The royals - Kitty Kelley [263]
“I am a victim of the British establishment,” he told Time magazine. “You can’t believe what I am fighting here. They can’t get over the fact that I own Harrods. It’s an Egyptian, not a Briton, who built this store, this fantasy. How can a bloody Egyptian come from another planet and do this?”
Despite his contributions to charity, the tycoon was disparaged by British newspapers as a social-climbing braggart not worthy of royal patronage. “Mr. Fayed is not the sort of person in whose debt a public figure such as the princess should knowingly place herself and her sons,” pronounced the Daily Telegraph. The next day, photographs of Diana with her arm around Mohamed al-Fayed aboard his yacht were plastered on the front pages of several newspapers. She was smiling happily, if not defiantly.
During that trip, she had approached the British reporters who dogged her to St. Tropez and asked them for some privacy, then warned that they should prepare themselves for startling news. “You’ll see,” she said. “You are going to get a big surprise with the next thing I do….
“My boys are urging me to leave the country. They say it is the only way. Maybe that’s what I should do. They want me to live abroad. I sit in London all the time and I am abused and followed wherever I go. Now I am being forced to move from here. William is stressed. William gets really freaked out. I was hoping to keep this visit all covered up and quiet.”
Despite the press intrusion, Diana later told Michael Cole, the al-Fayed spokesman for Harrods, that she and her children had had an idyllic vacation. “I’ve never had such a wonderful time,” he quoted her as saying. She told the reporter Richard Kay that she intended to bow out of public life to pursue personal interests. “She would then,” he wrote later, “be able to live as she always wanted to live, not as an icon—how she hated to be called one—but as a private person.”
Pictures of Dodi and Diana dominated the world’s tabloids, and the grainy photograph of them kissing, captured by a telephoto lens, reportedly fetched $5 million. The Sunday Mirror told its readers that the couple had found soul mates in each other: “They are both outsiders who have clashed with the British establishment.”
At the end of August, after a day cruising off Sardinia on his father’s yacht, the couple flew to Paris on his father’s plane. They visited the former villa of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, which his father owned. Later, they dined at the Ritz, his father’s hotel. The next day, Diana was scheduled to fly to London on the al-Fayed private plane to be with her boys before they returned to school. They had been vacationing with their father and the rest of the royal family in Scotland. But Diana did not live to see her children again.
Days later, on Saturday, September 6, the young princes, William and Harry, walked with their father, their grandfather, and their uncle, Diana’s brother, from Kensington Palace to Westminster Abbey to say good-bye to their mother. The Princess of Wales was not accorded a grand state funeral with gun carriages and muffled drums, although the Queen had the authority to give her such homage. Instead, the Palace promised a farewell that would be “a unique ritual for a unique person.” Two thousand people received invitations to attend the funeral in the abbey where English sovereigns had been crowned and buried for one thousand years. Those invited were to represent every facet of Diana’s short, bright life—from royalty to reality. Later, the Princess was to be privately interred on an island at Althorp, the Spencer family’s estate, in the village of Brington.
America’s official representative at the funeral was First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. Other celebrities included Luciano Pavarotti, Steven Spielberg, Diana Ross, Tom Hanks, and Tom Cruise. Diana’s favorite dress designers