Mohamed Fayed. Photo / Supplied
Covertly observing Mohamed Fayed as he inveigled his way into the court of his latest patron, a CIA agent summed Fayed up as being “friendly and evil at the same time”.
The description, contained in a secret memo from Haiti in 1964, has hardly been bettered and remained as applicable to the man who wormed his way into the orbit of the royal family in the 1990s as it was when he was breaking bread with the murderous dictator Papa Doc Duvalier.
Fayed’s brush with the CIA - and his ill-fated courting of Duvalier - is just one of the improbable episodes on his journey from penniless barrow boy in Alexandria to billionaire businessman and would-be father-in-law to the late Princess Diana.
He is such an irresistible character that the new series of The Crown devotes an entire episode to his backstory before it builds in later episodes towards Diana’s romance with his son Dodi that ended in tragedy in 1997.
The man who owned Harrods, House of Fraser, Fulham Football Club and the Paris Ritz was once a daily fixture in the nation’s press, as famous for his involvement in scandals as for his business acumen. The Crown has rightly attracted controversy, but it has also helped to introduce younger viewers to characters and episodes of the nation’s history of which they were previously unaware, and a whole generation has passed since Fayed was the nation’s pantomime villain.
The third episode of the series titled Mou Mou - the name Fayed preferred to be called by his friends - covers Dodi’s birth but skips his upbringing, which is essential to the understanding of the father-son dynamic. It opens in 1946 with a teenaged Mohamed, the son of a humble school inspector, selling Coca-Cola from a barrow in Alexandria. He meets and falls in love with Samira Khashoggi, the well-heeled daughter of a Saudi doctor, they marry and she gives birth to Dodi in 1955. The detail of him selling Coca-Cola from a barrow is true (he also sold sewing machines door-to-door) but it was not until 1952 that a friend introduced him to 17-year-old Adnan Khashoggi, the future billionaire arms dealer, who was starting a business selling furniture to his native Saudi Arabia. Impressed by Fayed’s natural salesmanship, he gave him a job and Fayed quickly generated large profits for the company. He married Adnan’s sister Samira, then aged 18, in 1954, and she gave birth to Dodi the following year.
With a loan from Adnan, Fayed went to Europe, bought expensive suits, stayed in five-star hotels and rented chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces in order to convince potential contacts that he was a high roller. He had an affair, which ended his marriage after two years, and was granted custody of Dodi, as was customary in Egypt at the time.
In The Crown, Fayed promises a newborn Dodi that he will be “the greatest of fathers” but in reality, as Fayed travelled the world building up his business, Dodi spent much of his early childhood living with Fayed’s brother Salah.
After the Suez crisis in 1956, Fayed bought a shipping company at a knock-down price from a Jewish businessman who was fleeing the country in the wake of President Nasser’s revolution. He courted traders he had met in Europe and rented a flat in Park Lane where he threw expensive parties attended by Scandinavian models. Posing as an exiled member of the Egyptian royal family, he managed to befriend the ruling family of Dubai and used his contacts to help the emirate (which had not yet struck oil) to raise money to build a harbour and infrastructure. He also acted as a middle-man between Western contractors and Dubai, earning large commissions in the process.
It was when Dodi was aged 10 that Fayed spent several months in Haiti, posing as a Kuwaiti sheikh. Backed by nothing more than his own chutzpah, he persuaded Duvalier that he was the man to build him a port and oil refinery. When it turned out there was no oil, Fayed left, but not before helping himself to £153,000 from a harbour authority bank account, according to Duvalier, who ordered his thugs from the Tonton Macoutes death squad to bring Fayed back, dead or alive.
The result of all this was that Dodi was closest to his mother, who died in 1986. He reportedly phoned her every day until her death, and once said: “If it meant giving up everything I have, I would do it to bring my mother back.”
Fayed is portrayed in the Netflix blockbuster as an overbearing father who controls his son through his money. When Dodi introduces him to his new girlfriend, model and actress Kelly Fisher (who has always insisted they were engaged) Fayed, brilliantly played by Salim Daw, rejects her as unworthy, and instead of being pleased that his son has found happiness with her, tells him that “making your father proud is what should bring you happiness”.
Taking matters into his own hands, he spots an opportunity to invite Diana to holiday on his yacht; makes sure Dodi, who had first met her 10 years earlier at a polo match, would be on board, and arranges for the pair to fall in love as if fixing one of his business deals. Fayed’s wild accusations that the Princess and Dodi were killed by MI6 on the orders of Prince Philip (who, he claimed, would never allow a Muslim to marry into the royal family) will be covered in the next series.
The loss of Dodi almost broke him. For the next 11 years he pursued every legal avenue he could in order to convince the world the deaths were a state-sponsored assassination, and that Diana and Dodi were “innocent victims” - the phrase etched onto a tacky memorial to them that once greeted visitors to Harrods.
Only in 2008, with the conclusion of an inquest into their deaths, did he give up the fight, saying that, for the sake of Princes William and Harry, he would accept the jury’s finding that the couple were unlawfully killed by a drunk driver in his employ. “I’m leaving the rest for God to get my revenge,” he added, tearfully.
Now aged 93, Fayed (who in 1985 married Finnish former model and actress Heini Wathen, 26 years his junior), still lives in Britain, attracting little attention since selling his major UK business assets, Fulham FC and Harrods, a decade ago. He divides his time between his estates in Surrey and Scotland, where his twilight years are spent doting on his grandchildren.
To his enemies, of whom there have been many, Fayed is a chancer whose success was built on deceit, dishonesty and downright theft, who would ruthlessly take revenge on those who crossed him. In later life, he was also dogged by accusations of sexual assault, all of which he denied and none of which has ever been proved. To his friends, he is a man capable of immense generosity and loyalty, with a mischievous sense of humour and utter devotion to his family.
What cannot be denied is that Fayed had a genius for networking, a talent for hard work, an instinctive grasp of business and a determination to get rich no matter what it took.
Fayed’s trick was to pretend he had more money than he did, then leverage his supposed wealth to borrow from banks and associates, which gave him the capital to buy and sell assets. He converted his exaggerated wealth into real wealth, including the 17th-century Grade I-listed Barrow Green Court in Oxted, Surrey, and the pink-painted Balnagown Castle near Inverness, the clan seat of the Ross family, into which he has poured millions. “I am Mohamed of the Glen,” he once pronounced after setting himself up as a Scottish laird.
But to the media, he was a fake. Nicknamed the Phoney Pharaoh by Private Eye magazine for adding the prefix “al” to his surname to give the impression he was a nobleman, he was viewed with suspicion by editors and politicians alike. The Home Office twice refused to grant him British citizenship because he was “not a fit and proper person” to have it, and a government report into his takeover of the House of Fraser famously concluded he had lied about his wealth, his origins and his business interests.
Furious about his pariah status, he went public with claims that Tory MPs had taken money from him to ask questions in Parliament, destroying several careers in what became known as the cash-for-questions affair, and used his charm and wealth to improve his public image by courting celebrities, the aristocracy and the royal family alike.
The Crown portrays the events leading to the tragic death of Fayed’s eldest son Dodi as the culmination of a lifelong obsession with the Royal family. He once claimed that the abdication of Edward VIII “had a big influence on me”. In one scene in the TV drama, a teenaged Fayed tells his brothers: “If we look up to [Britain’s] kings and queens as Gods it’s because they are.”
In 1986, following the death of the former king’s wife Wallis Simpson, Fayed believed he had found the perfect “in” with the royal family, taking over the rent of the villa near Paris where Edward and Mrs Simpson had lived out their later years, and spending millions restoring it to its former glory. He tried to ingratiate himself with Queen Elizabeth II by offering her the table on which her uncle had signed his abdication, but she graciously declined (Fayed had perhaps failed to understand how painful an episode the abdication had been for the late Queen). In The Crown, Fayed allows himself to believe that the Queen has accepted an invitation to visit the restored villa, only for her private secretary to turn up instead, with an inventory of objects that belong to the royal family. In reality, it was Prince Charles who visited the house at Fayed’s invitation to check if there were contents they would like returned - a fact the programme-makers curiously omit.
As well as taking over the Villa Windsor (as he renamed the property), Fayed courted Princess Diana’s father Earl Spencer and her stepmother Raine, Countess Spencer and gave the Countess a seat on the board of Harrods. Prince and Princess Michael of Kent were sometimes guests at his Surrey estate.
Royal staff were couriered Harrods gold cards with their names on them if they were introduced to Fayed at official engagements, and long before Diana and Dodi’s romance Fayed would send horse-drawn Harrods vans to Kensington Palace filled with gifts for Diana and her sons. (On one occasion, as the van drew up, Diana asked the driver: “Is this from Mr Fayed? Oh dear.”)
Harrods’ sponsorship of the Royal Windsor Horse Show also brought him into regular contact with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, sometimes with bizarre results. One former aide recalled an episode in 1993 when Philip had mentioned his arthritis, at which Fayed became animated and started undressing. The shirtmaker Turnbull & Asser, another premium British brand that his family owned, made “wonderful shirts” held together with Velcro, he explained, as well as clip-on ties that were a godsend for men with stiff joints. With a flourish, he whipped off his own clip-on tie and ripped open the Velcro-backed placket on his own shirt, to the couple’s obvious astonishment.
”Everybody knew what his game was,” said one former royal aide. “He was a bit of a fish out of the water but, as long as you dealt with him with a long spoon and your eyes wide open, he was no more of a rogue than a lot of other people who were hanging around London at the time.”Fayed has always claimed to be a victim of racism, and there may be some truth in the suggestion that, in 1980s Britain, the idea of an Arab owning such a revered institution as Harrods was seen through a lens of xenophobia. But there were also claims that he was himself a racist, including reports that one of his staff had the job of ensuring that none of the flats Fayed owned in a building in Park Lane were rented to black people.
The Crown neatly distils such claims into a scene set in Paris in 1979. At a grand opening of the Paris Ritz after he has bought and refurbished it, Fayed spots a black waiter serving canapes and orders Dodi to get rid of him. Dodi obeys, but later tells his father they should have treated him better, as the waiter - Sydney Johnson - is the former valet of Edward VIII.
”Mohamed is the least racist person I have ever known,” insists Michael Cole, the former director of public affairs for Harrods and one-time BBC royal correspondent who remains ultra-loyal to his old boss in retirement. “He is proud to be an Egyptian and he always says ‘I am an African with a permanent suntan’. He has appointed people of all races and creeds to the boards of his companies and race has never been a factor.”
Certainly, the idea of him being racist jars with the fact that he promptly hires Johnson to be his valet, as he did in real life (or indeed with his later friendship with the singer Michael Jackson, to whom he erected a statue at Fulham FC’s ground). Cole’s version of events is that Fayed heard about Johnson through Franz Klein, the president of the Ritz, who knew him from his regular visits to Paris’s finest hotels with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. On Klein’s recommendation, he hired the then-unemployed Johnson as his own valet, and together they oversaw the refurbishment of the Villa Windsor, which he still rents from the French government to this day.
Cole dismisses as “nonsense” scenes in The Crown in which Johnson teaches Fayed in the ways of the English gentleman by giving him Kipling, Wodehouse and Dickens to read (a scene in which Fayed gives him a marble gravestone after his death in 1990 also invented by programme-makers) but he says that a depiction of Fayed nursing Johnson on his deathbed is entirely in keeping with a side of Fayed the public never sees.
”He is a better man than all of his critics,” insists Cole. “He is demonised because he exposed corruption and rot at the heart of the Tory Party [during the cash for questions affair] and he paid the price for that. But they can’t hurt him any longer because he lost his eldest son and nothing can be worse than that.”
In The Crown, Dodi is played by Khalid Abdalla as the cocaine-snorting playboy that he became, but also as a quiet, sensitive soul who never manages to step out of his father’s shadow, even when he has Oscar-winning success as a producer of Chariots of Fire, and there can be no doubting the control that Fayed had over his everyday life.
As we know from the inquest into Diana and Dodi’s deaths, Fayed okayed the plan for the pair to leave the Paris Ritz, where they were staying in August 1997, to head for the family’s flat in the city, on a journey that would end in their deaths in the back of a car driven at high speed by a drunk.
Fayed, who has four younger children with Wathen, has let go of trophy acquisitions like Harrods, always insisting that he is a trader who simply buys and sells assets. Yet despite stepping down from the board of the Paris Ritz three years ago, he has never contemplated selling the hotel. It is, after all, the place where his first-born son spent the last day of his life. The CIA may have had his number all those years ago, but the one thing they never had him down for was sentimentality.
The goal was to make it harder for the regime to fill positions of those Israel killed.