In the summer of 1997, the world was introduced to Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Moneim Fayed via the image of a single blurred kiss. Dodi Fayed, as he is more commonly known, was the eldest son of the Egyptian billionaire Mohamed al-Fayed and Samira Khashoggi, sister of the notorious weapons dealer Adnan Khashoggi. He was about to become one of the most famous men on earth. The press was quick to give him a personality to go with his overnight fame: he was a "playboy" with an improbably long list of famous ex-girlfriends. Born in Alexandria, 41-year-old Dodi Fayed's occupation was sometimes given as film producer, but nobody much cared what he did or who he was; the woman he was kissing in the blurred image was Diana, Princess of Wales and their story was upgrading by the hour from tabloid novelty to the romance of the century: the new Edward and Wallis Simpson.
It had all begun when Mohamed al-Fayed and Diana met at a charity event in London. He lost no time in offering her and her sons a holiday at his home in the south of France and so they all flew down in his private jet on 11 July. Dodi arrived a couple of days later. The holiday included a stint on a yacht, the Jonikal. During the day there were plentiful shots for the paparazzi of the boys on jet-skis. In the evening a disco was organised on one of the decks for the young princes, at which, bizarrely, they were the only guests. After the princes returned to see their father, Diana returned to the south of France for a second holiday on the Jonikal, this time alone with Dodi.
The journey from that yacht to death in the tunnel lasted a matter of days and was played out at breakneck speed. The couple engaged in a manic game of peekaboo with the press, who were crammed on a single comedy dinghy, chasing them round the Bay of St Tropez. Diana would sometimes spray them with a water pistol. There was a strange portent of what was to come, as the relentless hounding of the couple in such chaotic proximity was questioned. Yet this time at least, Diana was complicit. She seemed to be stage-managing the whole thing - from the self-consciously posed photos (diving off the boat, the kiss) to her promise to the press, bobbing up and down a few feet away, that she would deliver them an amazing story "very soon".
Cut adrift from the royal system, Diana at this point had no one she could really trust. Her few remaining confidants were dubious characters, such as clairvoyants and numerologists, whom she listened to with avid attentiveness. She was pursued by the paparazzi wherever she went and still needed and craved the security and protection the royal system had offered her. In short, she was desperate to find a protector. Not so surprising then, the friendship with Mohamed al-Fayed, with his Onassis-sized wealth and obsession with security, surveillance and bodyguards.
For al-Fayed's part, it was no secret that since losing his battle to gain a British passport, culminating in the cash-for-questions fiasco that brought down the Major government, and then being snubbed by the royal family when they withdrew their patronage of Harrods, he was keen to build an alternative power base, with Diana at its centre. Al-Fayed encouraged Dodi to see Diana, and Diana was clearly happy to be seen with Dodi. But where, in all this, was Dodi?
Ever since visiting Harrods, and chancing upon the extraordinary shrine al-Fayed built for his son and Diana, I had wondered about Dodi and been keen to find out more about him, who he really was and how he ended up in Diana's arms. Eventually I decided to make a documentary film about him. My producer contacted Mohamed al-Fayed's office and asked for an interview. I was confident he would agree - after all, he had talked before about Dodi and would surely welcome another chance to put the record straight. Besides, I'd always been quite pro-Fayed when it came to the accident, having responded to the news of Diana's death, by mouthing "MI5" to myself.
Al-Fayed's office was polite but made it clear that he would only take part if we made it clear that a) Dodi was liked and well-loved by everyone, b) he'd had a successful film career, and c) if rumours of his drug use were included in the film, we should make it clear that there was no evidence to support them. It was a handy response inasmuch as it amounted to a useful check list of things I now needed to look into.
I searched for archive interviews with him and found, curiously, that Dodi never gave an interview in his entire life. There isn't a single word he spoke in public recorded or written down. When he died, his father made his own musical tribute to Dodi, along the lines of Elton John's reworking of "Candle in the Wind" for Diana. Al-Fayed's homage is called "My Father, My Son". The video features home-movie footage of Dodi skiing and smiling, stroking a cat, driving a motorboat. It is strangely affecting, as Dodi is always alone. He inhabits a world of luxury and privilege, but he is utterly alone. At one moment, his mouth goldfishes a line of dialogue, but we don't actually hear the words. His mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
Even in the photo of "the kiss", Dodi's face is largely obscured. It is not even clear they were actually kissing. I wondered if Diana and Dodi even had a relationship. The more he eluded me, the more intrigued I became.
In a photograph I came across of Dodi's desk in his Park Lane apartment there were just two pictures on display: one of him with Tony Curtis and Hollywood friends, the other with a woman I didn't recognise. She turned out to be Denice Lewis, a model who had dated Dodi on and off for five years and who now lives in Los Angeles, where she makes paintings of the deceased, mixing their ashes into the pigment. We met at her trendy downtown gallery, all barbed wire and ersatz graffiti on the outside. Denice is stick thin, 6ft plus heels, wearing a trouser suit and holding a chihuahua. I asked her if she could remember where she and Dodi met.
"I honestly don't remember, but it had to be at some party or fabulous event."
Was she impressed by him? I'd heard Dodi could click his fingers and have a helicopter there in 20 minutes.
"It was fun. We went to great places, but I loved going to their country home and going horse riding most. We would go to the south of France and go out on the boat. It was a fairy-tale lifestyle." Denice was a little distracted while we talked, laughing nervously and clutching her chihuahua.
Were you in love with Dodi?
"No, God no."
You were with him for quite a long time.
"But it was not like it was a committed relationship. We... we just dated for a long time."
Dodi was linked with a lot of women: Brooke Shields, Julia Roberts, Marie Helvin, Koo Stark, Britt Ekland, Winona Ryder, Daryl Hannah, Joanne Whalley, Tina Sinatra, Tanya Brier, even Susannah Constantine who, according to one interviewee, was "mad for Dodi" and wouldn't leave him alone.
Denice explained to me how it worked. "You have a ton of money, there are a bevy of beauties, you just point your finger like that and these girls are like ... There are a lot of girls in this town that are like vultures, I tell you; they go after some men, and Dodi would be a definite catch for many of them."
But Dodi wasn't interested in just any girls. He was interested in famous girls. He hired Pat Kingsley, the legendary publicist of Tom Cruise and Madonna, to make sure he was photographed with his famous dates getting out of limousines and going into LA restaurants. But though Dodi had a reputation for being a playboy, it is far from clear that he was actually dating or even sleeping with any of these women. But he was certainly seen with them. Photographed with them.
I'd thought that if anyone meant anything to Dodi, Denice might have. But I was beginning to realise that the deeper I digged, the shallower the story became. A picture was emerging of a man who, in spite of his immense wealth, struggled to make human connections and used famous women to create an image: of a playboy.
To find out more about Dodi's childhood and his relationship with his father, I arranged to meet Dodi's cousin Hussein Khashoggi at the Gore Hotel in Kensington. Hussein had known Dodi when they were both young and spent summers together, holidaying on a variety of yachts moored around the Mediterranean. Hussein's father Adnan Khashoggi and Mohamed al-Fayed were business associates in Cairo in the early 60s. Mohamed married Adnan's sister, but Khashoggi and al-Fayed had an epic falling out over money, though the details are murky. The rift created a vicious feud that exists to this day. Al-Fayed divorced Samira Khashoggi when Dodi was four, and he was subsequently shunted around the world from one private school to another, seeing next to nothing of his mother and little of his father.
I decided to treat what Hussein told me with a pinch of salt, given his fiercely anti al-Fayed position, but he is one of the few people who actually spent time with Dodi when he was a child. "We grew up with a lot of toys; we had a big boat, private jets, homes everywhere. It was a bit of a cocoon: you're in this world and nothing else matters outside. You have your drivers, your bodyguards, your staff, and everyone protects you. You're sent to boarding schools, so you really only see your parents for three months in summer and a little bit in winter."
When Dodi was 19, al-Fayed sent him to Sandhurst. Aside from the training of officers, Sandhurst also runs 18-month-long playing-at-soldier courses which are very useful to the rich sons of leaders of small countries, who might need their sons to stand in front of an army parade or two. At the time Sandhurst was becoming a popular choice for the sons of oil magnates, who wanted to buy a bit of public school/army kudos. This was the mid-70s, a time when the character of wealthy London was undergoing a radical change. Burkas were worn in Mayfair for the first time (by women carrying Gucci bags). Arab and Middle Eastern wealth was prevalent and conspicuous, and old establishment money didn't like it.
By doing a six-month course at Sandhurst, Dodi did his best to fulfil a certain ideal of what his father wanted him to be. "When you live in that world of big wealth," Hussein explained, "there is a loss of purpose and a lot of: 'What am I doing? What is my goal?' My main goal was to serve my dad, and it was very much like that for Dodi. Maybe Dodi never got a chance to really break out."
After Sandhurst, Dodi drifted into a life of luxurious super-elite non-activity. He had a monthly allowance of £400,000, and his PA, Pamela Maestre, told me that sometimes he would run into money troubles by the end of the first week. He might meet a girl, she explained, that girl might want something from Bulgari. Dodi might fancy a flight to Gstaad or St Tropez or New York - he'd need a jet: "Quick, Pam, charter me one now."
Aside from his impulse buys and bouncing cheques, Dodi became a collector of toys and gadgets. He was the first person in LA to have a Humvee and the first to own a Sony Walkman. In spite of his failure to become a soldier, Dodi retained a child-like glee in collecting all things military: army and navy uniforms that he loved to strut about in, and shelf upon specially constructed shelf in his Park Lane apartment of thousands of regimental baseball caps. It was a strange existence. He was looking for status in a world that gave him none, and from a father who indulged him financially but, according to Maestre, called him "my stupid son" behind his back.
Dodi became consumed by gloom, he was quiet and uncertain about himself. His friend the Hollywood director Stan Dragoti recalls: "He would fall silent suddenly and you weren't sure whether it was genuine depression or that he'd just got a pranging from his father."
Al-Fayed tried to set his son up in business, buying him a Ferrari dealership and even putting him on the board of Harrod's, but Dodi failed at both. He also bankrolled Dodi's most extravagant dream - to become a Hollywood producer, putting up the funding for Dodi's company Allied Stars, which made Chariots of Fire and won Dodi an Oscar.
It was in Hollywood in the 80s, far from the control of his father's micro-management, that Dodi came into contact with cocaine. As Dragoti puts it: "The large white cloud descended and whoosh, we were all in it." The elite Hollywood coke scene was a very different place from cocaine's tawdry, downmarket image today. In the 80s cocaine was chemical jogging. It was even seen as good for you: as energising, clean, creative, lighter and cleaner than the dark, curtains-drawn heroin scene that had descended on the 70s. According to Dragoti, "cocaine gave Dodi a personality". Rumours abounded that he was buying a kilo a week. "It was a social thing. It was like having a wine cellar full of Dom Pérignon. He clearly wasn't imbibing all of that by himself."
Did Dodi become addicted? Friends are very diplomatic, saying they never saw him doing it, then changing the subject. It's certainly the case that he began to develop psychological ticks: he became paranoid about germs, cleaning his hands with wipes if ever forced to shake a stranger's hand. Johnny Gold, owner of Tramp nightclub, who now lives in the Bahamas, recalls Dodi having a terror of being kidnapped. "He was sure someone might spike his drink. So he'd order a Stoli on the rocks. Take a sip, then push it away and order another one. He'd never drink from the same glass twice." At the Beverly Hills Hotel, he would book himself in to the same suite that Howard Hughes once lived in.
Time went by and Dodi remained trapped in this strange luxury bubble, feeling unable to please his father but desperate to do something that would gain his approval. Cue Diana and the summer of 1997. Events were conspiring to bring three people together who needed each other: Diana, unravelling, on the rebound from surgeon Hasnat Khan and keen to use Dodi to get back at him; al-Fayed, at the end of a long road of humiliation at the hands of the British establishment, and Dodi, keen to do something in his life that his father would consider worthwhile.
Ironically, at the one moment Dodi realised his father's ambitions for him, he had simultaneously engineered a situation in which he might break free from him for the first time in his life. In an adjacent bay to the one in which the Jonikal was moored, Dodi had another yacht, with another woman on it: Kelly Fisher, a model, who was engaged to marry Dodi and wore his mother's engagement ring as proof.
Dragoti told me Kelly and Dodi had been together two years: "a long time for Dodi". It was his first serious relationship since his hasty marriage in 1987 to another model, Suzanne Gregard, which ended after eight months. (Gregard had cited the fact they were always surrounded by bodyguards as the problem: "We were never alone.") But by the summer of 1997, Dodi and Kelly were engaged. They'd bought a house together in Malibu, and it appeared as if Dodi was engineering a break from his father to pursue his own life. But then he was suddenly faced with a stark choice: duty to his father with Diana, or love and freedom with Kelly. Dodi did what Dodi did best: he ignored the situation. But Kelly wanted answers and telephoned Dodi on the yacht. At first he wouldn't even take her call and gave the phone to his father. But eventually they did speak.
Kelly: "What happened to our engagement?"
Dodi: "What engagement?"
Kelly: "Our engagement. Don't you fuck with me, Dodi. You flew her [Diana] down to St Tropez and were seeing her all day, and fucking me by night."
Kelly was enraged by Dodi's apparent evasiveness, but he was guarded for a reason. Kelly was recording the entire conversation and Dodi was aware that something was up. Kelly's subsequent press conference - with her mother in tow - for the world's media, parading the ring and crying on her mother's shoulder, seemed at the time like just another character cashing in on the Dodi-Diana circus.
"They weren't going to get married," Dodi's close friend the Hollywood gossip columnist Jack Martin told me. "You don't think she [Kelly] was in love? You can't ask me that with a straight face. She was in love with the shopping."
I'm not so sure. In this shallow, suspicious world in which every relationship has another agenda, phone calls are recorded and everyone has their price, I still felt as if the Kelly moment had a shard of something genuine to it. Her uncontainable rage towards al-Fayed and Dodi was not the rage of someone looking to sell her story and make a quick buck. Kelly was clearly a woman spurned and Dodi, whatever he may have felt towards her, had his hands tied.
"You know," Hussein told me, "if the father and son had a private chat and his father said: 'This [the Diana situation] is good for you. I am going to make your life perfect, you are going to have everything you want', is he going to be able to resist that? You know, the alternatives may look very bleak, so you may just go along with it."
Another close friend of Dodi's, Henry Hay, a cashmere millionaire who partied with him in the 80s and remained close to him, says Dodi's sense of duty ran deep. That the very notion of him having a choice is to misunderstand where both he and al-Fayed were coming from. "There is a lot of confusion and misunderstanding in this area, especially in England," he says. "Why didn't Dodi stand up to his father? But you don't do this [in his culture] - it is unheard of. Family is sacred, the first born of the first born from Egypt, and your father is your father and there is a sacred bond in that."
The sacred bond was certainly stronger than anything between Kelly and Dodi. Asked what would make Dodi happy, almost everyone I spoke to said pleasing his father. It was a yearning within Dodi buried deep from childhood; a desire to fill the absence and inadequacy with his father's approval. It was what he had to do.
In a strange and very sad way, the crash in the tunnel sealed a perfect moment for Dodi. That Mercedes driving through Paris's dark streets could have been any anonymous diplomat's car. But it wasn't. Besides Diana, the exiled princess, there was a 41-year-old man-boy who had finally won his father's approval by sitting dutifully next to her.
The terrible irony of that journey is that it occurred because of a moment of defiance against his father - perhaps Dodi's only act of rebellion since his ill-fated wedding to Suzanne a decade earlier. As crowds gathered outside the Ritz, swarming with rumours that Diana was about to come out, Dodi panicked. He had decided to use the back exit instead. Security was frightened, because any change of plan was a bad idea and because it hadn't been agreed by al-Fayed. Both Dodi and security used the threat of speaking to al-Fayed - "The Boss" - against the other. Head of security Kes Wingfield recalled that: "We used the threat we'd have to ring London - as in ring the Boss - and he said there was no need as it had been okayed by Mr Mohamed. He said it had been okayed by Mr Mohamed."
Dodi's life had come down to a single phone call. At the inquest into Diana's death, al-Fayed denied speaking to Dodi on the night and agreeing to change the plan. He said he had told Dodi to "stay where you are".
Dodi marked his life by small acts of defiance in which he could breathe independently without incurring the wrath of his father. This would have been just another tiny act of defiance had it not ended in tragedy. Dodi lied to security about speaking to al-Fayed - and he paid with his life.
Al-Fayed's burden is the burden of the father who knows everything - who knew his son intimately and who loved his son in the only way he could. He knew Dodi wasn't the best judge of what he should be doing, and Dodi knew that, too. In that moment, everything al-Fayed had been building with Diana was destroyed. He lost a project, but more importantly, he lost his son - a man the world didn't even know. Yet in the days before losing him, Dodi had won his father's approval, something he'd been working towards his whole life. And he'd achieved the fame no amount of Hollywood dates had ever managed to secure.
Jack Martin told me Dodi would often say to him: "When am I going to meet a woman so famous she will get my face on the cover of People magazine?" With Diana, at last, he had.
• Dodi Al Fayed: What Really Happened is on Channel 4 on 22 January
