On the D Train

The last season of The Crown, which recounts Princess Diana's brief, ill-fated romance with Dodi Fayed, dropped on Netflix this week. This is what it was really like to live in "Dodi's World."

On a soft August morning in 1997 in Saint-Tropez, where I was exhaling for a couple of weeks, my cellphone rang. It was my Newsweek bureau chief Christopher Dickey. “Dana, I know you are on vacation, but the tabloids are reporting that Princess Diana is in Saint-Tropez with Mohamed Al-Fayed’s son, Dodi. See what you can find out.”

I had already been on the Diana beat for some time—since her solo trip to France in November 1992, a month before her separation from Prince Charles was announced by British Prime Minister John Major.

But Dodi Fayed? Who was Dodi Fayed?

Mohamed Al-Fayed offered the photographer Peter Beard $2 million for Beard’s then-wife Cheryl Tiegs, so he could set her up with Dodi. Beard and Tiegs said no.

Thus began my deep-dive into the life of the Egyptian-Saudi Arabian playboy who, a mere month later, would die with Princess Diana in Paris when their car, driven by an intoxicated chauffeur trying to outrun the paparazzi, crashed in a tunnel under the Place d’Alma.