Who is dodi al fayed

In a photograph I came across of Dodi's desk in his Park Lane apartment there were just two pictures on display: one of him with Tony Curtis and Hollywood friends, the other with a woman I didn't recognise. She turned out to be Denice Lewis, a model who had dated Dodi on and off for five years and who now lives in Los Angeles, where she makes paintings of the deceased, mixing their ashes into the pigment. We met at her trendy downtown gallery, all barbed wire and ersatz graffiti on the outside.

Denice is stick thin, 6ft plus heels, wearing a trouser suit and holding a chihuahua. I asked her if she could remember where she and Dodi met. Was she impressed by him? I'd heard Dodi could click his fingers and have a helicopter there in 20 minutes. We went to great places, but I loved going to their country home and going horse riding most. We would go to the south of France and go out on the boat. It was a fairy-tale lifestyle. Denice explained to me how it worked.

There are a lot of girls in this town that are like vultures, I tell you; they go after some men, and Dodi would be a definite catch for many of them. But Dodi wasn't interested in just any girls. He was interested in famous girls. He hired Pat Kingsley, the legendary publicist of Tom Cruise and Madonna, to make sure he was photographed with his famous dates getting out of limousines and going into LA restaurants.

But though Dodi had a reputation for being a playboy, it is far from clear that he was actually dating or even sleeping with any of these women. But he was certainly seen with them. Photographed with them. I'd thought that if anyone meant anything to Dodi, Denice might have. But I was beginning to realise that the deeper I digged, the shallower the story became. A picture was emerging of a man who, in spite of his immense wealth, struggled to make human connections and used famous women to create an image: of a playboy.

To find out more about Dodi's childhood and his relationship with his father, I arranged to meet Dodi's cousin Hussein Khashoggi at the Gore Hotel in Kensington. Hussein had known Dodi when they were both young and spent summers together, holidaying on a variety of yachts moored around the Mediterranean.

Hussein's father Adnan Khashoggi and Mohamed al-Fayed were business associates in Cairo in the early 60s. Mohamed married Adnan's sister, but Khashoggi and al-Fayed had an epic falling out over money, though the details are murky. The rift created a vicious feud that exists to this day. Al-Fayed divorced Samira Khashoggi when Dodi was four, and he was subsequently shunted around the world from one private school to another, seeing next to nothing of his mother and little of his father.

I decided to treat what Hussein told me with a pinch of salt, given his fiercely anti al-Fayed position, but he is one of the few people who actually spent time with Dodi when he was a child. It was a bit of a cocoon: you're in this world and nothing else matters outside. You have your drivers, your bodyguards, your staff, and everyone protects you. You're sent to boarding schools, so you really only see your parents for three months in summer and a little bit in winter. When Dodi was 19, al-Fayed sent him to Sandhurst.

Aside from the training of officers, Sandhurst also runs month-long playing-at-soldier courses which are very useful to the rich sons of leaders of small countries, who might need their sons to stand in front of an army parade or two. This was the mids, a time when the character of wealthy London was undergoing a radical change.

Burkas were worn in Mayfair for the first time by women carrying Gucci bags. Arab and Middle Eastern wealth was prevalent and conspicuous, and old establishment money didn't like it. By doing a six-month course at Sandhurst, Dodi did his best to fulfil a certain ideal of what his father wanted him to be. What is my goal? Maybe Dodi never got a chance to really break out.

After Sandhurst, Dodi drifted into a life of luxurious super-elite non-activity. He might meet a girl, she explained, that girl might want something from Bulgari. Aside from his impulse buys and bouncing cheques, Dodi became a collector of toys and gadgets.

In spite of his failure to become a soldier, Dodi retained a child-like glee in collecting all things military: army and navy uniforms that he loved to strut about in, and shelf upon specially constructed shelf in his Park Lane apartment of thousands of regimental baseball caps. It was a strange existence. He was looking for status in a world that gave him none, and from a father who indulged him financially but, according to Maestre, called him "my stupid son" behind his back.

Dodi became consumed by gloom, he was quiet and uncertain about himself. His friend the Hollywood director Stan Dragoti recalls: "He would fall silent suddenly and you weren't sure whether it was genuine depression or that he'd just got a pranging from his father. Al-Fayed tried to set his son up in business, buying him a Ferrari dealership and even putting him on the board of Harrod's, but Dodi failed at both.

He also bankrolled Dodi's most extravagant dream - to become a Hollywood producer, putting up the funding for Dodi's company Allied Stars, which made Chariots of Fire and won Dodi an Oscar. It was in Hollywood in the 80s, far from the control of his father's micro-management, that Dodi came into contact with cocaine.

As Dragoti puts it: "The large white cloud descended and whoosh, we were all in it. In the 80s cocaine was chemical jogging. It was even seen as good for you: as energising, clean, creative, lighter and cleaner than the dark, curtains-drawn heroin scene that had descended on the 70s.

According to Dragoti, "cocaine gave Dodi a personality". Rumours abounded that he was buying a kilo a week. He clearly wasn't imbibing all of that by himself. Did Dodi become addicted? Subscribe to the Biography newsletter to receive stories about the people who shaped our world and the stories that shaped their lives.

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Under Jobs' guidance, the company pioneered a series of revolutionary technologies, including the iPhone and iPad. Type keyword s to search. The son of of billionaire Mohamed Al-Fayed, Dodi was a film producer and jetsetter, who split his time between Los Angeles, London, and other family homes.

Dodi dated several famous women and was allegedly engaged to model Kelly Fisher at the time he met Diana. There is considerable debate over how serious his relationship with the Princess was at the time of their deaths.

Diana and Dodi both partially visible in back seat , bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones front, left and driver Henri Paul, in their Mercedes-Benz S, shortly before the fatal crash which killed Diana, Fayed and Paul in The photo was presented as part of the evidence at an inquest.

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