Romance, Irritation, Luxury Filled Last Day

The morning of the last day of their lives included a dip in the blue waters of the Mediterranean. The idyll under the August sun was drawing to a close, but that night they could look forward to the delights of Paris.

However, as the blond and tanned Diana, princess of Wales, 36, and the man who had become the new love in her life, Dodi Fayed, 41, son of an Egyptian billionaire, splashed in the warm seas off the Italian island of Sardinia where his triple-deck yacht, the Jonikal, was anchored, there was an unpleasant intrusion of reality to remind them, as if they needed it, how totally different they were from other couples.

Some paparazzi, photographers who make a living by chasing down and shooting pictures of celebrities, asked them to pose for a few photos. Diana and her companion refused--and apparently got dressed down verbally for it.

“There were just not heavy words, but implications, curses and insults directed specifically at the princess,” a witness later told a British newspaper. “It was awful.”

The incident may have been their first encounter of the day with the paparazzi, but it would not be the last.

And before the next day dawned, Diana, and the man who reportedly was hoping to marry the divorced wife of Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, were both dead.

After lunchtime that Saturday, the couple boarded a private jet at an airport in the north of Sardinia, a rocky island south of Corsica. About an hour and a half later, they landed at Le Bourget Airport north of Paris, the same field where Charles Lindbergh brought in his “Spirit of St. Louis” to a hero’s welcome in 1927.

On the tarmac to greet Diana and Fayed was the No. 2 security guard from the Ritz Hotel, the short and balding Henri Paul, 41, who, in addition to the paparazzi, was to play a pivotal role in the tragedy that had inexorably begun to unfold.

According to police sources, film confiscated from photographers who took pictures of the car in which Diana died show that paparazzi were onto the couple as soon as they touched down at Le Bourget. By 5 p.m., as many as 30 had gathered outside the Ritz, a hotel owned by Fayed’s father and a likely port of call for the couple.

Photographers’ determination to get a picture was whetted by the astronomical prices--up to $5 million, according to trade gossip--fetched by a grainy shot taken by one of their colleagues that was the first photographed embrace between Diana and Fayed.

The new love interest in the princess’ life was a millionaire playboy and film producer whose father owns, along with the Ritz, Harrods department store in London and a bevy of other exclusive properties. After Dodi arrived in Paris, he was thinking out loud with a relative about the months to come. Apparently he was planning to propose to Diana.

8:45 p.m. / ‘We Are Going to Get Married’

At 8:45 p.m. Dodi reportedly phoned a cousin, Hussein Yassin, a Saudi businessman who works for oil companies. “I asked him bluntly,” Yassin recounted in a newspaper interview. “I said, ‘Dodi, are you very serious about this relationship?’ And he said, ‘We are very serious.’ ”

“So, I said, ‘Well, you know, you should make it easy for yourselves and announce an engagement, that you are going to get married.’ And he said: ‘We are going to. We are going to get married.’ ”

When he had first arrived in Paris, Fayed had dropped in at Repossi’s, an exclusive jeweler on the Place Vendome opposite the Ritz. He picked up a ring, Repossi spokeswoman Alice Valentin confirmed. She declined to divulge further details.

But the British tabloid the Sun said it was a diamond ring worth more than $200,000 and quoted jeweler Alberto Repossi himself as saying Dodi had ordered a ring unlike any other and confided he wanted to “spend the rest of his life” with Diana.

On Saturday, after dodging photographers near the Champs-Elysees, where Dodi has an apartment, the pair showed up at the Ritz around 10 p.m., two bodyguards running interference through a clutch of photographers. Fayed’s father later said his son and Diana weren’t expected; according to some reports, they were planning to dine at a chic bistro in a trendy neighborhood near the Centre Pompidou but gave up because of the pressure from paparazzi.

If indeed there was a last-minute change of plans, it would prove disastrous.

The Ritz boasts a gourmet restaurant, L’Espadon, with a 100,000-bottle wine cellar that includes a magnum of choice Petrus ’61 at $8,000. The couple took a table there but, having been hounded from the Italian Riviera to Paris that day by photographers, and uncomfortable under the stares of other customers, Diana and Fayed left the restaurant after a few minutes to dine instead in a private dining room.

According to some waiters, Diana had a mushroom and asparagus entree and sole. Fayed chose the turbot. It would be their last meal.

Outside were the photographers, their gaze riveted on the Ritz’s main doorway. Paul, who went off duty earlier in the evening, when it seemed that Diana and Fayed wouldn’t be returning, was called back in. He returned in his own car about 10 p.m., according to security-camera footage released Friday by Harrods.

Police tests would later show that the weekend pilot and former officer candidate in the French air force had been drinking and had more than three times the lawful level of alcohol in his blood. The hotel said no one detected the smell of liquor on the security guard’s breath or any other signs of intoxication.

Camera footage of Paul walking into the hotel and talking to Dodi and Diana, one of Fayed’s bodyguards asserted Friday, shows clearly that he was not drunk.

According to Dodi’s father, Mohammed Fayed, his son’s British bodyguards as well as Paul warned Dodi and Diana that if they exited through the Ritz’s main door onto the Place Vendome, they would face a barrage of flashes. It may have been the younger Fayed himself who decided that Paul would help him and Diana escape the photographers from the rear of the building in a rented car.

The armor-plated Mercedes and driver they had used earlier, as well as an accompanying Range Rover, would be used to try to trick photographers into heading off in a different direction.

12:20 a.m. / Tactics of Deception Fail

At 12:20 a.m., with Sunday, Aug. 31, just beginning, the security-camera videotape shows Diana, Dodi and Paul walking to the service entrance of the Ritz. As they prepared to leave, Fayed slipped his arm around Diana.

A photographer was there to snap the scene as the princess exited the hotel. Wearing bright red lipstick, darkly tanned from her holiday and clad in a dark jacket and white slacks, the princess was going to her death.

Along with a bodyguard, Paul and his VIP passengers climbed into a black 1994 Mercedes-Benz 280 SE, a 2-ton sedan with a 197-horsepower engine. But the ploy to outwit the paparazzi had failed. As they pulled away from the Ritz, a number of photographers gave chase on motorcycles and scooters.

The limo swung into Paris’ central Place de la Concorde, passed the floodlighted Egyptian obelisk in its center, then bore right for the expressway that parallels the Seine and runs west toward the city’s exclusive 16th district. That route, too, seems to have been meant as a deception.

For Diana and Fayed were not bound for the 16th at all, where the Egyptian’s father is the owner of the former residence of the duke and duchess of Windsor on the fringes of the leafy Bois de Boulogne, but for Dodi’s apartment near the Arc de Triomphe. Evidently, the plan was to use the tree-flanked expressway, where there are no traffic lights that would have slowed the Mercedes down, to shake the paparazzi and then change course.

At the apartment, one French newspaper said, champagne was on ice, the major-domo standing by.

Through the thick foliage of the chestnut trees, the people in the Mercedes would have glimpsed the illuminated bulk of the Eiffel Tower on the southern bank of the Seine. It is one of the last things Diana, in the back seat of the car with Fayed, would see.

East of the busy Place de l’Alma, the road dips and makes a sudden bend to the left to enter an underpass. Paul, his senses allegedly dulled by alcohol, may have been startled by the wicked hook.

Film seized after the accident by police clearly shows photographers at one point around the Mercedes, and Paul tugging down the sun visor as if to prevent himself from being blinded by the photographers’ flashbulbs. A motorist from Normandy driving in front of Paul has said that in his rearview mirror, he saw a motorcycle carrying two people swerve into the path of the Mercedes.

Witness accounts concur that Paul was speeding; one initial police estimate mentions a possible 121 mph in a 30-mph zone. In any event, Paul was in trouble.

He hit the brakes hard enough to leave a trail of rubber more than 50 feet long, an action that would likely have made Dodi and Diana, whose seat belts were not fastened, lurch forward. But the heavy sedan, traveling at high speed, ran head-on into a square concrete pillar, the 13th from the four-lane tunnel’s entrance, in the central divider. Wrenched to the right with tremendous force, the vehicle careened into a brick-lined wall, rebounded, and shuddered to a stop in the slow lane, the horn blaring and the smashed-in front end pointing in the direction from which the car came.

Dodi and Paul were dead. A security guard riding in the front seat, Trevor Rees-Jones, 29, a former British paratrooper, was apparently saved by the passenger-side air bag, but his face had crashed through the windshield on impact, and he was horribly mutilated.

A physician, Dr. Frederic Mailliez, 36, was at the wheel of a vehicle belonging to SOS-Medecins, a medical charity, and traveling in the tunnel in the opposite direction. He may have been the first witness at the accident scene.

“I helped a passenger in the front seat, who turned out to be the bodyguard, and I helped a young woman behind who was Lady Di, but I didn’t recognize her,” the doctor said later. “She was like this [Mailliez lowered his chin onto his chest] and she was unconscious.

“She was moaning and gesturing in every direction, and in that position, when you are unconscious, you can’t breathe. So I lifted her head up and helped her breathe with an oxygen mask.”

12:27 a.m. / Her Most Grievous Wounds Were Hidden

The Paris fire brigade got an emergency call at 12:27 a.m., apparently from one of the photographers trailing Diana. Meanwhile, a number of men with cameras swarmed around the wreckage “as though they were mosquitoes,” said eyewitness Jack Firestone, 42, a visiting tourist from New York. “There was no movement of one human being trying to help another human being.”

Their two-note sirens blaring and blue lights flashing, helmeted firemen arrived at the scene in minutes. But it now appears that they may have neglected to alert the SAMU, or emergency medical services. The SAMU learned of the car wreck in a separate call from a witness at the scene, and, according to some reports, 10 minutes went by during which dispatchers verified that it was not a bogus alarm.

When they finally arrived in the pale, artificial light of the underpass, SAMU paramedics got right to work on the injured Diana. For 30 minutes, they gave her painkillers and tried to treat her wounds.

The initial diagnosis was “not catastrophic,” a rescue official remembered: head trauma, multiple fractures to a shoulder and thigh. The princess also had regained at least a state of semiconsciousness, said a few words and seemed confused and agitated.

Her most grievous wounds were hidden: She was bleeding massively from internal injuries. SAMU workers realized that when they tried to take Diana’s blood pressure and got an alarmingly feeble reading. The princess was rushed to La Pitie-Salpetriere hospital, one of the French capital’s largest, about four miles away on the Left Bank.

It was now five minutes past 2 a.m., and doctors at La Pitie-Salpetriere were aghast. Diana, they found, was suffering from massive chest injuries and bleeding. She went into cardiac arrest soon after arrival. Surgeons began a battle to save her life.

Blood--more than 20 pints, by one count--was transfused into her. Doctors also decided to cut her open, baring a hole in her left pulmonary vein. The tear in the vital blood vessel was mended. For two hours, Diana’s unresponsive heart, which had stopped beating on its own due to massive blood loss in her chest, was given urgent outside stimulation, by electric shock and doctors’ massaging hands.

The princess’ wounds were so grievous, medical experts later commented, that those efforts were almost certainly doomed to failure.

“With these kinds of injuries, heroic measures are called for but are very rarely successful,” said Dr. Alistair Wilson, a British emergency surgeon.

About 3 1/2 hours after the crash, six hours after Diana and Dodi’s meal at the Ritz, physicians decided nothing more could be done. At 4 in the morning, a doctor at the hospital, with the French interior minister by his side, announced that Princess Diana was dead.

The hospital chaplain, a Roman Catholic priest, prayed over Diana’s body.

Soon, mourners started to gather outside, bringing bouquets or single flowers to lay in a pile by the glass entrance doors.

Richard Kay, a journalist who has covered the royal family for 11 years, could claim more reason than most for grieving. He had counted himself among Diana’s friends for almost the past five years. About six hours before she climbed into the Mercedes, Kay later recounted, Diana talked to him by telephone.

“She told me she had decided to radically change her life,” the senior Daily Mail writer later recalled. “She was going to complete her obligations to her charities and to the antipersonnel land mines cause and then, around November, completely withdraw from her formal public life.

“She would then, she said, be able to live as she always wanted to live.”

The princess, Kay had concluded, was clearly in love with Dodi and believed that he was in love with her. “Diana was as happy as I have ever known her,” Kay wrote in his newspaper. “For the first time in years, all was well with her world.”