Princess Diana's relationship with Dodi Al Fayed was called her last great love affair, but was it really?
Princess Diana's relationship with Dodi Al Fayed was called her last great love affair — but was it really?
Author Christopher Andersen has just released the 20th anniversary edition of his bestselling book, "The Day Diana Died."
"She told her friend she was deliriously happy with Dodi Al Fayed in those last weeks, cruising aboard his father's yacht," he told Inside Edition. "But what she was really trying to do is make the man she really loved jealous. That man was Pakistani heart surgeon Hasnat Khan."
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Andersen says the iconic photograph of Diana alone on the diving board of Dodi's yacht says it all.
"She would be sitting in the boat alone, lost in her own thoughts, sitting on the end of a diving board," he said. "She was given into fits of depression and anxiety."
Still, there were reports that Dodi, the son of Egyptian billionaire Mohamed Al Fayed, had bought Diana an engagement ring.
"It was a $250,000 ring, I believe, that would be twice as valuable today," Andersen said. "He was going to ask her that night. She was going to reject him. She told her friends, 'Look, I need another marriage like a need a bad rash on my face.'"
But Debbie Gribble, who worked as Diana and Dodi's stewardess aboard the Fayed family's 200-foot yacht, The Jonikal, believes their relationship was the real deal.
"They appeared very much in love, yes," she said in a previous interview.
Gribble, who was on three of the couple's cruises, remembers William and Harry, then just 15 and 12, joining them on the yacht.
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"They would come down to the crew's mess and sit down and chat with the crew and the bodyguards and help themselves to ice cream and wash up their plates," she recalled.
But at the end of the summer, on Aug. 31, 1997, the world learned the devastating news that Diana was gone, killed in a car crash in Paris.
"Her death was kind of a surreal event at the time and it still seems unreal," Andersen said.
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