Private Di

Diana the princess-divorcée was also plotting publicity coups to upstage her rival, Camilla, that summer of '97. She timed her none-too-discreet escapade aboard the Fayed yacht to coincide with a birthday party Charles was giving for his mistress at his Highgrove estate. Diana told a friend that she fantasized about jumping out of the cake in a bathing suit—and did the next best thing by allowing the paparazzi to photograph her in a tiger-striped one-piece as she dove off the boat. According to Brown, Diana even informed photographers so they could capture the famous telephoto picture of her kissing Dodi out in the water off Corsica—a shot that earned the photographer some $500,000. After it was published, she complained that it was too grainy.

An aristocrat herself, Diana knew that the aristocracy of birth was now irrelevant. All that counted now was the aristocracy of exposure," writes Brown. "The camera was Diana's fatal attraction." So it was that a few days later, in the wake of "the kiss," the once tame paparazzi hounded her and Dodi mercilessly in Paris, chasing them from the Ritz Hotel to the tunnel near the Seine where they died.

Because there has been so much conspiracy theorizing about the cause of that accident, Brown devotes two full chapters to the tragedy. According to her, you can forget the talk that Diana was in love with Dodi, who was killed with her that night. She had no intention of marrying him, and nobody was out to murder them, even if Dodi's father keeps trying to convince the world that the royals have blood on their hands.

Of course he would, says Brown: "She died because four men in Al Fayed's empire weren't looking after her": Dodi, "whose plans were as chaotic as he was"; Al Fayed, who approved his son's "cockamamie notion" of using Henri Paul, the acting head of security at his Ritz Hotel, to drive them "instead of a qualified chauffeur"; Henri Paul himself, "who was found to be concealing a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit," and bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, another Fayed employee, who did not ensure that the princess wore a seat belt. "Little wonder that Mohamed Al Fayed's storm of regret at the loss of his son has been so volcanic in its repercussions of blame," says Brown. She also tells NEWSWEEK she thinks Mohamed himself was in love with Diana. "He was mad about her, yes," says Brown. "Absolutely mad about her." There is perhaps something of Euripides in this story.

The chronicle of Diana's life, in fact, however much it may have been told, and however maudlin some of the tellings, remains one of the great tragic narratives of our time, and Brown knows just the details to bring that point home. Despite her evident contempt for Al Fayed, for instance, she cannot help but sympathize with him as he waits outside the morgue in Paris before dawn that late-summer night in 1997, hoping someone can be found with a key so he can see the body of his son. And there is this line from Charles, talking to an aide in those hours between the news that Diana had been in a crash and word that she had been killed: "I always thought that Diana would come back to me, needing to be cared for."

"Heartbreaking," says Brown, whose book brings Diana back to all of us as a woman who still needs caring for.

© 2007