PEOPLE’s 1997 cover.
Princess Diana’s tragic death in a Paris car crash on August 31, 1997, shocked the world. It would become one of the biggest news events of the 20th century – and the only time PEOPLE has ever featured a photo-only cover with no headline. Here is that cover story in its entirety.
To her ex-husband,Prince Charles— as well as the rest of the world — the death ofDiana, Princess of Wales, was an unimaginable shock. On Sept. 1, the day after Diana, 36, and her companion Dodi Al Fayed, 42, died in a cataclysmic car crash in Paris, the distraught Charles walked the hills surrounding Balmoral, theQueen’s castle in Scotland. According to Britain’sDaily Mail, the prince, 48, who had consoled himself with stiff martinis and late-night calls to friends including his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, was spotted wandering alone at 6:30 a.m. under dour gray skies. “No one,” wrote the Mail’s Geoffrey Levy and Richard Kay, “has seen him racked with such a sense of frustration and confusion…. Over and over he asked himself how it could be that the fresh and uncomplicated girl he married when she was 20 should end her life in the mangled wreck of a car speeding through Paris.”
With Diana’s body lying in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace in London, the world seemed to be pondering the same question. If ever a life had seemed destined for greater things, it was Diana’s. In the words of designer Elizabeth Emanuel, who created the princess’s 1981 wedding dress, “She wasn’t meant to go now; she had such an incredible amount to give still.”
As the Lord Chamberlain’s office and the Spencer family finalized plans for Diana’s Sept. 6 funeral at Westminster Abbey (a rite that would include people whom she had touched through her charity work) and her private burial at her family church in Northamptonshire, her admirers were swept up in grief. And there was anger as well – at the swarm of paparazzi who pursued the Mercedes in which she and Al Fayed had been riding into a tunnel alongside the Seine; at the driver, a Ritz Hotel employee who, according to investigators, was legally drunk when the car flew out of control at a reported 121 mph; and at the press in general, whom many blamed for the death of a woman who lost all claim to privacy when she became a princess.
Princess Diana.Tim Graham/Getty
Ironically, Di’s life had seemed full of promise at the time of her death. Publicly involved since July with the attentive Al Fayed, a splashy Egyptian-born businessman and movie producer (Chariots of Fire) who was the son of the controversial billionaire Mohamed Al Fayed, she had vacationed with him three times in five weeks. On Aug. 21 the two began a private cruise on his family’s $32 million yacht, the Jonikal, exploring Riviera retreats and ending on the Costa Smeralda, where Diana was “glowing, enough to fill the room,” according to a guest at the Cala Di Volpe hotel. Dodi, meanwhile, was spotted at a boutique buying cashmere sweaters with a bodyguard. “All were size 54, which we assumed were for him,” says the saleswoman. “Then he bought a size-44 cashmere knit blouson with long sleeves and buttons. When his friend asked, ‘Who are you buying that for?’ he said jokingly, ‘You don’t know?’ It was obvious it was for Diana.”
On the day they died, the two returned to Paris in a jet belonging to Harrods, one of Mohamed Al Fayed’s properties. Arriving on the afternoon of Aug. 30, the lovers relaxed in a $2,000-a-night suite at the Ritz–another jewel in Al Fayed’s crown. Local lensmen lay in wait outside the entrance, but Dodi’s chauffeur, driving a Range Rover, was able to shake paparazzi who later pestered the couple near the Champs Elysees.
That evening, Diana telephoned the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay, who reported that she “was as happy as I have ever known her. For the first time in years, all was well with her world.” Exuberantly, Diana told Kay that she hoped to step back from charity work to concentrate on her private life. And five days earlier, she had suggested in an interview with the newspaper Le Monde that she was contemplating a dramatic move; branding the British press as “ferocious,” she said she would long since have fled the country if not for her sons. “Abroad it is different,” she said. “There I am received with kindness.”
A.G. Carrick/Diana Memorial Fund/Getty
That night was mild, with pinkish clouds drifting through a clear sky over the Seine. Close to 10:30 p.m., Diana and al Fayed were seated in the Ritz’s luxurious L’Espadon restaurant. Undisturbed, they locked eyes and murmured quietly over dinner (which, for Diana, was scrambled eggs with wild mushrooms and asparagus, along with sauteed sole). “They looked like two love-struck teenagers,” reported one Ritz staffer.
But as happened so often in Di’s life, reality intruded. At about 11:15, the maitre d’hotel whispered that about 30 photographers were massed outside the hotel. Holding hands, Diana and Dodi retreated to the private suite. There, the couple decided to race past the stakeout on their way to Dodi’s apartment off the Champs Elysees. At around 11:45 p.m., Dodi’s Range Rover, with his regular chauffeur, sped away from the Ritz. Two more decoys followed, but most of the photographers didn’t bite.
With Paul in the driver’s seat, Al Fayed’s Welsh bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, 29, beside him and Diana and Dodi in the back, the Mercedes, with its tinted windows, screeched away. After the Place de la Concorde, Paul sped onto an expressway along the Seine. On the mile-long stretch to the tunnel beside the Place de l’Alma, he picked up speed but lost none of their pursuers – at least seven cameramen on five motorcycles and scooters.
The paparazzi descended seconds after the crash. One photographer called his agency on his portable phone. “It’s a catastrophe,” he said. “She’s been killed.” With ambulances 15 minutes away, at least one cameraman began shooting the princess and Al Fayed, who died at the scene. Angry onlookers reportedly attacked him before police arrived, and gendarmes confiscated his film. (Arrested at the scene, the photographers – now free – face charges of crimes including manslaughter and failing to aid accident victims. They could draw up to 10 years in prison, as well as six-figure fines.)
That morning and throughout the week, public distress over the princess’s death was most intense in London, where thousands of dazed mourners made pilgrimages to Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace, Diana’s home. They buried the wrought-iron gates in daisies and lilies and propped up hand-lettered signs – “Born a lady, became a princess, died a saint.” Flags were lowered to half-mast, and services were held at churches including St. Paul’s Cathedral, where the Waleses had wed on July 29, 1981. At St. James’s Palace, the wait to sign the books of condolence lasted up to 11 hours.
Though one can only speculate about what might have been, Di seemed to have cared little about Dodi’s past. Overlooking his penchant for Ferraris, flashy women and unpaid debts (he had been sued at least 10 times in California), she appeared to be deeply in love. “Diana and Dodi were made for each other,” says photographer Terry O’Neill, one of the many friends who spoke of him warmly. “He offered the love, sympathy, understanding, quietness and politeness she needed. Also, he had the peripheral things – the boats, houses and security to give her the privacy she [craved].”
The notion of privacy, of course, proved to be a cruel joke. But last week, at least, the princess’s survivors grieved in peace. At Balmoral the royals built a wall between themselves and the outside world; with the Queen, a numb Charles bent to the task of keeping William and Harry engaged in normal life until Sept. 5, when they were to pay their respects to their mother at the St. James’s chapel. On the eve of what one Palace watcher predicted would be “the biggest occasion of its kind since Winston Churchill’s funeral,” Diana’s sons were last seen hiking the hills with their father and his Jack Russell Pooh, out of range of the photographers who stood at a respectful distance across the River Dee.
source: people.com
