The royals - Kitty Kelley [262]
A black man mourning Diana’s death reflected on her ruptured relationships with her family as he stood in front of Kensington Palace. “She was let down by everyone around her,” he said. “Her husband, her lovers, her mother, her sister-in-law—her real family and the royal family…. I think we were the only ones—commoners like me—who truly valued her because she valued us.” From a deck of playing cards, he had plucked out the queen of hearts and placed it atop the carpet of flowers.
A young woman in a T-shirt and jeans approached the palace gate in tears and left her offering: a picture of the princess in a tiara pasted above a few lines of poetry by W. H. Auden:
[She] was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
In among the flowers and stuffed animals was a smashed camera with a card that read: “This is the murder weapon that killed our beloved princess.”
Many people blamed the paparazzi for Diana’s death and, like her brother, held the media responsible. The public fury abated slightly after the French police released results of a blood alcohol test showing that the driver, Henri Paul, head of security for the Ritz Hotel, was intoxicated at three times the legal limit.
Some people took comfort from Diana’s relationship with the new man in her life, Emad Mohamed al-Fayed, known to friends as Dodi. She had been enjoying the last night of their vacation—their fourth in five weeks—when both of them were killed. Earlier, she had taken a five-day trip to Greece with her friend Rosa Monckton, and, to Diana’s delight, Dodi called her constantly. “She was happy, enjoying herself, and liked the feeling of having someone who not only so obviously cared for her, but was not afraid to be seen doing so,” Rosa wrote in an article after Diana’s death. But she also recalled Diana’s irritation when Dodi recited a list of the presents he had purchased for her, including a Cartier pearl-twist bracelet with a pearl-and-diamond dragon clasp and a reversible Jaeger-Le Coultre wristwatch.
“That’s not what I want, Rosa,” she was quoted as saying. “It makes me uneasy. I don’t want to be bought. I have everything I want. I just want someone to be there for me, to make me feel safe and secure.” She meant, of course, emotionally secure.
The two women spoke by mobile telephone on the afternoon of August 27, four days before Diana’s death.
“Just tell me, is it bliss?” asked Rosa.
“Yes, bliss,” replied the Princess.
When their romance started in the summer of 1997, pictures of the multimillionaire son of Mohamed al-Fayed* were splashed all over the newspapers. He was described by the News of the World, Britain’s largest-circulation weekly, as a forty-one-year-old playboy, who was “unfit” to marry into Britain’s aristocracy. “He excels at giving lavish parties, smoking expensive cigars and dating beautiful women,” said the paper. “He is an unsuitable choice to become the stepfather to the future king of England.” Noting the dismissive tone of the British press toward Diana’s new suitor, The New York Times described Dodi as “a young, wealthy outsider in Britain’s class-obsessed society.”
His romance with Diana had started when his father invited the Princess and her two sons to visit his family at their villa on the French Riviera. Diana accepted the invitation, despite the advice of her best friends, who felt the senior al-Fayed was socially unacceptable. The British press criticized her for lending her presence to a man who had been denied citizenship by the British government. Al-Fayed, who was born in Egypt, had admitted bribing Members of Parliament to ask