Diana The Princess Of Wales Attends A Gala Reception & Preview Of Her ‘Dresses Auction’ At Christies In London. ; Dodi al Fayed.Photo:Antony Jones/UK Press/Getty ; Aaron Rapoport/CORBIS OUTLINE/Corbis/Getty
Antony Jones/UK Press/Getty ; Aaron Rapoport/CORBIS OUTLINE/Corbis/Getty
Warning: This post contains spoilers from season 6 ofThe Crown.
It’s one of the intriguing moments in the early episodes of the latest season ofThe Crownand was one of the big questions in the years soon afterPrincess Diana’s death: Was the iconic princess secretly engaged toDodi Fayed, or had he bought a ring preparing to propose?
In the final season of the Netflix show, the first episodes of which hit the streaming service on Thursday, Dodi proposes to Princess Diana in Paris just hours before their tragic death in a car crash. However, the royal turns him down, saying she’s not ready.
The question of their possible engagement became vitally important even 10 years after the couple’s 1997 fatal crash in Paris when it formed part of theinquest into Princess Diana’s death(along with the question of whether Diana was pregnant — she wasn’t). That’s because Dodi’s bitter father, Mohamed al-Fayed (whodied earlier this year), claimed it was one of the reasons behind the establishment plot to kill the couple.
Firstly, were Diana and Dodi, who had only got together earlier in that summer, in love? Richard Kay, a seniorDaily Mailjournalist who was close to the princess, wrote poignantly of a last call she made to him only hours before the fateful drive away from the Ritz hotel in Paris. In his moving reflections, written a day after her death (and reproduced in the book of tributesRequiem), he said she was “as happy as I have ever known her.”
Princess Diana vacations in St. Tropez in the summer of 1997.Michel Dufour/WireImage
Michel Dufour/WireImage
He added, “I cannot say for certain that they would have married, but in my view, it was likely.” (Kay later told the inquest into her death in 2007 that he had changed his mind on that.)
Princess Diana talked excitedly about seeing her sons,Prince William, then 15, andPrince Harry, then 12, who were holidaying in Balmoral with their father, Prince Charles.
“ ‘I’m coming home tomorrow, and the boys will be back from Scotland in the evening,’ “she told him. (Sadly, she would also call her sons that night andthey’d talk to her for the last time.)
Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed.Tim Graham Photo Library/Getty; Getty
But was she about to agree to marry again?The Crownshows the couple looking around a jewelry store while hiding out from photographers in Monte Carlo, and it is known that Dodi did, indeed, buy a diamond ring at the Repossi shop in Place Vendome, Paris for around $14,000. Was he going to give it to her at his flat, where they were headed on the night of their deaths? If it was an engagement ring, it wasn’t particularly expensive for a man of his means – “something of a let-down for such a big spender,” as Kaywould put it 20 years later.
However, Dodi did appear to have been planning something special. Rene Delorm, his butler, said he was asked that evening to have “the champagne on ice when they returned to the apartment,” Lord Justice Scott Baker, conducting the official inquest into the couple’s deaths,summed upin 2007. They never reached it.
Princess Diana with Mohamed Al Fayed attending a charity dinner for the Harefield Heart Unit held at Harrods, London, February 1996.Jayne Fincher/Getty
Jayne Fincher/Getty
The inquest into the couple’s deaths was conducted with forensic detail 10 years after the night that shocked the world. Ostensibly tasked with ruling how Diana and Dodi died, it also looked into all the circumstances around the tragedy. One of those was to assess the couple’s relationship, which had become such a bone of contention as Mohamed al-Fayed believed it was the root of the establishment’s — and the royals' — reason for wanting the couple dead.
It must be remembered that not only was Dodi coming out of a relationship with American model Kelly Fisher (whoclaimed that he had proposedto her), Princess Diana had only recently finished an intense relationship with heart surgeonHasnat Khan.
Kelly Fisher during a news conference in which her attorney Gloria Allred announced on July 14 that she filed a breach of contract suit against Dodi Fayed.KIM KULISH/AFP/Getty
KIM KULISH/AFP/Getty
Khan was, for many of her friends, Diana’s last true love. But, like so much in the princess’s life, it was complicated and complex.
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In the raw, immediate hours after the shocking news from Paris, Kay wrote, “In her two sons — and latterly in Dodi — she saw the only men in her life who had never let her down and never wanted from her anything except her being herself.”
Her planned reunion with Prince William and Prince Harry never took place, of course, and we’ll never know what the future would have held for the couple.
source: people.com
