A massive three-year investigation of conspiracy theories surrounding those deaths, to be issued in London tomorrow by Lord Stevens, may not put the case so bluntly. But the British press has reported that Lord Stevens will conclude, as the French police did very quickly after the fact, that Diana’s death was an accident. Reports that the CIA was bugging Diana’s communications (flatly dismissed as “rubbish” by an agency spokesman) and that the U.S. National Security Agency has files mentioning Diana’s name (which is hardly surprising) do not change the basic narrative at all.
This is a story I have followed for a long time. I was in Paris that night. I arrived at the Place de l’Alma shortly after the bodies of the men and the dying Diana had been taken away, and I watched as the smashed car was pulled from the tunnel. A few hours later, at the hospital, I was on the phone with an American satellite network at the moment that a French doctor announced formally and definitively that Diana had died. I conveyed that message to the world, and because I became, in that instant, the voice of Diana’s death, I have been asked often since then what “really” happened. The Stevens investigators themselves contacted me briefly a few months ago, looking for one person I interviewed the week after Diana’s death who claimed to be a witness.
Nothing presented by any source has ever caused me seriously to doubt the police conclusions. But how did such an accident happen? Diana’s death is no less a tragedy for being inadvertent, and to my mind it is even sadder because it was so pointless; the only real mystery is about the workings of fate. At least five decisions were made by Diana and Dodi and Henri Paul on Aug. 30, 1997 that cost them their lives. None of those decisions were especially momentous in itself, yet taken together they led ineluctably to the tragedy we all remember from that night.
First, let’s clear away some of conspiratorial fog surrounding this case. Central to the thesis that Diana was murdered is the myth that the princess and Dodi were in love, that they were going to be engaged and, by some accounts, that she—mother of a future king of England—was already pregnant with the child of this Muslim paramour. Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed, has built an extravagant memorial to their romance in Harrod’s, the department store he owns in London. Dodi’s father has also hired many lawyers and private investigators to pursue the conspiratorial truth as he believes it: that Diana was killed in a plot carried out by the British intelligence services at the behest of royal racists.
But Diana was not pregnant, and her butler, Paul Burrell, says that she was not in love with Dodi. The younger Fayed might have intended to pop the question, but according to Burrell, the princess never intended to say yes. Did she fear dying in a prearranged car crash? Her correspondence says she did. But that obsession, which even her brother thought related to “mental problems,” preceded her dates with Dodi. If there was no serious Diana-Dodi romance, then the core motive for conspiracy evanesces like rain on a summer sidewalk.
Then there are questions of basic practicalities. If you are a professional killer (and my quarter century covering guerrilla wars and terrorism has put me in touch with a few), then you want to keep the plot as simple as possible and base it on reliable information about the target’s movements. The Diana conspiracies depend on the assumption that the route Diana would travel that night was knowable, and indeed known. But this was no motorcade. In fact, the itinerary was made up on the spur of the moment.
Again, let’s step back for a second and look at the context. Dodi and Diana had visited Paris earlier in the summer and had a very relaxing time. They were able to dine at Lucas Carton, an exquisite restaurant in the middle of town, unmolested and almost unnoticed. But when they returned on Aug. 30, their world had been changed by the publication of a grainy out-of-focus picture showing the two kissing, however briefly, out in the Mediterranean. The photographer reportedly had earned a fortune approaching a million dollars for that shot. So even though there are laws against paparazzi harassment in France, all bets were off: the fines were much lower than the potential rewards. And the pack was on Diana’s trail from the moment she landed in a private plane at Le Bourget airport.
This should have been predictable and predicted, but Diana and Dodi and the bodyguards his father employed—including Henri Paul, who was the deputy chief of security at the Fayed-owned Ritz Hotel in Paris—appear to have been blindsided by the onslaught of photographers chasing them as relentlessly as hounds after a fox. They spent much of the day holed up at the Ritz on Place Vendome. They went to Dodi’s apartment at the top of the Champs Elysées (which looked out on the Arc de Triomphe through thick windows with the greenish cast of bulletproofing), and they decided they’d go to dinner at Benoit, on a narrow street in downtown Paris near Les Halles. Dodi asked his stepuncle, Saudi diplomat Hassan Yassin, to go with them, but Yassin, who was staying at the Ritz, declined.
So, Dodi and Diana headed downtown toward the restaurant with a professional chauffeur and bodyguards. But before they got there the pack had closed in again. Without warning—in a fit of pique, perhaps, or of panic—they changed their minds and went back to the Ritz. You can see the irritation on both their faces in the famous security videos as they entered through the hotel’s revolving door. Diana had put her safety and her privacy in Dodi’s hands. Now he was going to get his father’s people to sort things out. This was the first unpredictable—and fatal—decision of the evening.
Henri Paul had been with Diana and Dodi much of the day but had finally gone off the clock when they went to Dodi’s apartment. Paul had a drinking problem which he was trying to get under control, but there’s no question he’d been under a lot of stress. He was the No. 2 security man at the Ritz, and since the No. 1 guy had left, Paul was running the show. But he was not going to get the top job and knew it. His future was a question mark. Paul may have received some money from the French services, presumably to keep them up to speed on the dignitaries at the Ritz, many of whom are politically important, but he wouldn’t be much use to them if he lost his job. And his main income still came from Fayed. So he had to ingratiate himself as much as he could with Dodi and Dodi’s father and, of course, Diana. Not an easy job considering the paparazzi madness.
When Paul got off work, we are not sure exactly where he went. His apartment would have been a grim refuge. Not far from the Ritz on Rue des Petits Champs, it was a small place near the top of a creaking stairwell, just below the common toilet of immigrant workers on the top floor. When I visited it a few days after the crash, the hallway in front of Paul’s door stank of urine. It was quite a contrast with the “palace” where he worked.
Wherever Paul was, he probably thought he could relax. Repeated blood tests since the crash, including the most recent verifying his DNA, establish that he had several drinks that night. His blood alcohol level was three times the legal limit in France. And then, suddenly, he was called back to the Ritz to deal with the paparazzi situation. Chalk that up as fatal, unpredictable decision No. 2.
Paul drove up to the front door in his own car, a tiny Austin Mini with an automatic transmission. Whether he was drunk by that point, and if so, how drunk, is not known. Several people said he did not seem to be impaired, but that would have been hard to tell—especially as he wasn’t the center of attention.
A plan was hatched to escape the paparazzi by sending decoy cars driving away from the front of the hotel while Diana and Dodi would leave from the service entrance on Rue Cambon. As arrangements were made, and Diana and Dodi at last got something to eat, Paul is reported to have had at least two glasses of Ricard, a 90-proof pastis that looks much like grapefruit juice when it is mixed with a little water. (The less water, the yellower the color.) Tests would later show that Henri Paul also had Prozac and Tiapridal—prescribed by his doctor to counter alcohol dependency—in his bloodstream.
The car that pulled up to the back of the hotel was a heavy Mercedes S280 sedan with a stick shift. Henri Paul got behind the wheel. It’s not clear who decided that Paul should drive, but this would count as a third unanticipated, and fatal, decision. The Ritz has maintained since the week after the accident that Paul had been trained to drive such cars, but that misses the point. We all know that if you’re used to driving one kind of car—in Paul’s case a tiny Mini with an automatic transmission—and you get in a new one that is twice as big and heavy and configured differently, you’re going to have some reflex problems. A few Ricards will, of course, make those reflexes much worse.
So now they are ready to roll. Bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones is riding shotgun. He puts on his seatbelt, but no one else does—and this is a fourth fatal decision. Dodi sits behind Paul, Diana behind Rees-Jones. They drive down narrow Rue Cambon, which is one-way, then turn onto Rue de Rivoli, which is also one-way, and it’s clear the plan already has fallen apart. As the Mercedes rolls into Place de la Concorde, the pack of photographers on motorcycles and scooters is closing in again.
From Concorde, it is a straight shot up the Champs Elysées to Dodi’s apartment at the Arc de Triomphe, a landmark you can see quite clearly from the bottom of the avenue. At a brisk walk, the journey takes about 20 minutes, in the Metro, less than five. If they’d taken that direct route up the Champs, it’s a good guess they’d all be alive today. But at that hour on a Saturday night, even in late summer when the rest of Paris is pretty empty, traffic on the city’s most famous avenue can bog down as movie theaters let out. Someone in the car—Dodi? Diana? Henri Paul?—decided to take another route to outrun the photographers who were on motorcycles and scooters. This was the final, fatal decision that could not have been predicted by anyone outside the car.
Henri Paul continued around the Place de la Concorde, turned right onto the Cours la Reine and put the pedal to the metal. The Mercedes roared down the four-lane tree-lined road near the Seine River at upwards of 80mph.
The Cours la Reine looks wide open, but it’s in fact a very treacherous little highway with a couple of nasty surprises. (If you are looking at a map, you need to know its name changes several times as well.) As you approach the tunnel under Place de l’Alma, a side road allows traffic to come directly onto the main drag. In Paris, cars entering from the right have the right of way, even when they’re coming from a little side road onto a major thoroughfare, so there’s always a danger someone will pull out suddenly without looking. Furthermore, as the road dipped down into the tunnel, there was a distinct bump that would cause a light car at high speed to lift up off its wheels and even a heavy car like the Mercedes that Henri Paul was driving would rise up disconcertingly on its shocks. Then you were in the tunnel.
We do not know precisely what a small, cheap, slow old Fiat Uno was doing there that night, but it’s a good guess that it pulled in off the side road and Paul, focused on the paparazzi fading into the distance behind him, never saw it until he was almost on top of it. When he did, he overcorrected to miss it—perfectly natural in such an unfamiliar car, especially since he was drunk. He clipped the Fiat’s tail light and slammed into one of the exposed pillars in the middle of the tunnel. The Mercedes spun around at speed. Paul and Dodi were thrown all over the inside of the car and killed instantly. (In unpublishable photographs, Dodi’s body looks like a broken rag doll.) Trevor Rees-Jones, despite his seatbelt and airbags, had his face shredded by the windshield. Diana, when the car came to rest, was seated in the well behind the right front, clearly in shock but breathing and with no conspicuous external injury.
From this point on, we can second-guess the procedures and competence of the emergency crews that arrived on the scene. But Diana had a torn vein leading into her heart. The fates, and the actions of the people in the car, had already decided that three people would die. (Rees-Jones was saved by his seatbelt.)
The great missing link in this narrative, of course, is the driver of the Fiat Uno, who appears never to have been found. Why did he or she never come forward? The answer is not hard to find. Having narrowly escaped death and driven on from the scene of the crash (a crime), and having no idea who was in the Mercedes, the driver would have woken up the next morning to discover that Princess Diana had been killed in front of his eyes and all the photographers who were on the scene were arrested in connection with her death. To come forward would be to invite prosecution—and, in any case, it was weeks later before the driver would know his or her make of car had been identified by the police as being in the tunnel. If the driver was trying to hide something else—lack of a license, a late-August tryst, whatever—there’d be even less reason to ‘fess up.
Three years ago, I went over all this with Dodi’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed, first at a dinner with mutual friends and then in a telephone interview. He explained his well-known belief in a conspiracy by the royal family to eliminate Princess Diana. “She was being followed up by M.I.6 and M.I.5 [the British foreign and domestic security services],” said Fayed. “All her actions everywhere. This is why they know when she’s going to be with Dodi, when she’s going to announce [the] engagement, when she’s going to pick up the ring. Everything was planned, you know.” An alleged British agent named James Andanson supposedly tracked the couple in Paris, lying in wait with a tiny Fiat Uno to make them crash in the tunnel. (Andanson was cleared by the French police, but years later was found burned to death in another car. Officially, the Fiat Uno involved in the crash was never found.)
And the choice of routes that night? So many different ones could have been taken. Indeed, it would have been natural to exit the Cours la Reine before the tunnel to go up to Dodi’s apartment via the Avenue d’Iena or the Avenue Marceau. Fayed insisted that Henri Paul was really working for M.I.6, and he was killed at the wheel that night while following orders, but of course didn’t know that he was intended to die. Fayed wouldn’t countenance any discussion of Henri Paul’s inebriation: “If you believe that this was a drunken driver then forget about the interview,” he told me.
Alright, Mr. Fayed. But perhaps you wonder, too, why Dodi and Diana, knowing the Ritz was surrounded by paparazzi, didn’t just spend the night there. After all, it’s the family hotel. “One of the security called me and told me it’s havoc outside on Place Vendome,” said Fayed. “I called Dodi personally. I say, ‘Please.’ I begged him: ‘Don’t go out. Just stay there. You’re in a beautiful suite. You don’t need to move tonight.’ I say ‘Please.’ He told [me], ‘No, I want to give her everything … I will see. Maybe I will stay in the hotel.’ Twenty minutes later the hotel calls me [and] says Dodi was killed, you know, and Diana is in hospital.”
Dodi Fayed listened to someone else. To Henri Paul, perhaps. Or to Diana. Or to the bodyguards or, most likely, to his own judgment. And the rest is tragedy.
title: “Past Newsweek Coverage” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-18” author: “Frederick Atwood”
When she married Charles in 1981, Diana personified the fairy-tale version of royalty. The awkward teenager, a cloud of hair dipping over her eyes, captured the world’s most eligible bachelor. Her wedding gown seemed to stretch the length of St. Paul’s, and when the bridal couple chastely kissed afterward on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, millions thrilled to the spectacle. In time, the public untangled the truth from the tableau. This was not a marriage lifted from the pages of a romantic novel but an all-too-modern, deeply troubled one. The beautiful princess was not a shy young thing gamely struggling with her role but a woman who, in her misery, became desperately sick. The heir to the throne was not a stoic bulwark and tutor but a man who could barely conceal his irritation that Diana did not develop a stiff upper lip and shape up.
Royalty on her watch seemed to become just another branch of celebrity: everyone had a chance to be famous and nobody was allowed to stay on a pedestal for long. After the deadly chase in Paris, Diana became the most tragic casualty so far of the curious connection between the famous and the rest of us.
By the time Charles and Diana separated in 1989, her moment as an icon of young beauty and motherhood was over. What came next was truly surprising. A woman who had been contemptuously thought of as dim was revealed to be rather clever. A person who had led a life of privilege turned out to have the common touch, boldly embracing AIDS babies at a time when fighting the epidemic was far from fashionable. The person who had been raised to stay in her husband’s shadow gave a television interview in which she rejoiced in being a “strong woman.’’
When she first appeared in 1980, she brought light to a drab Old British society that had lost both an empire and its self-confidence. When she died, she had become the epitome of the New Brit—stylish, cosmopolitan, liking the town but hating the country. She could change other people’s attitudes, and did. Until Diana, no more than a few hundred Britons cared two figs for land mines—but the abolition of those weapons has become one of the country’s most fiercely held causes.
The rest of the royals will now take over again. The princess’s funeral will be moving; her two sons will become the focus of an outpouring of love. The monarchy will do what it has done best for a thousand years: mysteriously unite the nation—and a watching world—with a solemn pageant of kings and princes. But in her brief life, Diana pursued a different title, and there is no doubt she succeeded in her quest. ““She was the People’s Princess,’’ said Tony Blair, Britain’s prime minister, ““and that’s how she will remain in our hearts and memory forever.’’
title: “Past Newsweek Coverage” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-08” author: “Tricia Goss”
It was the opening scene of a grand, 16-year soap opera that had Diana playing a dizzying array of roles, from innocent bride to loving young mother to glamorous style setter. The gap between her public and private lives was vast. She was the most celebrated woman in the world and yet achingly lonely. Movie stars and factory workers lined up to meet her, but she felt so unloved that she repeatedly tried to harm herself. The higher her rating in the popularity polls, the more her husband seemed to keep his distance. She suffered from bulimia and depression, but she found the strength to comfort people whom she said were “rejected by society’’: AIDS patients, battered women, drug addicts. After her divorce, she seemed determined to bridge her very different worlds. So in the last few weeks before her death, she campaigned against land mines in Bosnia and vacationed in the Mediterranean aboard the luxurious yacht of her lover, Dodi Fayed. She appeared relaxed, even happy, a woman finally in control.
In all those years and throughout all her transformations, there was one constant in Diana’s life: she was rarely out of camera range. Her fame was her most valuable possession; it enabled her to draw attention to causes she cared about. But it was also her curse. “The higher the media put you,’’ she said, “the bigger the drop.’’ She alternately railed against the press and then cultivated certain reporters with whom she shared “confidences’’ when she wanted to present her side of the story. The consummate celebrity of the 1980s and ’90s, she knew how to play the game. Americans loved her and her fascination with pop culture; it seemed only appropriate that she once danced with John Travolta in the Reagan White House.
She also understood what was expected of her at the palace. “The things I do for England!’’ she once complained to a friend after a particularly grueling round of public appearances. Her ambition when she married Charles was to be a good wife and mother and to serve her country as the future queen. But although she quickly became the most admired member of the royal family, the ultimate downfall of her marriage could not help but weaken the monarchy. The number of Britons who believed Charles would be a good king has plummeted to just 41 percent last year, according to polls.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The consort to the heir to the throne was to be an asset, not a liability. When Diana married Charles, the expectation was that she would be molded into a useful force for what Prince Philip called “the family firm.’’ But the authorities at Buckingham Palace did not quite realize that the young princess was already a pro at dealing with the press—and that this skill would one day be used against them. Her media education had begun in the fall of 1980, when Fleet Street became aware that she had assumed a special place in Charles’s love life. At the time, she shared a London flat with three roommates and worked as a kindergarten teacher’s aide. The courtship was stressful. Charles’s invitations were sometimes spur of the moment, forcing Diana—the future fashion icon—to rummage through closets for something suitable to wear.
The greatest pressure came from the growing hordes of paparazzi. Most of the time, Diana kept her cool, but one day she burst into tears when photographers snapped her getting into her car on the way to work. The photographers later apologized, and she tried to accommodate them by posing with two of her young charges in a famous photo in which the outline of her legs, lit from behind, showed clearly through her skirt.
Before long, Diana cultivated a camera-ready smile that earned her the nickname Shy Di. And despite the relentless attention, there were, amazingly, no pictures of Charles and Diana together until the official engagement announcement in February 1981. On that day, Diana appeared radiant as she stood next to Charles and showed off her sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring (within days, copies showed up in stores all over Britain). “I desperately loved my husband, and I wanted to share everything together,’’ she said later. “I thought we were a very good team.’’ Her future husband appeared to be somewhat more ambivalent. When an interviewer asked if they were in love, Diana replied, “Of course,’’ but Charles added: “Whatever love is.’'
As a child of divorce, she was determined to make her marriage work. Diana was just 6 in 1967, when her mother, Frances, left her father, the 8th Earl Spencer, for Peter Shand Kydd, a wealthy businessman. Her two older sisters, Sarah and Jane, were in boarding school, but Diana and her younger brother, Charles, spent much of the next few years shuttling unhappily between their parents’ homes.
When she was 12, Diana attended the exclusive West Heath School in Kent, where she hung a picture of Charles above her bed and reportedly told a classmate: “I would love to be a dancer—or Princess of Wales.’’ She dropped out at 16 and spent a few months at a Swiss finishing school, which was the end of her formal education.
AT THE TIME OF THEIR engagement, Diana was deemed a perfect choice for Charles. Her ancestry was impeccable; the Spencers are among the most aristocratic families in Britain. Her father had been an equerry to both George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Her maternal grandmother, Lady Fermoy, was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother. Just as important, Diana was a virgin; no old lovers would show up to sell their stories to the tabloids. Her husband’s past was not so pure—and even before the wedding, Charles and Diana fought about his relationship with his longtime friend Camilla Parker Bowles. Diana was furious when she discovered that Charles had given Camilla an engraved gold bracelet just before the ceremony. He reportedly downplayed the importance of the gift but kept in touch with Camilla even as he and Diana honeymooned aboard the royal yacht Britannia.
In public, however, they remained a perfect couple, efficiently producing the requisite “heir and a spare’’—William in 1982 and Harry in 1984. They smiled gracefully and posed for photographers on the steps of the hospital after each was born. Diana morphed from a somewhat pudgy girl dressed in frilly blouses to a sleek fashion plate decked out in designer gowns (the transformation was helped by advice from the editors of British Vogue). Women around the world emulated her style. But despite their efforts to present a happy-royal-family picture, the tension between Charles and Diana grew steadily. Their true feelings couldn’t stay hidden forever.
In the first seven years of their marriage, the couple made official state visits to 19 countries. At almost every stop, Diana was the star, the one the crowds waited hours to see. Charles was clearly an also-ran, and his resentment was intense. “With the media attention came a lot of jealousy,’’ Diana told an interviewer in 1995, “a great deal of complicated situations arose because of that.''
Charles could not seem to compete with Diana’s glamour or her almost instinctive ability to connect with ordinary people. She shook hands with AIDS patients when many people were still afraid to touch them. She took her sons to homeless shelters so that they could understand the real world. She hugged the dying in hospices and exchanged “war stories’’ with other women who suffered from eating disorders. Charles’s causes were far more esoteric: the state of modern architecture or organic gardening.
Indeed, the couple had few common leisure-time interests. Charles loved horses and New Age philosophy. Diana’s tastes veered toward pop music, romance novels and spending time with her children. He liked hunting; she abhorred it. He had long ago adjusted to the strictures of royal life. She kept trying to break free and maintain some semblance of normalcy. The gap between them grew much larger than their 12-year age difference.
Reports of trouble in the marriage began surfacing in the mid-1980s. By that time, Charles had returned to Camilla Parker Bowles; Diana then began an affair with a cavalry officer, James Hewitt, who later cooperated in a book chronicling their romance. It was getting more and more difficult to keep up the front. At a polo match in 1986, Charles tried to kiss his wife after he lost a match. She wiped her lips with the back of her hand.
As their marriage broke down, Charles spent more and more time at his country house, painting and gardening. Diana stayed in town. They were together only at ceremonial occasions and even then seemed to go out of their way to avoid physical contact. Their body language was chilling. It was almost as if they inhabited two separate emotional universes. But no matter what went on behind palace doors, in the War of the Waleses Diana remained the public favorite. Charles was seen as remote, a cold fish. She won sympathy not only for her charity work but also for the loving attention she gave her sons.
Diana went out of her way to give William and Harry the maternal love and support she felt her husband never had. She breast-fed them and insisted on taking William, then just an infant, with her when the couple toured Australia in 1983, a dramatic change in royal-family behavior. She openly hugged them, took them to amusement parks and hamburger joints—just like other kids. When she was with them, her face took on a special glow. No matter what else was wrong with her life, her time with them was serene.
The contrast between Charles and Diana’s parenting emerged most dramatically in 1991, when William’s skull was fractured after he was accidentally hit by a golf club at school. For two nights, Diana stayed with her son in the hospital; Charles reportedly stopped by once and then took off for a night at the opera. Raised from birth to hold his emotions in check, Charles was reported to be genuinely perplexed by the criticism his behavior inspired.
THE PUBLICATION THE following year of Andrew Morton’s biography “Diana, Her True Story’’ eliminated any remaining doubts that the marriage was doomed. Diana later admitted that she had encouraged her friends to cooperate with Morton because, she said, “I was at the end of my tether. I was desperate.’’ Her father even contributed touching photos he had taken of Diana as a child and teenager.
But the price for the release Diana sought was increasingly frenzied press coverage. Both Charles and Diana were embarrassed by the disclosure of taped telephone conversations. In one, Charles discussed his sex life with Camilla. Diana was recorded exchanging confidences with her close friend James Gilbey, who nicknamed her “Squidgy.’’ In a November 1992 tour of South Korea, the estrangement between Charles and Diana was so apparent that reporters referred to them as “the Glums.’’ A month later the separation was official.
The scandalous revelations and the public-relations war continued on both sides. In a June 1994 television interview Charles admitted he had been unfaithful. Four months later, in his authorized biography, he said that he had never loved Diana and had married her because of pressure from his father. Charles’s friends portrayed Diana as mentally unstable, given to wild claims. Diana fought back—most notably during her own television interview in November 1995, during which she questioned Charles’s fitness to reign and suggested that William would be a more suitable king. Despite gossip that she was headed for a nervous collapse, she appeared composed and in control. Her personal goal, she said, was to be a “queen of people’s hearts.''
It was a masterful media performance, far more effective than her husband’s, but it also hastened the end of the marriage. Soon afterward, Queen Elizabeth wrote to both Charles and Diana urging them to divorce as soon as possible. Negotiations over a settlement continued over the next few months until February 1996, when Diana met alone with her husband in his apartment at St. James’s Palace and then announced that she had agreed to a divorce.
The terms were made public when the divorce decree was officially granted a year ago. Diana gave up the honorific “Her Royal Highness,’’ which marked her as a member of the royal circle, but was permitted to retain her title as Princess of Wales. She also received a lump-sum payment of $26.5 million, $600,000 a year to maintain her office staff, and her five-bedroom apartment in Kensington Palace. Technically, she was still a part of the royal family. She and Charles shared custody of their sons, although her time with them grew increasingly limited. Both were away at school much of the year and spent half their vacations with their father.
In the last year of her life, Diana appeared to be making a concerted effort to create a life on her own terms. She changed her personal style, favoring sleek clothes that showed off her well-toned figure. In many ways, her days were not that different from other wealthy divorcEes’. She worked out regularly at the gym, lunched with friends, enjoyed her time with her sons. She talked about her desire to have more children, but she seemed in no hurry to remarry. She concentrated on the causes she cared about most, particularly the campaign against land mines. In a highly symbolic move, she even sold dozens of her most famous gowns to raise more than $3.25 million for AIDS and cancer charities.
But even as she moved toward more independence, she was frustrated. In an interview this summer, she told the French newspaper Le Monde that the press had made her life so miserable that she would move to another country if she could. Only her sons kept her in Britain. The British press particularly aroused her ire. “There is an obsessive interest in me and the children,’’ she told a reporter earlier this year.
Despite her desire for some privacy, she was seated front and center at one of the most celebrity-studded events of the summer, the funeral of Italian designer Gianni Versace. When Versace’s close friend Elton John began crying, Diana, who was seated next to him, reached out and patted him gently on the arm.
Meanwhile, her charitable efforts continued to make news. In June she visited Washington as part of her campaign against land mines. Last month she was in Sarajevo, mourning the victims of war in a visit to a cemetery and in private talks with families of people maimed or killed by exploding mines.
But it was her romance with Dodi Fayed that drew the most publicity. Last month pictures of the couple embracing on his yacht were splashed across the front pages of tabloids in Britain and the United States. Though she had been rumored to have been involved with a number of eligible men since her divorce, her relationship with Fayed was considered to be her first serious romance. “The caresses, the tender touches, the sheer warmth of the body language can leave no doubt about the intimacy of the relationship,’’ said the Daily Mail. Some reporters said that Diana did not seem to be all that concerned about the platoons of paparazzi in speedboats and helicopters that trailed the lovers. “She was quite happy to be watched,’’ one was quoted as saying. Diana did seem remarkably relaxed in her time with Fayed. She was photographed laughing and lounging on the deck of his yacht. Earlier in the summer, Fayed’s father, Mohamed, invited Diana and her sons to his villa in St-Tropez. She told reporters he was just an old friend of the family.
It’s impossible to say how the romance would have ended. While many Britons objected to Fayed, seeing him as a dilettante playboy unworthy of Diana, others believed she was entitled to any happiness she could grab. And unlike many of the other men Diana had been linked with over the years, he was at least single. It wasn’t clear what would have happened to Diana’s status if she did remarry, but some observers thought she would have had to relinquish many of the perks she kept in the divorce, including her Kensington Palace apartment, the financing for her office staff and perhaps even her title as Princess of Wales. On Sunday morning, as Londoners awoke to the shocking news of her death, there was little doubt that whatever her title, she would now always be remembered with deep affection. Her former husband and son will probably reign over the realm one day, but in death Diana may well loom as large—if not larger—than she did in life.
The Beginning of the Journey: Diana Spencer grew up in a broken home, but her family maintained strong ties to the House of Windsor. In 1980 Charles needed a bride, and Lady Diana seemed perfect. They married in splendor the next year; the new princess became a superstar.
A Caring Mother: Diana quickly became a mother twice over, producing Prince William and Harry. She was devoted to them, and made sure they mixed their royal training with outings to hamburger joints and serious visits to homeless shelters.
The End of the Affair: By the mid-1980s the Waleses had no real common interests, and their marriage, never particularly placid, was in pieces. On official trips their body language around one another was chilling. In the ensuing public-relations war, both gave rare television interviews in which they each confessed to having been unfaithful—and Diana discussed her eating disorders. Divorce was soon to follow.
The Princess’s New Life: After her separation and eventual divorce, Diana said that though she would never be queen of England, she wanted to be ‘queen of people’s hearts.’ She embarked on serious charitable works, most notably a campaign against land mines. This summer she went on holiday with Dodi Fayed, a new love interest.
