The giant photographs, sized two by one and a half feet, were larger than life in their gilded frames: Diana, the Princess of Wales, was radiant, and Emad “Dodi” Fayed, in open-necked sport shirt, looked equally relaxed among arrangements of lilies and trailing ivy in one of the main windows of Harrods on London’s Brompton Road. In the background, a bejeweled mannequin in Egyptian robes and headdress stroked a golden harp as if beckoning the portraits heavenward. Behind her was the store’s famous Egyptian Hall. Here, years earlier, the sphinx heads along the molding had been cast in what appear to be the likeness of one man: Mohamed Al Fayed, the store’s billionaire owner, and the father of Dodi.

Diana and Dodi had died in a high-speed car crash 10 days earlier. But the Harrods window still drew throngs of mourners bearing notes and fresh bouquets. The messages offered impassioned variations on a single theme: Dodi and Diana, star-crossed lovers, united in eternity. Peaceful at last. Together. Forever.

Diana is now sealed into the collective memory, and not with Prince Charles, the father of her sons and source of much of her unhappiness, but with a man who had been at her side for all of three weeks, a man scarcely known outside certain rarefied precincts of London, Manhattan, and Hollywood until his name burst into the tabloid press in August when he publicly became Diana’s consort.

In the dramatic quest for public sympathy that unfolded after the royal divorce, Diana showed a genius for manipulating the press. She was the “people’s princess,” rebelling against the haughty royals. What better way to annoy the British establishment than by taking up with a man whose father’s garish wealth and business manner made him an outsider among the upper classes?

After being denied British citizenship, Dodi’s father had bitterly cited racism. Later, Mohamed Al Fayed drew further enmity after revealing that he had paid prominent Conservative members of Parliament to raise questions relating to his business interests in the House of Commons. Fayed’s revelations of Tory Party “sleaze” contributed to Labour’s landslide last spring. (Vanity Fair is involved in libel litigation with Mohamed Al Fayed, arising out of a September 1995 article. In July, due to the recent delivery of further defense material, the case was adjourned from its scheduled hearing and is now fixed for September 1998.)

What Diana may have been slow to fully appreciate was that her relationship with Fayed’s son would almost certainly have dimmed her place in the British imagination. Her mystique rested not only on her glamour and vulnerability but also on her monarchical and aristocratic associations. Had the Princess actually married Dodi and settled, as some speculated she might, in Paris, she would probably have lost favor, even with the masses.

Dodi Fayed was a 42-year-old man/child with a lavish monthly allowance—by most accounts $100,000. He was charming and generous, but his good intentions couldn’t dislodge his reputation for reneging on commitments and creditors. He was seen as someone who lacked the drive—or, more flatteringly, the ruthlessness—to make it on his own. When his romance with Diana hit the headlines on August 7, Dodi suddenly faced the kind of scrutiny that even members of royal families are ill-prepared to withstand. If Diana was reading the tabloids closely, as she was known to do, she likely learned a lot. Dodi was accused of failing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent, wrecking rental properties, selling film rights he didn’t own, and neglecting to pay attorneys, doctors, repairmen, and even his projectionist. One account, from model/actress Traci Lind, alleged that during their affair they used nicknames (Bruisey and Gippo) and fought “like children,” trading pushes and slaps. She also claimed that he once threatened her with a nine-mm. Beretta.

The biggest splash came in mid-August when a sobbing 31-year-old model named Kelly Fisher sued Dodi after he jilted her to take up with Diana. Having suffered the demise of an engagement sealed with a sapphire-and-diamond ring, Fisher accused Dodi of failing to pay her $440,000 in “premarital support” which, she claimed, he had pledged in return for her giving up modeling. (Exhibit A: a check for $200,000 that he had written to her on a closed account.)

Fisher sold her story to Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World and the Sun for an estimated $300,000 to $450,000. She claimed that while Diana was on one Fayed yacht she and Dodi were on another, making love. She said that Dodi kept an “astonishing array of weapons,” and that he was “flabby and out of shape” and so germ-obsessed that he traveled with Handi-Wipes and oxygen tanks. (After Dodi’s death, Fisher dropped her suit.)

Understanding Dodi is complicated; he was a chameleon with a tendency to tell tall tales about himself. “Dodi was many things to many people,” says Tina Sinatra, his longtime friend with whom he had a brief romance in the 1980s. “His relationships were very varied and quite inconsistent.”

In Arabic, Dodi’s given name—Emad—means “someone you can depend on,” but friends and foes remember him as desperately needy, by turns generous and insensitive, impulsive and careful. He had been a rich, lonely child, and his financial dependence on his father stunted him as an adult. Even in his 40s, friends called him a “kid” or a “boy.”

Lacking any real professional distinction, he defined himself by women—the more famous and beautiful the better—actresses Valerie Perrine, Brooke Shields, Joanne Whalley, Winona Ryder, Tanya Roberts, and Mimi Rogers; models Marie Helvin, Koo Stark, Traci Lind, and Julia Tholstrup; celebrities Tina Sinatra and Charlotte Hambro (a granddaughter of Sir Winston Churchill’s). He pursued them with unabashed romanticism, idealized them, and sometimes spurned them. “He had the attitude that the woman he was with reflected on him,” says his longtime friend Michael White, a producer. Princess Diana represented Dodi’s lifetime achievement.

Winging his way on G II’s and cruising on 200-foot yachts, sending gifts of caviar, cashmere, and smoked salmon to his friends, Dodi had no “real life.” He never had a home to speak of. His father owned the apartments on Park Lane in London and just off the Champs-Élysées in Paris where Dodi often stayed. Dodi rented mansions and beach houses in Los Angeles, and used his family’s vacation homes in Saint-Tropez, Gstaad, and Scotland. “I have no idea where Dodi thought was home,” says White.

“Around the office we used to always say, ‘Dodi is a character in a movie,’” recalls Jack Wiener, a producer who was Dodi’s partner for seven years. A sense of unreality touched everything Dodi did; in many ways, he was the victim of his own misguided, hopelessly romantic dreams.

At the time of Dodi Fayed’s birth, on April 15, 1955, in Alexandria, Egypt, his father was working for $280 a month as a “commercial manager” for a furniture-importing company owned by Adnan Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian who would later become a multimillionaire arms dealer. Mohamed had met Adnan’s sister Samira on Stanley Beach in Alexandria in 1953, and they married on July 16, 1954.

The Khashoggis had a good pedigree: Adnan and Samira’s father had been private physician to the king of Saudi Arabia. Although Dodi’s father would later claim to have been born into an old Egyptian family enriched by shipping, land, and industry, he was actually the son of an Alexandria schoolteacher. Business documents list Mohamed’s birthplace variously as Al Fayedia, Dubai, Alexandria, and Cairo.

Mohamed’s relationship with Khashoggi ended in 1957 amid recriminations. By 1959, Mohamed and Samira were divorced. The father received custody of his son—according to Muslim custom, as Dodi would explain—and the boy grew up in Alexandria. Mohamed took a Finnish wife, Heini, who bore him four more children. Dodi’s mother married her cousin and spent time in Cairo, Paris, and Madrid. Her second husband died in a car crash at age 45, and her mother, Samiha, died at 51 after a botched face-lift. For all her heartache, Samira kept her affectionate nature. “Dodi obviously inherited from his mother all those gentle, wonderful, warm, and kind characteristics,” says model Marie Helvin, his close friend.

Dodi disclosed little about his upbringing, but he indicated that he had been cared for largely by servants while his father traveled the world. “One measure of [Dodi’s] isolation,” recounted The Sunday Times, “is that close family members seem unsure with whom he lived, recalling vaguely that his time was divided between Egypt and palaces on the Côte d’Azur.”

Most accounts said that Dodi was raised a Muslim, though, oddly enough, he told Suzanne Gregard—his wife for eight months during the 1980s—that he considered himself a Catholic. “Maybe the help in the house was Catholic,” says Gregard. He also suggested that for most of his childhood he didn’t really know his mother. Gregard believes that he didn’t actually meet her until he was in his teens—though photographs show him with her at five or six.

Dodi was the stereotypical poor little rich boy, showered with toys, treated to luxurious holidays, but essentially lonely. Jack Martin, a Hollywood columnist and Dodi’s friend of 22 years, remembers a conversation during Dodi’s 30th-birthday party thrown by friends at the White Elephant on London’s Curzon Street. “Dodi turned to me—and this is the only time I saw him teary,” recounts Martin, “He said, ‘This is the first time anybody has ever given me a birthday party.’”

In 1968 his father sent the 13-year-old Dodi—a mediocre student—to Le Rosey, a small Swiss boarding school famous for its unique three-month skiing term in Gstaad.

Dodi left after one year, according to Philippe Gudin, director general of Le Rosey. Peter Riva, grandson of Marlene Dietrich and a Le Rosey grad, remembers that Dodi found it “really tough.” During a lunch with Dodi’s father in the early 80s, Riva asked, “Why did you send him there?” Mohamed replied, “I knew people who sent their children there.”

The next five years of Dodi’s life are an enigma. “I don’t know anything about that, I’m afraid,” says Michael Cole, a spokesman for the Fayed family. “Mohamed was living here [in London]. Dodi would probably have lived here, but I don’t know what he was doing.” Several reports indicate that Dodi’s father provided him—at the age of 15—with his own London apartment, at 60 Park Lane (a building Mohamed still owns), along with a chauffeured Rolls and a bodyguard.

We do know that at age 19 Dodi enrolled at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, where he took the six-month course from January through June 1974. (The half-year stint was a less stringent version of Sandhurst’s traditional program.)

Dodi submitted to Sandhurst’s regimen of fitness training, marching, team games, exercises in signals and communications, and training in weaponry and other military equipment. “He had a reasonable build. He wasn’t fat and pampered and soft and flabby,” says Major Tim Coles, who lived in the room next door. “He walked gracefully and converted it into an upright military posture.

“I don’t remember him making a particular fuss,” continues Major Coles. “He was quiet, intelligent, pleasant, had a good sense of humor, was friendly, and appreciated help when anyone gave it.”

Dodi ended his military career after receiving his commission at graduation—the equivalent of a second lieutenant. He told Major Coles that he planned to join the Dubai air force; instead, he served briefly as an attaché at the United Arab Emirates embassy in London. The job didn’t limit his active nightlife. He began to frequent Tramp, a members-only London nightclub owned by Johnny Gold, a friend of Mohamed’s. “He would come here with eyes popping,” recalls Gold. With its booming disco and hamburgers garnished with suggestive messages (“To a sexy dish”), Tramp was a magnet for 70s men on the prowl. Gold held court and Dodi joined him most nights, sipping Stolichnayas and smoking Cohibas. “He spent many nights here,” says Gold, “often by himself. He was a good bachelor. Women liked him.” Dodi’s manner was that of a friendly puppy, always eager to please. “What endeared him was that he was without guile, although not without bullshit,” says Peter Riva.

Dodi stood about five feet ten, had a soft voice with a slight Middle Eastern accent, curly black hair, expressive light-brown eyes, and a smile offset by a slightly sinister mustache. “I didn’t think he was good-looking,” recalls Nona Summers, a London socialite. “But he was nicely dressed, wore lovely cashmere, nice shoes, very soigné. And he smelt nice. He loved to laugh.”

At 21, Dodi had what Jack Martin calls “his first movie-star romance,” with Valerie Perrine, a Texas-born actress—11 years his senior—who was in London filming Superman. Martin found Dodi “painfully quiet and shy.” Recalls Martin: “He had no discernible ego.”

Dodi had been hooked on movies since his mid-teens, when he met Barbara Broccoli, the daughter of the late Albert R. “Cubby” Broccoli, who produced the James Bond films. Through her, Mohamed became friendly with Cubby, and eventually agreed to set up a film business with Dodi in 1979. Mohamed hired filmmaker Timothy Burrill to run the company.

Incorporated in June 1979, Allied Stars Ltd. listed two parent companies: Allied Stars S.A., a Liberian corporation, and the Compagnie de Gestion et de Banque Gonet, a small Swiss bank where Mohamed Al Fayed did business. Allied’s first project was Breaking Glass, a film about a rock musician. British producers Davina Belling and Clive Parsons had taken the script to Burrill, who submitted it to Mohamed, who provided backing of £1.2 million—equal to $2.5 million then and $5.25 million in today’s dollars.

“Dodi’s role was not very involved,” says Parsons. The crucial financial decisions were Mohamed’s, “whether because it was the first film or other reasons.” Through a $1.5 million sale to Paramount and other foreign-rights deals, the film almost immediately recouped the Fayed investment.

By 1980, Burrill had already launched a second project, based on a script brought in by producer David Puttnam about a Jewish boy and a Scottish divinity student who were on the British Olympic team in 1924. “We submitted it to Mohamed Fayed and he agreed to co-finance the film with Fox,” says Burrill. The Fayed investment was $3 million, and Fox put up an equal amount. Dodi would later boast to friends that he had discovered the script and pushed the project. “Mohamed,” says Puttnam, “made all the decisions. Dodi came on the set for a couple of days, and he came for some postproduction. He was nice and courteous.”

Released in 1981, Chariots of Fire won an Academy Award for best picture, pulling in some $40 million at the U.S. box office. “The profits were many millions of dollars because the cost of the film was so small and the worldwide gross was so great,” says Sandy Lieberson, Fox’s president of production at the time. David Puttnam estimates that Mohamed “can’t have made less than $10 million.”

Chariots of Fire put Dodi Fayed in a position to be a major player in Hollywood. But nothing happened for three years. One night in 1983, Jack Wiener, a former Columbia executive turned producer, ran into Dodi at Tramp. “Come and see my dad,” Dodi said. “We have this film company now, and it would be really nice to work together.” Wiener went to see Mohamed, who made an attractive offer: Wiener would associate himself with Dodi, and Mohamed would supply development money for options and scripts. The only condition, says Wiener, was “we had to come to Mohamed with whatever it was we were interested in.”

Wiener and Dodi found nothing promising until a friend of Dodi’s came up with the script for F/X a thriller about a special-effects man. Wiener jumped at the project, and Mohamed put up the option money.

Dodi contacted his friend Mike Medavoy, who headed Orion Pictures. Orion financed the film and refunded the development costs to Mohamed. Dodi and Wiener each received producer’s fees of $500,000 for F/X and its 1991 sequel.

Wiener could have taught Dodi the nuts and bolts of film production. But, as quickly became clear, Dodi lacked the desire necessary to see a film through all the difficult stages of budgeting and production. F/X took 13 weeks to shoot, and Dodi was there for 4 of them. Instead of arriving for rehearsals at seven a.m., he showed up at lunchtime. “He had the passion to make movies, but he didn’t see his role as being there every day,” says Weiner. “It was a shame. It would have been a way for him to learn.” Bill Condon, scriptwriter on the F/X sequel, had only one meeting with Dodi, whom he thought “incre-dibly sweet.” But Dodi’s “one word of advice,” recalls Condon, was “to make sure it was funny as well as full of action. That was kind of it, I hate to say. He was marginal.”

Enthusiasm helped cam-ouflage Dodi’s inactivity. “In meetings he seemed cordial and professional,” recalls director Charlie Matthau. “He asked intelligent questions about the script.” Those close to Dodi knew, however, that he was simply playacting. “You could sit in meetings and everything seemed perfect,” says a producer who worked with him. “But there comes a time when you believe you are another person, and Dodi did that. . . . There was no evil there, just keeping up a particular image that you would love to be.”

Dodi—in his 30s by now—had never outgrown his dependence on his strong-willed father, and this he found to be emotionally and professionally crippling. Any son of such a formidable figure must work doubly hard to prove himself, but Dodi never did. Those who knew father and son believe that Mohamed Al Fayed loved Dodi and wanted the best for him. “In a strange way Mohamed idealized him,” says a producer, another of Dodi’s acquaintances in the film business. But, for whatever reason—perhaps because he grasped his son’s limitations and wanted to protect him—Mohamed put Dodi in an impossible trap. “It’s like when you are training a dog and you use a choke chain,” says the producer. “You give a little freedom, then you need to give a pull. Dodi was encouraged to fly and then not allowed to.”

Unable to make any independent decisions, Dodi never fully experienced the personal or professional challenges of adulthood. He was remarkably sheltered. “He was sort of like a deer in the headlights,” says producer Mark Canton, the former Sony chieftain who recently returned to Warner’s, where in the early 80s he first encountered Dodi. As Wiener recalls, “Mohamed would say to me, ‘Jack, please keep an eye on him and take good care of him.’” Yet shielding him from failure—and allowing him to maintain the illusion of success—meant Dodi would be caught out time and again.

On the surface, Dodi was a dutiful son. “If we were away he would call his father every day or every other day and report in,” says Wiener. Dodi was rarely known to criticize his father. “He had great pride in Mohamed, great respect,” says Johnny Gold. “From what Dodi said, they had a wonderful relationship.” One close friend did sense that Dodi was “frustrated” by his lack of independence. “He always wanted to please his father,” says the friend, “and he would have loved to have been successful like his father.”

In Mohamed’s presence, Dodi was deferential and quiet. “When Dodi had to see his father, everything stood still,” says Nona Summers. His occasional sullenness may have stemmed from what some saw as inconsistency on the part of Mohamed. “Mohamed really did love his son,” says Jack Wiener, “but he could be very strict with Dodi and, the next moment, could be extremely warm and generous. That kept Dodi off-balance. Mohamed was the patriarch of the family, and it was difficult because Dodi never knew how his father would react.”

With an allowance of $100,000 a month, Dodi, it seems, would have been hard-pressed to overspend, but he leased homes in Beverly Hills and Malibu for $25,000 a month, insisted on chauffeur-driven cars and security guards, and spent wildly to impress friends.

The cycle was inevitable: a spending binge by Dodi was followed by Mohamed’s declining to pick up certain bills. “Dodi’s father could be quite strict about charges for hotel suites,” recalls Wiener, “so we tried to be careful that those mishaps didn’t occur.” But Wiener couldn’t supervise everything. Jack Martin remembers being with Dodi at the Westwood Marquis when Mohamed pulled the plug. “Dodi had done something his father didn’t like,” says Martin. “He had a penthouse and Mohamed called the management and said, ‘I am not paying my son’s bills.’”

“Dodi would commit himself and then the funds were not there, and he would try to talk his way out of it,” says a producer in Hollywood. When confronted, Dodi would usually apologize and promise payment. If he wrote a check, however, it might well bounce. Peter Riva once cornered Dodi in the lobby of the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, demanding that he repay him $15,000 for the cost of staying at the Hôtel Ritz in Paris (which has been owned by Mohamed since 1979). Dodi had invited Riva as his guest, and then Riva had been presented with the bill. Only when Riva got fierce with him did Dodi hand over the money—in cash.

Some of Dodi’s creditors sued him. In January of 1994, American Express filed a lawsuit against Dodi for failing to pay a $116,890 debt. According to doc-uments from the suit, Dodi’s extravagances during one three-month period included $12,835 on furs, $10,684 on Armani clothes, $14,869 on jewelry, and even $9,385 at Harrods, his father’s store. Dodi’s troubles began when he wrote two bad checks totaling $31,815 and, in the same month, piled up another $60,974 in charges. These included $5,657 to American Airlines and $5,000 to the Hotel Bel Air. Other creditors walked bitterly away. One prominent Hollywood actress had to reupholster every piece of furniture in her Malibu beach house because of the damage done by Dodi’s dogs during his eight-month rental. Although Dodi supplied new fabric and gave up his security deposit to partly cover the costs, the actress says, “I just don’t think he had respect for other people’s property. We didn’t pursue him, because we wanted him out of our lives.”

During the 1980s, Dodi became part of the jet-set drug scene. “He was into cocaine,” says Nona Summers, whose own problems with the drug sent her into a rehab program. “I never did it with him. He didn’t tell the truth about many things, but he told me he had done it, that he got himself in trouble and stopped.” Another friend recalls a scene in the suite Dodi was renting in the Waldorf Towers in New York. “The only time I ever saw a kilo of cocaine was in Dodi’s apartment,” says the friend. “It was his weekly buy. . . . I was there when the kilo was around, when the cokeheads went into the bedroom.” Jack Martin, who says he never saw Dodi high, believes that “Dodi bought a lot more for others than himself. That was part of his low self-esteem. He loved to buy, to give, to provide.”

Dodi’s impulsive generosity became one of his hallmarks. “He wouldn’t give so you would do him a favor,” says Peter Riva. “He was after acceptance, people enjoying his company, or prestige.” During the filming of F/X, Dodi brought Jack Martin to New York and put him up for several months at the Pierre Hotel, where the Fayeds had an apartment. “It was the best way to be a houseguest,” says Martin. Once, Dodi was at Tramp when he suddenly remembered that it was the birthday of Johnny Gold’s wife. Recalls Gold, “He was wearing a magnificent Cartier gold chain, and he said, ‘I’m really bad at this sort of thing,’ and he gave it to her.”

Nona Summers attended a dinner at Dodi’s Park Lane apartment in the 80s with a group that included Jack Nicholson. As his guests sat down, Dodi put a huge white truffle in the middle of the table. While various guests tried to shave it, the truffle rolled around the table, sending everyone into paroxysms of laughter. For dessert, Dodi’s waiter brought a tray heaped with ice-cream cones wrapped in paper.

Dodi’s generosity extended to himself. When Dodi arrived on the set of the F/X sequel in Toronto, Jack Wiener told him he would have to share a Winnebago to keep costs down. “Don’t worry about me,” said Dodi brightly. He said he had bought a 45-foot luxury coach from a rock band and was having it driven to Canada from Oklahoma. (Actually it was rented.) “Don’t you understand?” exclaimed Wiener. “That’s going to cost you a fortune.” Replied Dodi, “Can’t we put it on the movie?” Wiener told him he could not. “We had a very small lot, and the thing could hardly fit in. Eventually they came and took it away,” recalls Wiener.

Beginning in the 70s, Dodi began collecting expensive cars, which reportedly included a 1928 Rolls-Royce and five Ferraris. His passion for Italian autos was so intense that in 1989 Mohamed bought Modena Engineering, a Ferrari dealership outside London, and made Dodi a director. Dodi’s favorite car at the time was a Ferrari Testarossa that cost $182,000.

Many of Dodi’s preoccupations were boyish. His Park Lane apartment featured a collection of baseball caps, and he was obsessed with military memorabilia. He used a family yacht, the Cujo, which was a converted U.S. Coast Guard cutter that sometimes flew a skull-and-crossbones flag. When he was in Los Angeles, he drove a $90,000 Hummer.

He rarely read a book and expressed few opinions or interesting ideas. “He wasn’t someone who was the life and soul of a party,” Michael White says. “He would sit and observe.” Dodi scoured the newspapers for gossip but showed no curiosity about politics or world affairs. “He didn’t care about what was going on in the world as long as it didn’t affect him,” says Jack Martin.

Dodi was fanatically concerned with personal security. During one seven-week period in 1987 he ordered “over 700 hours of highly specialized security and surveillance” for $34,023, according to the California firm that he hired. (Dodi’s failure to pay the bill resulted in a lawsuit.) Self-importance was clearly a factor, but Dodi seemed to have genuine fear. When he was at Tramp, “he would have a drink and go off and dance and then come back and order a fresh drink to make sure nothing was put into his drink,” says Johnny Gold. Wherever he went, Dodi would insist on having one or more bodyguards and a backup security car in tow. “I would ask, ‘Dodi, who wants to kidnap you?’” recalls Jack Martin, “and he would say, ‘I am very valuable.’ He played at it.”

One of the most disconcerting aspects of Dodi was his tendency to exaggerate the extent of his wealth and privilege. When he rented a house, he would say he owned it. “I don’t think a word of truth came out when he talked about possessions,” says Nona Summers. “He was gentle and kind but a complete liar. . . . He wanted to impress people.”

His friends learned to live on “Dodi Time.” “You couldn’t get cross with Dodi,” says Michael White. “He was like a sweet child in many ways. You felt that if you told him off he would burst into tears. . . . He didn’t have the ability to say ‘No, I can’t do that’ or ‘I don’t have that.’ His way of getting out of things was not to be around or not to answer the phone.” The tolerance of his friends reinforced Dodi’s belief that he could talk his way out of anything.

With the exception of some jilted lovers, the women in Dodi Fayed’s life took the most forgiving view of his fantasies and fibs. “His friendships with women were easier,” says former wife Suzanne Gregard. “He had an innocence that was very appealing, attractive, and gentle,” says Marie Helvin, who was impressed that Dodi did not use profanities and disliked dirty jokes. Helvin and his other women friends served as sister/mother figures who were flattered when Dodi poured out his troubles. But for all the jewelry, furs, and flowers he showered on women, he didn’t know how to make any emotional commitments. “He sabotaged his relationships because he was always looking for a bigger and better deal,” says a close female pal.

In his adult years, Dodi tried to get to know the mother he had seen so seldom, calling her frequently. He spoke of his mother with reverence and pride. When Jack Martin met Samira in Cairo, he found a flamboyant “Auntie Mame” with lots of jewelry and a great beehive of blond hair. “She was warm but very strong,” recalls interior designer Corinna Gordon, a friend for many years. “I think Dodi was a little intimidated.”

In the mid-80s, Samira became ill with cancer. When she died in the fall of 1986, Dodi brooded for a long while. One former girlfriend said he went into an “emotional free fall.” Perhaps coincidentally, Dodi’s legal and financial problems started then.

Dodi made his first effort to settle down in 1983, when gossip columns reported his secret engagement to Linda Atterzaedh, a wealthy Iranian, but that fizzled quickly. Afterward, he dated Brooke Shields when she was a sophomore at Princeton. He met Suzanne Gregard when she was a 26-year-old model, and he courted her with his usual avidity, flying her by Concorde to London for weekends, even buying the adjacent seat so she wouldn’t have to speak to anyone. When she balked at his invitation to visit England for two weeks, he booked her as a model at Harrods so she would be forced to come. “Dodi worshiped Suzanne,” said her brother, Ken. “She actually told me once, ‘You know, he gets down on the ground and kisses my feet.’”

Only days before the end of 1986, Dodi proposed that Gregard marry him on New Year’s Eve in Vail. “Dodi was a pretty impulsive person,” Gregard tells me. “The day we were married the telephone was ringing off the hook with lawyers about prenuptial agreements. We never signed one. Dodi felt it would have been unromantic, and he trusted me.”

After a honeymoon in Malibu, the couple settled in a rented ($25,000 per month) town house at 118 East 62nd Street in Manhattan—at Gregard’s insistence, so she could continue modeling. But Dodi began to travel while Gregard was away on photo shoots. “I wasn’t able to follow him around,” she says. “When there is that kind of distance, it is hard.” Although neither would clarify the reasons, they decided—after eight months—to divorce. A decade later Gregard acknowledges that she initiated the divorce, and that Dodi had tried for a reconciliation. She also admits that she had been bothered by the heavy security. “We were never alone,” she says.

After the divorce, Dodi stuck to his favorite London haunts: Harry’s Bar, a Japanese restaurant called Miyama, Tramp, the Italian restaurant San Lorenzo. In Los Angeles he felt at home at the Bistro Garden and Caffe Roma. More often than not he would spend his evenings screening movies for his friends. He had several circles of male chums in Los Angeles and London, but the men closest to him were directors Stan Dragoti and Richard Donner, as well as Tony Curtis, Jack Martin, and Terry O’Neill, the fashion photographer. In the higher-powered Hollywood crowd, Dodi counted studio heads Terry Semel and Mike Medavoy among his friends, along with Mark Canton.

Financially, however, Dodi was more tangled than ever. By 1997 the dockets of Los Angeles Superior and Municipal Courts were filling up with cases in which Dodi was named as defendant. Among the claims against Dodi were $93,053 in back taxes to the I.R.S., $135,575 to director Glen Larson for rent and damages (which Dodi’s lawyers paid shortly before his death), and more than $150,000 to another former landlord, entrepreneur Larry Gordon.

In terms of sheer fecklessness and adolescent behavior, a lawsuit Dodi filed in 1993 against a former girlfriend named Amy Diane Brown may have been the most revealing. Dodi and the 30-year-old blonde model had been dating for seven months in 1992 when Dodi installed Brown in a Los Angeles penthousecondominium that he had bought for $175,000 in cash and a $300,000 promissory note. According to Dodi’s lawsuit, after Brown badgered him for two months, he pledged to give her the deed once she “promised . . . she would continue to be his romantic companion.”

After Dodi had the property transferred, he claimed, Brown summarily dropped him. But, according to a source close to the case, Dodi then held on to some mink and sable coats that he had previously given to Brown and she had been storing at his Beverly Hills home. Finally he filed suit, alleging Brown had “deliberately schemed and planned to deceive him with promises,” and asking that the court evict her. She settled out of court, handing over the deed in return for her furs and some cash. Four years later, Brown says, “It is still so terribly painful. I feel he ripped me off.”

In the last couple of years, Dodi insisted to friends that he was starting to pull his professional life together. “He had no stand-alone reputation and he was trying to build that,” says Mark Canton, to whom Dodi talked about doing business. “My impression was he was more serious this time around.”

Mohamed tried for a while to get Dodi involved in Harrods, and in 1989 he put his son on the board and constructed an office for him in the executive suite. Dodi enjoyed suggesting ideas for clothing designs and fabrics at both Harrods and Turnbull & Asser, the shirtmaker also owned by the Fayeds, for window displays, and for restaurants at Harrods, where he took a special interest in the sushi bar. But Dodi resigned from the Harrods board after 18 months, and the Turnbull & Asser board after three years. “He never went too deeply,” admits Johnny Gold.

Jack Wiener had left Allied Stars in 1990, and Dodi was given office space at Tri-Star. Dodi subsequently notched production credits on two films: Hook, released in 1991, and The Scarlet Letter, released in 1995.

With the assistance of his father, a benefactor of the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in London, Dodi had acquired the film rights to Peter Pan, whose author, Sir James M. Barrie, had bequeathed his copyright to the hospital. Dodi had been trying to develop a Peter Pan movie since 1985 (rather appropriate, given his own character). Finally, toward the late 80s, veteran producer Jerry Weintraub bought the rights from Dodi and sold them for $1.35 million to Sony, which had its own Peter Pan project with Steven Spielberg. Weintraub declined to attach himself to the movie, because it was a Spielberg production. Dodi, however, received an executive producer’s credit, though he had virtually no role in making the film.

More recently, Dodi ran into problems with The Scarlet Letter (starring Demi Moore). Although the film’s principal backer was actually entitled to sell international distribution rights, Dodi sold the rights in several European countries without telling anyone. When the film’s director, Roland Joffé, confronted Dodi, he first said Joffé was mistaken. Joffé then produced contracts bearing Dodi’s signature, prompting Dodi to claim they were forgeries. Amazingly, Dodi was later accused of trying the same thing with two other films to which he didn’t own the distribution rights, The Grass Harp, which was released in 1996, and Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried, which was made but never released.

By last spring, Dodi was talking more earnestly about settling down. He told Marie Helvin, “I’m such a different person; I have changed so much.” He spoke to Johnny Gold about buying a house in London and, by Kelly Fisher’s account, proposed to her no fewer than four times. On June 20, Dodi bought Julie Andrews’ five-acre compound at 27944 Pacific Coast Highway on Paradise Cove in Malibu for $7.3 million, including furnishings valued at $250,000. (The actual owner is Highcrest Investments Ltd.) Laughing with Mark Canton, Dodi said he had finally bought a house and paid for it. Fisher later said that the couple planned to live there as husband and wife.

Only weeks afterward, Mohamed invited the Princess of Wales to bring her sons, William, 15, and Harry, 12, to his villa in Saint-Tropez for a vacation. Mohamed had been a friend of her father’s, the late Earl Spencer, and her stepmother, Raine, the Countess of Chambrun, sits on the Harrods International Board. Asked why she accepted the invitation, Diana explained to one chum that Mohamed’s wife, Heini, was “one of her oldest friends.”

At first, Diana and her boys were with only Mohamed and Heini and their four children on one of Fayed’s yachts, the Jonikal. By Fisher’s account, Dodi was with her on another yacht nearby. Dodi joined his family three days into their vacation. The entire group was photographed extensively by the paparazzi as they swam, Jet-Skied, and relaxed on the yacht. On two evenings, Dodi made the strange, flamboyant gesture of renting a disco for William and Harry to enjoy privately. According to Fisher, Dodi was also visiting her on the other boat, and she had no idea he was romancing Diana as well.

Just two weeks later, Diana and Dodi were off on their first vacation together. Dodi said little directly to friends about Diana. Jim Hart, screenwriter for Hook, recalls how dazzled Dodi had been by Diana at the film’s London premiere in 1992. “He had admired and revered her from afar,” Hart says. “He talked about her, what a great lady she was.” Those who spoke with Dodi during the three-week romance said he seemed happy. He called Johnny Gold frequently and “used to giggle down the phone a lot,” says Gold. “He was enjoying it because he was enjoying her.” Instead of being bothered by the tabloid coverage, Dodi seemed to like it. “As an adult he had to prove himself and make himself seem bigger than he was,” says Jack Martin. “Dodi wanted to be famous, God knows.”

Two weeks before the crash, Dodi returned to Los Angeles to do some business. He phoned friends and visited his longtime pal restaurateur Nicky Blair, at Cedars Sinai Hospital, where he was being treated for cancer. “He gave me a big hug,” recalls Blair. “I was really in shock that he came to see me. Everyone was looking for him and he was only in town for 36 hours.” Flying back to New York on a private plane, Dodi spoke elliptically about Diana to Mark Canton. “He was happy the romance was blossoming,” says Canton. “He seemed superstitious, though. He didn’t want to go to where it might lead.”

Diana seemed more open. When she and her friend Rosa Monckton went on a holiday to Greece, Dodi insisted they use a Fayed jet, and the two women laughed about the tackiness of what Monckton described to The Sunday Telegraph as “green pile carpet covered in pharaohs’ heads.” Diana also told Monckton she was dismayed by Dodi’s lavish gifts. “That’s not what I want, Rosa,” Diana told her friend. “It makes me uneasy. I don’t want to be bought. . . . I just want someone to be there for me, to make me feel safe and secure.”

Diana told Monckton that she had made no decisions about her future. Through various journalists—Richard Kay of the Daily Mail, Taki Theodoracopulos of The Spectator—Diana sent signals that marriage was not on her mind. “It took her a long time to get out of a loveless marriage, and she’s not about to get into another,” wrote Taki.

According to Michael Cole, Dodi and Diana exchanged gifts on their last day together, August 30. Cole says she gave Dodi a pair of cuff links that had belonged to her father and a gold cigar cutter inscribed “With love from Diana.” Dodi is said to have given her a garish diamond-encrusted ring worth $205,000 that he had picked up at the Repossi Jewelers on the Place Vendôme that afternoon. Diana was said to have helped choose the ring, although her friends protested that it wasn’t her taste. “It’s pretty vulgar, isn’t it?” says Kay.

Dodi was also said to have given Diana a small silver plaque, commissioned “from a distinguished silversmith” and inscribed with a poem that he had written. Reports of that detail “stopped me dead in my tracks,” Tina Sinatra recalls. When she and Dodi dated in the 80s, he had admired a silver plaque in her house—a gift from her former husband, Richard Cohen, on their wedding day—engraved with these words:

“As if . . . I have tried many things, music and cities, the stars in their constellations and the sea—When I am not with you I am alone, for there is no one else, and there is nothing that comforts me but you.”

Dodi asked to borrow the plaque. “He loved it,” Sinatra tells me. “He promised me that he would copy and return it, and it became a running joke. After four, five, or six years, I knew I was not going to get it back.” Sinatra was actually touched to hear of Dodi’s gift to Diana. “It might not be the same plaque,” she says. “But if he loved it enough to pass to her, that’s very dear. It’s something I’ll always wonder about.”

The investigation by French magistrates of the accident in which Dodi and Diana were killed will grind on. In the meantime, debates continue. Jack Martin vividly recalls careening up Madison Avenue in New York in the 80s as Dodi exhorted his driver to “lose the paparazzi.” Dodi’s longtime friend Barbara Broccoli wrote in the London Times that “Dodi was obsessive about safety—he hated fast cars. . . . He was terrified of speed and so cautious that in the past five years he didn’t even like to drive himself.”

One of Dodi’s former girlfriends remembers thinking he was a wimp for driving his Aston Martin Lagonda at 40 miles per hour on English country roads. One of Mohamed’s former senior security aides has an image of Dodi tooling his Honda Gold Wing motorcyle around Saint-Tropez, “but he never got it out of first gear.”

Thirty-six miles outside London, Dodi Fayed was laid to rest in a huge fenced-in grave site, about a quarter-acre in size, at the Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. The day of Dodi’s burial, the grave site was a muddy clearing. Forty-eight hours later, it had been transformed by a Harrods designer into a garden bower, with a pristine lawn, a curving herbaceous border of ma-ture flowers, bushes, trees, a bench, and a wide flagstone path leading to the grave. A horizontal marble headstone five feet long and 18 inches high, inscribed DODI, was set behind the marble rectangle outlining the grave, which was covered in green marble chips. Prayers from the Koran were repeated five times a day—an audiotape running from 9 in the morning to 11 at night. In mid-October, the Fayed family moved Dodi’s body, headstone, and the surrounding marble to a private plot on their estate in Surrey.

Before that took place, a stream of mourners continued to visit the Brookwood grave. Among them, on a late-summer day, was a group of schoolboys in blue blazers, listening intently as their teacher told them the love story of Diana and Dodi. “It’s a shame they couldn’t have been put together,” remarked Carol Brown, an aide to the elderly. “They would have been lovely lying together.” Dodi Fayed had become a mythic figure utterly divorced from the sad realities of his life.

“The Mouse Who Roared,” Tina Brown, October 1985
“Diana: Brought to Heel,” Georgina Howell, September 1988
“Di Palace Coup,” Anthony Holden, February 1993
“The Princess Rebuilds Her Life,” Cathy Horyn, July 1997
“The Diana Mysteries,” Tom Sancton, October 2004
“Diana’s Final Heartbreak,” Tina Brown, July 2007