entirely in character. He bought tickets on Concorde and booked the seat beside her so that she could not speak to anybody else on the flight. A friend of his, Jack Martin, remembered her telling him that Dodi got down on the ground and kissed her feet. Her own summary of him, given afterwards, was brief. Dodi was a pretty impulsive person.
A month after his death, still generous about a man who had married her and lost interest inside a year, she told a television magazine that he was so romantic and thoughtful and that he did not take things too seriously.
The second case is uglier because it went to court. Around 1992 he was involved with a model named Amy Diane Brown for roughly seven months. During that time he bought her a penthouse, $175,000 in cash, and a promissory note for $30,000 more. When the relationship ended, he tried to take the property back. He kept the mink and sable coats he had given her, and then he sued her, alleging that she had deliberately schemed and planned to deceive him. They settled. She handed back the deed in exchange for the furs and the cash.
Four years later, speaking to a magazine, she had not recovered from it. It is still so terribly painful, she said. I feel he ripped me off.
Set those two side by side, and a shape appears that is impossible to unsee once you have seen it. The gesture comes first, and it is enormous. A ring, a flat, a car, an airplane seat, a house. It arrives fast, before anybody has had time to ask what it means or what is expected in return.
Then the relationship proceeds on the assumption that the gesture was the promise. Then at some point his attention moves, as attention does in a man who has never had to hold on to anything. The woman discovers that the gesture was not a promise at all. It was a purchase, and he would quite like the goods back.
The names around him in those years were numerous and the reporting on them is uneven. The actress Valerie Perrine. Brooke Shields, seen with him publicly while she was an undergraduate at Princeton. A reported engagement in 1983 to a woman named Linda Atzert that dissolved almost as soon as it was reported. Tina Sinatra, who gave the single most efficient verdict on record. His relationships, she said, were very varied and quite inconsistent.
The model Marie Helvin, who was a friend rather than a lover, said something kinder and stranger. Dodi obviously inherited from his mother all those gentle, wonderful, warm and kind characteristics. His mother, of course, had barely raised him.
There were others named in the same reporting, actresses and models, and in one case a granddaughter of Winston Churchill. There were also names that attached themselves to him in the tabloids and cannot be verified at all, and they will not be repeated here because the point does not depend on the length of the list.
The point is the mechanism, and the mechanism was consistent enough and documented enough that by the middle of the 1990s there was a paper trail of women who had been given something extraordinary and then found that it came with conditions nobody had mentioned. Two of those cases had produced litigation before 1997. The third one was about to.
This is what makes the summer that follows something other than a piece of gossip. When a woman stood up in Los Angeles in August 1997 and said that Dodi Fayed had promised her a marriage, paid her some of the money he had pledged, bounced a check for part of the remainder, and then let her find out from a photograph that it was over, she was not describing behavior that would have surprised anybody who had worked with him. She was describing the house style. The difference was the timing, and the difference was who else was on the boat.
She met him in Paris in July 1996, and by her account he asked her within a year to give up the only career she had ever had. Everything in this chapter is Kelly Fisher's account. That distinction matters and it will be held to throughout, because the man she was describing died before he could answer any of it and the case was never tried.
What is documented is the lawsuit, the ring, the press conference and the recordings. What is claimed is everything the lawsuit was about.
She was an American model, then around 30, living in Los Angeles. By the accounts available, she had been born in Kentucky and raised largely in Toronto, where she was scouted at about 16. She had worked through agencies in Paris and Hamburg. She had done covers and campaigns, the ordinary respectable substance of a modeling career, and she was still working when she met him.
By her account, they were together for roughly eight months before he proposed, which places the proposal in February 1997, though other tellings put it earlier. He gave her a sapphire and diamond ring. The Associated Press wire report of the time valued it at $233,000. The newspapers of the time noted that it resembled the sapphire engagement ring the Prince of Wales had given Diana in 1981, which is either a coincidence or the single most revealing detail in this entire story, and there is no way to know which.
Her mother, she said, gave the marriage her blessing in November 1996. The wedding was set for August 9, 1997. Then came the arrangement that the lawsuit was actually about.
She said he asked her to stop modeling and promised her $500,000 to compensate her for the career she was setting aside. She said she received $60,000 of it in cash. She said a further check for $200,000 bounced.
Try to hold the ordinary human shape of that underneath the numbers. A woman in her early 30s with a working career in an industry that does not wait for anybody is asked by the man she is going to marry to stop. Not to slow down. To stop. In exchange, she is offered a sum of money meant to stand in for the years she is giving up. She said yes.
Which means that by the early summer of 1997, Kelly Fisher had no career, a ring, a date, and a promise from a man whose entire documented history consisted of grand promises that did not survive contact with his own attention span.
Then on July 2, 1997, he bought the house. It was in Malibu at Paradise Cove, five acres on the Pacific Coast Highway. It had previously belonged to Julie Andrews. The price was $7,300,000, with a further $250,000 for the furnishings, and it was held through a company called Highest Investments. Fisher understood it to be the house they would live in after the wedding five weeks later.
Hold that date, July 2, because nine days after Dodi Fayed signed for a $7 million house on the California coast for the woman he was going to marry in August, the Princess of Wales landed on the French Riviera as a guest of his father.
There is no evidence that he engineered that. Everything in the record suggests the opposite. The villa was his father's. The invitation was his father's. The boat was his father's, bought that same year. The summons that brought Dodi down to the south of France came as every summons in his life had come: down a telephone line from the man who paid for everything.
What Dodi did was arrive. And having arrived, he did the one thing that 42 years of being rescued had equipped him to do perfectly. He did not end things with Fisher. He did not tell her what was happening. He did not choose. He simply let both arrangements continue running at the same time on the same coastline, a few hundred meters apart, and trusted that whatever went wrong would be absorbed by somebody else, as it always had been. For about five weeks, it worked.
The Princess of Wales arrived on July 11 with two boys who needed a summer nobody could photograph, and his father telephoned and told him to come.
Mohamed Al Fayed had known Diana for around a decade by then. Accounts placed their first personal meeting at a polo match at Windsor in July 1987. What he offered her in the summer of 1997 was the one thing her own family could not easily arrange, which was a fortress.
The villa above Saint-Tropez has come down in the accounts as Castel Sainte-Claire, though even the name of it is rendered differently in different tellings. There was a main house and a beach house and a private jetty where a yacht could tie up without anybody on shore getting a photograph. Diana and her sons, then 15 and 11, were reportedly put in a four-bedroom guest house on the grounds. The family were there. The bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was there. And Dodi came down from wherever he had been to join them, because his father had asked him to.
Whatever else can be said about that fortnight, the boys enjoyed it. Everything about that trip to Saint-Tropez was heaven, Harry said years afterwards. The weather was sublime, the food was tasty, Mummy was smiling. Camilla Fayed remembered that Diana would tuck the younger children up in bed as though they were her own. It is a genuinely warm memory held by people who were children at the time, and it deserves to stand.
On July 14, Diana got into a small motorboat and drove out to the photographers moored offshore. She was wearing a leopard-print swimsuit that would be on the front of half the newspapers in Europe within days. She told them she was being abused and followed. She told them her elder son was really freaked out by them. Then she said something that has been quoted ever since with a weight it was probably never meant to carry. You will have a big surprise coming soon, she said. The next thing I do.
She almost certainly meant her withdrawal from public life. It has been read as prophecy ever since because of what came afterwards. That is how the summer of 1997 has been remembered: every ordinary sentence in it turned into a sign.
Now put the other account beside it. According to Kelly Fisher, she was also brought down to the south of France that July. Not to the villa, not to the big boat. She said she was flown down and placed on the smaller Fayed vessel, an 80-foot cruiser called the Cujo with twin engines developing something like 2,700 horsepower and a top speed above 40 knots, a boat Dodi had taken over from his uncle and had refitted in Italy, which flew a skull and crossbones from the mast.
The other boat, the one the world would come to know, was the Jonikal, 63.8 meters, built in Italy in 1990 for a textile industrialist at a construction cost of over $20 million. Bought by Mohamed Al Fayed that same year, 1997, weeks before any of this began.
So the geometry of that fortnight, on Fisher's account, was this. The father's villa on the hill. The father's new superyacht on the water carrying the Princess of Wales and her sons. And a few hundred meters away on the father's smaller boat, the woman his son was supposed to be marrying in three weeks, waiting.
She has said that the days belonged to Diana and the nights came back to her. The exact wording she used on a telephone recording played in a London courtroom a decade later is harder and plainer than any summary of it. You even flew me down to Saint-Tropez, she said, to sit on a boat while you seduced Diana all day.
There is no way to test that account. The man it accuses died before he could be asked. His family denied there had ever been a formal engagement at all, while not denying the relationship or the money. No sworn Fayed rebuttal of the Saint-Tropez arrangement exists in the public record.
But the shape of it is entirely consistent with everything the previous 40 years had established about how Dodi Fayed handled an impossible position. He did not resolve it. He arranged the furniture so that neither woman had to be told anything, and then he went on being charming to both of them. He had never once been made to choose.
The holiday broke up around July 20. Diana went back to London and then within days to Milan, where she attended Gianni Versace's funeral at the Duomo with Elton John on July 22, one of the last great public photographs taken of her alive. In the first week of August she went back to the Mediterranean and back to the Jonikal, and a photographer in a boat off Sardinia raised a long lens.
The photograph was taken off Sardinia in the first week of August, and it was the most valuable photograph in the world that week. The photographer was Mario Brenner, a man of 40 based in Monaco, better known for fashion work than for stalking celebrities on the water. The most careful accounts date the shot to August 4, though other tellings place it a few days later, and that small disagreement has never been fully resolved.
What is not in dispute is what he caught. Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed, in an embrace on the deck of a yacht, unmistakably and unambiguously together.
The agent Jason Fraser handled the sale, and what followed was an auction. The figures reported for what that single image earned range from over a million to around $3 million, and in one American account as high as $5 million. No single number can be trusted. The range itself is the fact.
On Sunday, August 10, the Sunday Mirror put it on the front page under two words: The Kiss. Within 48 hours it was on newsstands on every continent, and the most photographed woman in the world had become overnight the most photographed woman in the world with a new man.
There is a detail in the timing that has been almost entirely forgotten, and it is worth restoring. In exactly those days, between August 7 and August 10, Diana was not on a boat at all. She was in Bosnia and Herzegovina walking minefields with two men from the landmine survivors network, doing the work that would become the most serious achievement of her public life. The photograph of the kiss and the photographs of the minefields ran in the same news cycle, and only one of them is remembered.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, a woman who said she should have been married the day before was looking at the front pages. On her account, the wedding had been set for August 9. The photograph ran on the 10th.
What passed between them in that week exists in fragments, and the fragments come from telephone calls Kelly Fisher recorded, which were entered as evidence at the inquest in London 10 years afterwards. What survives from the tapes themselves is the exchange, and it needs no arranging.
She put it to him that he had flown her to Saint-Tropez to sit on a boat while he spent his days with Diana. His answer on the recording was three words. We broke up, Kelly.
That is the whole of his defense, so far as anything he said on the subject has ever been preserved. Three words delivered down a telephone line to a woman who said she had given up her career on his instruction, who had a ring on her hand valued at more than $200,000, who said she had been told the house in Malibu was theirs, and who found out that it was finished the way the rest of the planet found out: on a newsstand on a Sunday.
He did not tell her. He simply stopped and let the news do the work.
There is a version of this story in which that is merely caddish, the sort of thing that happens to people who involve themselves with wealthy men. It is a story the newspapers would happily have run for a fortnight and then dropped. But look at what the photograph had done to the surrounding machinery.
Operation Paget, the police investigation that would examine every element of this seven years later, made a specific observation about the Brenner picture. The sum of money it was reported to have earned focused the attention of the world's paparazzi on the couple from that moment forward. The market had just been shown what a single frame of those two people was worth, and every photographer in Europe adjusted accordingly.
That is the machinery that would be behind a Mercedes on a Paris embankment three weeks later. And it had been switched on by a picture published on August 10. Kelly Fisher had four days left to decide what she was going to do about her own situation. On August 14, she went to see a lawyer. Not a quiet one.
On August 14, she walked into a room full of cameras in Los Angeles wearing the ring. Beside her sat the attorney Gloria Allred. The claim they filed was breach of contract. The core of it was the money. $500,000 promised in exchange for a modeling career set aside. $60,000 received. A check for $200,000 that did not clear. The lawsuit sought the shortfall, $440,000, and that is the figure carried in the wire reports of the time. Larger sums have circulated since, a million, 10 million, and none of them appear in the contemporary record.
The Associated Press photographer Nick Ut was in the room, and his caption went out that afternoon. Model Kelly Fisher sits during a press conference to announce a lawsuit against producer and department store heir Dodi Al Fayed. Thursday, August 14, 1997, in Los Angeles. Fisher's lawyer, Gloria Allred, filed a breach of contract suit against Fayed for allegedly breaking their engagement. Fisher supposedly set aside lucrative modeling engagements, assuming she would be married to the millionaire playboy.
It is a dry paragraph, and it is the single most reliable document in this entire story, because it was written by somebody who was standing there and had no stake in the outcome.
Allred did the talking, and the language was built for the evening bulletins. Mr. Fayed, she said, needed to take responsibility for the woman that he left at the altar and treated with such total disrespect. He threw her love away, she said, in a callous way with no regard for her whatsoever. He had led her emotionally all the way up to the altar and abandoned her when they were almost there.
Then Allred said something that was not about money at all, and that has aged into one of the strangest sentences of that summer. Her client, she said, was willing to meet the Princess of Wales, anywhere in the world, to tell her what had happened.
That offer was made on August 14, 1997. No reply ever came. Diana had 18 days to live.
Now consider how that press conference actually landed, because this is the hinge of the whole story. It should have been enormous. A named woman, a famous lawyer, a court filing, a valuable ring held up to the cameras, and an allegation that the man currently starring in the most photographed romance on earth had been engaged to somebody else the entire time and had ended it by silence.
It did not. Part of that was that the Fayed side denied any formal engagement had existed, and a denial from a family that owned Harrods carried a great deal more institutional weight than a claim from a model in California. And part of it, the larger part, was that the alternative story was simply better. A princess who had been unhappy for years had found somebody. Nobody wanted the version with a lawsuit in it.
So the world made a choice about which of the two accounts of Dodi Fayed's summer it preferred, and it made that choice in the middle of August. Then 17 days later, the choice became permanent.
Because it is one thing to disbelieve a woman while the man is alive to be questioned. It is another thing entirely once he is dead and the woman beside him in the wreckage is being mourned by half the planet. Everything Kelly Fisher had said on August 14 was still exactly as true or as false on September 1 as it had been a fortnight before. Not one fact about it had changed. What had changed was that saying it out loud had become unspeakable.
The second cruise began on August 21 and it ended in a Paris underpass nine days later. They were on the Jonikal again off Sardinia, and this time the whole apparatus was watching. The photograph of August 10 had established the price. Every boat with a long lens in the western Mediterranean now knew what a frame of those two people was worth.
Somewhere around August 22, according to the account that has come down, Diana and Dodi went into a jeweler's boutique in the Hotel Hermitage in Monte Carlo and looked at rings. That account originates substantially with the jeweler himself, Alberto Repossi, and has never been independently confirmed. It should be held loosely. Almost everything that has ever been said about a ring and an engagement in the last 10 days of Diana's life comes back eventually to people with a reason to want the story to be true.
On August 30 they flew from Sardinia to Le Bourget and came into Paris. Earlier that day they visited the Villa Windsor in the Bois de Boulogne, the house the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had lived in during their exile, then held by Mohamed Al Fayed.
From that point, the day exists as a timetable reconstructed from the evidence given at the inquest, and it is worth going through it in order, because the ordinariness of it is what makes it unbearable.
At 3:35 in the afternoon they arrived at the Ritz by a back entrance with Trevor Rees-Jones. At 4:42 Dodi walked to the jewelers on the Rue de la Paix and came back with a brochure. That is the visit at which, on the Fayed account, the ring was collected. At 5:53 they left the hotel for his Paris flat. At 7:00 the driver Henri Paul went off duty. At 9:51 they came back to the Ritz through the front entrance, through the photographers, and they ate until 10:01. At 10:08 Henri Paul returned to work. At 10:43 he went into the hotel bar and stayed about 25 minutes. At 11:51 a Mercedes and a Range Rover were sent out from the front of the hotel as a decoy to see how the photographers outside would react.
At six minutes past midnight, now August 31, Diana and Dodi were waiting at the service exit on the Rue Cambon at the back of the building. Between 17 and 20 minutes past midnight, a black Mercedes S280 pulled away from the rear of the Ritz. Henri Paul was driving. Trevor Rees-Jones was in the front passenger seat. Diana and Dodi were behind them. None of the four was wearing a seat belt.
At around 23 minutes past midnight, pursued by photographers on motorcycles, the car went into the underpass at the Pont de l'Alma at an estimated 105 kilometers an hour in a limit of 50. It clipped a white Fiat Uno. It struck the 13th pillar head-on.
Henri Paul was pronounced dead at the scene. Dodi Fayed was pronounced dead at the scene. He was 42 years old. Trevor Rees-Jones, whose airbag deployed, survived with terrible injuries to his face and head, and would spend the rest of his life as the only person who had been inside that car and lived.
Diana, with broken ribs, a dislocated collarbone, swelling on the brain and a torn vein in her chest, was still alive. Her heart stopped at around 1:00 and was restarted. She was moved into an ambulance at 1:18. The ambulance left the scene at 1:41 and reached the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital at 2:06. She died at 4:00 in the morning. The anesthetist Bruno Riou announced it to the press at 6. She was 36.
The blood alcohol readings on Henri Paul have been reported between 1.74 and 1.8 grams per liter, something over three times the French legal limit, with traces of prescription medication as well. The French investigation under Judge Hervé Stéphan concluded in 1999 that he had lost control at excessive speed while intoxicated and held him solely responsible.
That is the finding. It was examined twice more in the years that followed, and no investigation ever found anything behind it, though the inquest jury would in the end lay the blame on the pursuing vehicles as well as on the car.
But it was never going to be allowed to stand as the whole of the story, because a man had lost his only son by his first marriage in a car driven by an employee of his own hotel, leaving from the back door of that hotel, at the end of a summer he himself had arranged.
What Mohamed Al Fayed said instead, from the first weeks and then for the next 26 years to every investigation that would sit still long enough to hear it, was that his son had been murdered.
He was buried on September 1 in a quarter-acre plot in Surrey under a marble stone that carried one word. The funeral was held that day at the London Central Mosque in Regent's Park and it lasted between 25 and 30 minutes. The body was wrapped in three pieces of white cloth. The coffin was draped in black with gold lettering and set facing east. Between 15 and 20 worshippers carried it out on their shoulders. Around 50 mourners waited outside.
The family spokesman, Michael Cole, explained Mohamed's wish to bury his son in Britain. He is very patriotic about this country, Cole said.
The grave was at Brookwood Cemetery. The headstone was five feet long and 18 inches high and lay flat, and it was inscribed with the single word Dodi. A design team from Harrods turned the muddy clearing into a landscaped garden inside 48 hours, and verses were played from tape five times a day from nine in the morning until 11 at night. In the middle of October, the body, the headstone and the marble were all lifted and moved again to a private plot on the family estate at Oxted.
Then the argument began about what the summer had meant. The Fayed position, held from the first weeks and maintained for the rest of Mohamed's life, was that his son and the Princess of Wales had been engaged, that a ring had been bought in Paris on the last afternoon for exactly that purpose, and that an announcement had been days away.
Against that stands the sworn evidence of Claude Roulet, an assistant to the president of the Ritz, who was involved in the arrangements around that jeweler's shop. Roulet told the inquest that the engagement ring story was constructed after the fact by the jeweler. As best as I can remember, he said, it was a kind of romantic story that Dodi asked for an engagement ring.
He testified that the ring selected was the cheapest option that had been presented, chosen by Dodi alone in a last-minute decision rather than jointly with Diana, and that the jeweler's account of events changed in the days after the crash.
Paul Burrell, who had been Diana's butler, was asked the same question directly in January 2008. He said he knew that she would not get engaged, and then, pressed under cross-examination, said that he did not know. He told the court she had been uneasy about being given a ring at all. He said he had suggested she wear one on her right hand as a sign of friendship. Of the ring bought in Paris on the final afternoon, he said she would have found it rather gaudy and lacking in taste. He described the romance as having reached its peak and started down the other side.
Behind all of this ran the investigation. Operation Paget was opened in January 2004 at the request of the coroner. Its report came out on December 14, 2006, 832 pages long, having examined 175 separate conspiracy allegations and some 20,000 documents. Its conclusion was that there had been no conspiracy to murder anybody in that car and that every allegation of one was without foundation. Forensic examination found no evidence that Diana had been pregnant.
The inquest itself ran before Lord Justice Scott Baker from October 2007, with a jury of six women and five men and around 250 witnesses. Together, the investigation and the inquest cost more than £12.5 million.
In February 2008, Mohamed Al Fayed gave evidence. He alleged that the British foreign intelligence service had conspired against him and infiltrated the tax service and the Home Office. He alleged that the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales had wanted to be rid of Diana because the family could not bear the prospect of a Muslim marrying her. He said Diana had suffered for 20 years from what he called a Dracula family. He said she had been pregnant, and he said the couple had been engaged and were about to announce it.
Asked why he had never mentioned the engagement at the time, he said it was one hour before they were murdered. Am I going to announce it after they were dead?
On April 7, 2008, the jury returned its verdict. Nine of the 11 agreed: unlawful killing by the grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles and of the Mercedes, with the impairment of the driver's judgment through alcohol and the absence of seat belts as contributing factors. The coroner had told them there was not a shred of evidence for the allegations against the Duke of Edinburgh. The jury made no finding that Diana and Dodi had been engaged.
So the ring bought in Paris on the last afternoon of his life, which his father spent a quarter of a century presenting as proof of an engagement, was found by the only court that ever examined it to prove nothing at all.
There was, however, another ring. That one had been photographed on a woman's hand in a room full of cameras in Los Angeles 17 days before he died, and nobody had ever disputed that he gave it to her.
She dropped the lawsuit on September 2, two days after he died, and said through her lawyer that she forgave him. Gloria Allred put out the statement to the wires. She's shocked, Allred said. She has been crying. She is emotionally drained. She has decided to forgive Dodi Fayed for the past injustices.
Then came a second sentence, which is the one that ought to be remembered, because it is the only formal acknowledgement anywhere in the record that the case was ever real. Had Mr. Fayed lived, said Allred, the action would have been vigorously pursued and litigated.
Kelly Fisher kept the ring. She said very little for a decade. Then in December 2007 she was called to give evidence at the inquest in London, and the recorded telephone calls were played in open court, and a woman who said she had walked away from a career and a wedding date 10 years earlier sat in a witness box in a foreign country and was asked to demonstrate that a dead man had once intended to marry her.
Her answer to that is the line this whole story comes down to. It is just quite humiliating, she said, to sit here and try to prove to people that someone wanted to marry you.
She has given almost no interviews. She married a Russian pilot in 2007, had a daughter in 2011, and settled in South Carolina, where she works in property. She is the only principal in this story still alive to be asked about that summer, and she has spent most of 30 years declining to discuss it.
The little she has said outside the witness box has been about grief rather than money. I was heartbroken to see the pictures of Diana and Dodi together, she said. But the most heartbroken I ever was, was when he died. And more simply: you go in the course of three weeks from being engaged to them all dying.
Everything else went the way such things go. Mohamed Al Fayed unveiled a shrine inside Harrods in April 1998, holding photographs of the couple, a wine glass said to be from their last dinner, and a ring said to have been bought the day before the crash. In September 2005 came a bronze statue of the two of them dancing barefoot in the waves beneath an albatross, made by a sculptor who had worked for the family for 40 years.
Harrods was sold to Qatar in 2010 for £1.5 billion. In January 2018 both memorials were taken out of the shop. The statue was returned to the family. The space was cleared for a Harrods with no Fayeds in it at all.
Mohamed Al Fayed died on August 30, 2023, aged 94, one day short of the 26th anniversary of the crash, and was buried at Oxted beside his son. A year after his death, more than 20 women alleged in a BBC documentary that he had sexually assaulted them, and five alleged rape. Within weeks, the number of people who had come forward ran into the hundreds. He had never been charged with anything in his lifetime.
And that is the man who wrote the official version of the summer of 1997. He spent 26 years and a great deal of money insisting that his son had been about to marry the Princess of Wales, on the strength of a ring that the Ritz's own executive testified had been a story invented after the crash. In the same 26 years, he never once conceded the engagement that had a date, a house, a part-paid promise, a bounced check and a court filing, because that one made his son look ordinary. He fought to the end of his life for a version of Dodi Fayed that no investigation could find, and buried the one that had a paper trail.
The truth underneath both versions is smaller and sadder than either. Dodi Fayed had been given everything and permitted to be responsible for nothing. He had $100,000 a month and unpaid bills at his father's own hotel. He had an Oscar and no career. He bought a woman a $7 million house on July 2 and was photographed kissing somebody else five weeks later, and appeared to believe that both things could simply carry on.
He had never once been made to choose. And in the last summer of his life, his father placed both women on the same stretch of French coast, and he moved between them, because moving between things without choosing was the only method he had ever been taught.
On August 14, 1997, a woman sat down before the cameras in Los Angeles wearing the ring and told the truth as she understood it to a room that had already decided it preferred the other story. Seventeen days later, the other story became sacred, and hers became something nobody was willing to hear. She has been carrying it quietly ever since.