“How was our special guest?” Mohamed Al-Fayed asks his son Dodi over the phone with great interest, referring to Diana of Wales. “She seems happy, she is on the deck sunbathing,” responds the one who was the princess’s last partner. “Now you just have to close the deal for her and put a ring on her finger. If you marry that girl overnight you will be a true giant, a colossus. You will have more money and power than you could ever imagine and you will finally be my equal because I would make you my partner in everything.” This dramatized conversation between father and son opens the third episode of the sixth and final season of The Crown. “You’ve never offered me anything like this,” replies Dodi, played by Khalid Abdalla, visibly upset. “Because until now you had never deserved it,” the Egyptian businessman claims in the television fiction that he became the owner of icons of conspicuous consumption such as the Ritz hotel in Paris and the Harrod’s department store.
Those who knew Mohamed Al-Fayed affirm that he would never have pushed his son into a marriage, no matter how many advantages he saw in the marriage. What is certain is that Dodi Al-Fayed, whose full name was Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed, was not good enough for business in the eyes of his father. “Mohamed Al-Fayed was a tyrant, a cruel and dominant man who manipulated his family for money,” Martín Bianchi, EL PAÍS journalist specialized in lifestyle, society and royalty, explains to ICON. “I know from friends close to the couple that Dodi was a sensitive man who continually sought the approval of his father. That’s something he had in common with Diana, that she always felt inferior to her sisters and ignored by her father. Probably the rejection of her parents helped them connect,” Bianchi continues.
The call that the Netflix series reproduces took place in August 1997 and just a few weeks before it occurred, Dodi was decorating the Malibu house he was moving into with model Kelly Fisher, his fiancée. But for Mohamed Al-Fayed (Alexandria, 1929-London, 2023) a marriage with Diana (played by Elizabeth Debicki in the series) would mean achieving a status that he had not been able to achieve despite his fortune. And he looks like he had tried. The billionaire moved to England in the 1970s and for more than 25 years he was the owner of Harrod’s, the historic department store, unofficial suppliers to London’s ruling class. He also took over a football team—Fulham FC—and bought the Parisian mansion where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor lived during their exile, as well as a plot of land in Scotland of almost 30,000 hectares.
All of which did not change either his modest origins or his reality: the businessman was a newly rich Egyptian and delighted to be so, which is why English high society snobbered as hard as he tried to win her over. In fact, he was never granted English nationality, and that is how Dodi, the only son he had with his first wife, Samira Khashoggi—sister of Adnan, the famous arms dealer—possibly became his last hope, an argument in the one who insists The Crown.
A great opportunity
Ironically, Al Fayed’s first meeting with Diana of Wales occurred in the early 1980s, during a polo tournament and, in the version of The Crown, precisely because of a rudeness: the magnate is supposed to have a seat next to the queen, but she sent Diana so as not to have to watch the tournament – where Dodi competed against Prince Charles – at her side. “Al-Fayed Sr. was fascinated by the British monarchy and social advancement. He was a businessman born in Egypt, a former English colony, who grew up admiring the crown and found in Diana a way to reach her in a certain way and satisfy her ambition,” says Martín Bianchi.
Before becoming the world-famous boyfriend of the recently divorced Lady Di, Dodi dedicated himself to producing films in Hollywood backed by his father’s money. With a salary of $100,000 a month and a personality marked by a solitary childhood even surrounded by privileges (he attended the Swiss boarding school of Le Rosey and was a student at Sandhurst, the military academy to which William and Henry later went), young Al -Fayed had a reputation as a womanizer, party animal and capricious. Insecure, impulsive and generous, he offered very expensive gifts to his friends and his conquests; He loved sports cars but he hated speed, and he was passionate about movies but he lacked the determination to stay in the day. As a producer, with Chariots of Fire (1981) won four Oscars; then participated in the success F/X, deadly effects (1986) and appeared as executive producer of Hook (Captain Hook), a 1991 film directed by Steven Spielberg, which was nominated in four Academy Award categories that year. It was at the premiere of Hook in London, which Diana attended, when Dodi was dazzled by the princess.
He always depended on his father: when he didn’t like the bills he received from his firstborn – room service in luxury hotels, or even bills at Harrod’s – Mohamed refused to pay them, which caused his son to become a millionaire. playboy for some and, for others, delinquent. It was also Mohamed who invited Diana and her children to spend a few days on the French Riviera, and where the romance arose that ruined the planned wedding with Kelly Fisher, which he details. The Crown. This is the much-discussed fictional version, but, “from what people who knew Diana say, the series portrays quite faithfully what the relationship between them was like,” says Bianchi when asked about the veracity of the scenes from the Netflix hit.
A man in moccasins
When Dodi and Diana started seeing each other, the press went crazy. He liked the attention. However, he had barely given them time to get to know each other well when, at the end of that summer, a traffic accident in Paris when the couple was fleeing the paparazzi at full speed he ended the lives of the princess and the film producer. Mohamed Al-Fayed maintains that they were engaged, but journalist Tina Brown, the princess’s biographer, has said that “Diana had no intention of marrying Dodi Fayed, hers was a flirtation to upset Charles and the Royal Family.” Michael Cole, public relations for the Al Fayed, told Vanity Fair that the couple had exchanged gifts in their room at the Ritz on the night of his death: for him, a pair of cufflinks that belonged to his father, and for her, a spectacular Repossi diamond ring (“not very much to Diana’s taste,” according to what relatives said later).
News of the World he claimed on the same day of his disappearance that the Egyptian was not someone worthy to marry a member of British royalty and that Diana’s eldest son, William, did not approve of this relationship either. “Are you still wearing moccasins?” the princess’s first-born son asks her mother in a scene from the series. Meanwhile, Enrique, Diana’s little son, refers to Al-Fayed as “the poser” and both brothers laugh at the fact that the producer is always on the phone with Los Angeles on his gigantic yacht. It is, once again, a vision dramatized by the Netflix scriptwriters, but it portrays the difficult fit of that foreigner with a taste for open shirts and flashy jackets in the starched English aristocracy.
The death of Dodi and Diana once again confronted Al-Fayed Sr. with the establishment British. The Egyptian businessman claimed that the accident was caused to prevent Diana from marrying a Muslim. Furthermore, the disappearance of the Princess of Wales caused shock worldwide and completely overshadowed the fact that two more people had died in that car, Dodi and Henri Paul, the driver. The media mourned the loss of the princess while the Al-Fayed family, not to mention that of the driver, resigned themselves to mourning her in a very discreet background. But the patriarch did not give up: the Egyptian made Harrod’s a temple for the deceased couple and placed memorial monuments.
After Dodi’s death, Al Fayed tried one last time to be granted English nationality, but was unsuccessful. In 2003, six years after a fatal accident, he gave up. Mohamed had lost a son and a privileged tax status that allowed him to settle his tax obligations for 240,000 pounds per year (about 350,000 euros). That was his limit. He claimed that the British upper classes were “racist, deep down” and, after 35 years on English soil, he said he was moving to Switzerland. In 2010 he sold Harrod’s to the Qatari royal family and in 2013 he parted ways with Fulham FC. On August 30, 2023, one day before the 26th anniversary of Dodi’s death, Mohamed died at the age of 94. It was the end of a man with an ego even bigger than his possessions. Someone who came to declare to Financial Times that, when he died, he wanted his body to be displayed in Harrod’s so that people could visit him. This wish was not granted either.
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