“The chairman will meet with you now,” said the secretary who had come to fetch me. I entered his enormous office, which stretched along a corner of Harrods in Knightsbridge. The curtains were drawn.
On that day in 1997, Mohamed Al-Fayed rose from his chair to greet me. He was short and bald with a toffee-colored complexion. His stout body was dressed in a gray bespoke suit. On his shirt, little hippos copulated against a pastel-blue cotton background.
He shook my hand. “Paul Spike, yes? Sit down. So, Paul, how your balls? Your balls O.K.?”
I tried hard not to blink. “Yes, my balls are O.K.”
“That’s good. You like to fuck the boys, Paul? You a shirt-lifter?”
“I’m married, thanks.”
“You like to fuck the girls, eh? Good, good for you.”
It was a fitting introduction to this monster, serial rapist, and criminal psychopath. At the time, 27 years ago, that meeting simply seemed unspeakably vulgar. That was my error. I mistook his psychopathy for vulgarity, and I will always regret that, as will countless others who watched the recent BBC documentary Al-Fayed: Predator at Harrods. Since its release in September, 111 women have come forward accusing him of rape and sexual assault.
The previous year, the chairman had purchased Punch magazine and invested millions in re-inventing it. The oldest humor magazine in the English-speaking world, Punch was established in 1841 by editor Henry Mayhew and wood engraver Ebenezer Landells. Over the years, its contributors have included the artists John Leech, J. B. Handelsman, and Ralph Steadman, along with writers A. A. Milne, Sylvia Plath, and Somerset Maugham. Its most recent editor, a former columnist named Peter McKay, had been fired. A longtime reader of the magazine, I had been writing and editing as a freelancer there after McKay’s departure.
“He fuck me, McKay, he fuck me,” ranted Al-Fayed. “Him and his friends, I give them everything they want, and they fuck me. You know, I want a magazine that makes a … ” Smack! Al-Fayed punched his hand.
I tried hard not to blink. “Yes, my balls are O.K.”
After a brief meeting, he asked me to draft a proposal to relaunch the magazine yet again. On the following Monday, memo in hand, I was ushered back into his office. I almost collided with his publicist Michael Cole, whom I recognized from the television news. He shook my hand with a sympathetic expression, as if to say, “Are you sure you want to get involved in all this?” (By the end of the year, Cole had resigned.)
“How your balls?” asked Al-Fayed. Apparently this was a standard greeting.
“Good, thank you.”
“Bald man?” He rubbed his hairless skull. “Big dick!” He looked at me. “Lots of hair? Little dick.”
I shrugged and attempted a smile.
“So what you got for me now?”
I took the proposal out of my case and handed it to him. He dropped it as if it were a glowing hot ingot.
“Summary, summary!” ordered Al-Fayed. “Give me summary!”
For the next eight minutes, I described my ideas. After I finished, Al-Fayed voiced no objections and ordered me to “get back to work.” A few hours later, I was summoned back to his office. Having already established the condition of my testicles, we could get straight down to business. He liked my ideas and offered me the editorship.
“How much you want?” He digressed into a small tirade against McKay.
“Half the salary you paid McKay and a simple contract with no notice period. I can quit, or you can sack me, at any time. If everything works out, I will ask for a salary rise and a new contract, but first I want you to trust me.”
It was agreed that I would begin the next day, and he would inform Stewart Steven, the former editor of the Evening Standard who was filling in at Punch, of his dismissal. Unfortunately, I arrived to find Steven besieged with inquiries from reporters about his replacement. I apologized and then returned to the chairman’s office to sign my contract.
On my way out, I passed a tall, elegant woman, whom I later recognized as Raine, Countess Spencer. The daughter of romance novelist Barbara Cartland, she was also the stepmother of Princess Diana and her brother, Charles Spencer. The tabloids called her “Acid Raine,” but they recently reported that she and Diana had reconciled. Why on earth was she going to see Al-Fayed?
Two exhausting, invigorating months later, my first issue of Punch appeared on the newsstands. (Well, some of them. Our new distributor was a dud, but our first choice wasn’t available, since it was half owned by Condé Nast, and Al-Fayed was suing the company’s title Vanity Fair for libel because of a critical profile of him.) The chairman’s only response to my first cover was to point at the letter u in Punch and say, “Make this one bigger.”
On several occasions, Al-Fayed visited our offices unexpectedly, but he never lingered longer than five minutes and always arrived with a phalanx of beefy bodyguards. He was brusque but liked to be shown a bit of work in progress, especially the cartoons, which he examined for no more than 10 seconds.
Once, he brought his son Dodi, an attractive man who was taller and not as fat as his father. He looked pale and disinterested; I had heard that he had recently been treated for cocaine addiction in a rehabilitation clinic.
The next time I met Dodi was on a Saturday afternoon at the Royal Windsor Horse Show. Every year, this event was sponsored by Harrods, which hosted a formal lunch in a tent on the grounds of Windsor Castle. There were rumors that Al-Fayed was only involved because he wanted to be photographed with Queen Elizabeth. I did find it difficult to imagine that Al-Fayed was a devotee of English equestrian sports, but who knew?
At lunch, I was seated next to Dodi. Al-Fayed was at another table alongside Raine, Countess Spencer, who was now working for him in some capacity. (Later, she would be appointed to Harrods’ board of directors.) Al-Fayed seemed very keen to charm her.
Dodi was more talkative and looked more animated than he did the previous time we had met. “You know you can’t tell my father anything,” Dodi confided. “Twice a year, we hire celebrities to come and open the Harrods sale. We pay them a lot of money to spend the night in a good hotel and be picked up by the Harrods coach and horses in the morning. All the photographers are waiting when my father greets them at the door, and then he gives them a tour. One year, we had Richard Gere. The night before, I made the mistake of telling my father about that urban myth—you know, about the gerbil up his bum?”
“Yes, I’ve heard that one.”
“Anyway, when Richard Gere arrived, my father shook his hand and said, ‘So where do we start the tour, eh, Richard? I think, for you, maybe we start at the pet store!’ Richard didn’t think that was funny. In fact, he was furious, and cursed and stormed off.”
The last time I met Dodi was on a July morning the day after the opening of the Harrods sale. My secretary was informed that my presence was required in the store’s top-floor restaurant, and I should bring my notebook.
There were only three people in the large dining hall: Al-Fayed, Dodi, and, seated between them, the actress Darryl Hannah, who had opened the sale the previous morning.
“Here, Paul, you get interview with her. Big celebrity exclusive. Ask questions,” ordered Al-Fayed.
I could immediately see that this “interview” was not about to happen. Hannah was in a terrible state—anxious and drawn, head bent low over the table, eyes watery and unfocused—as if she had been up all night. There was a sumptuous array of food on the table, but nobody was eating anything. Hannah was speechless and couldn’t meet my eyes.
Dodi sat beside her and acted very solicitous, constantly whispering in her ear. She didn’t seem to be able to whisper back but just shook her head, as if traumatized. It was clear that she wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. Meanwhile, Al-Fayed was glaring at me.
“So when did you get to London?” I asked.
She looked at me in disgust. Suddenly, she got to her feet and walked quickly toward the door. Dodi jumped up and followed her. It appeared that whatever “entertainment” the Al-Fayed father-and-son team had subjected Hannah to had a catastrophic effect.
The role of charming host, which Dodi played on behalf of his father, had been polished over many years. As a female public-relations consultant once told me, “I knew Dodi back in the 70s. He used to call me and my teenage girlfriends, inviting us to parties in that apartment building on Park Lane owned by his father. He’d promise us money and goody bags of Harrods products if we turned up, and sometimes we would go. There was no obligation to do anything, and we’d get 50 or a hundred pounds and some lovely cosmetics. We were young and silly then, but also London street smart, so nothing happened to us.”
It appeared that whatever “entertainment” the Al-Fayed father-and-son team had subjected Hannah to had a catastrophic effect.
I had a vacation booked for the middle of August in 1997. I was not able to forget about work and called my staff in London frequently when I was away.
Two days after my return, I was summoned to Al-Fayed’s office late in the afternoon. This time, I was escorted to a conference room and waited for several minutes before his adviser Mark Griffiths entered, looking uncomfortable.
“Paul, the chairman has decided that he would like you to resign as editor of Punch.”
I was shocked—I had only put out 30 issues—but also relieved. “Can I ask why?”
Mark smiled and lifted his eyes to the ceiling. I interpreted this as his way of saying, “We both know these walls have ears.” I nodded.
“The chairman feels that the magazine, in recent weeks, has become vulgar. I don’t want to go into specifics, but some of the articles and pictures, he feels they are not what he wants to see in his Punch.”
At the word “vulgar,” I recalled those randy hippos all over the chairman’s shirt.
The real story took some time to piece together. Ultimately, I discovered that it involved Diana, Princess of Wales. Over the summer, she visited the Al-Fayeds at their villa in St. Tropez. (The tabloids ensured that everyone in the world knew she was there.) I assume that her visit had been arranged through the good graces of her stepmother, Raine, Countess Spencer.
The same week, Punch published a cover story that was critical of Gianni Versace. Al-Fayed was proud of his Punch and gave a copy to Diana. He had forgotten that she had been a close friend of the late designer’s, and she was outraged. The chairman was mortified, and he asked Diana to suggest my replacement. She immediately named two of her favorite journalists, both royal correspondents to whom she often confided. In the end, the job was passed to my deputy editor, who agreed to give Al-Fayed his own ludicrous column in every issue.
When Diana and Dodi died, I was deeply affected and mourned along with much of the world. My most poignant memory was also an ambiguous one—the photograph of Diana sitting on Al-Fayed’s rooftop in St. Tropez, speaking into her mobile phone. At the time, she was accused of seeking attention from the paparazzi, but I believed the truth to be much simpler than that—she probably crawled onto the hot tiles to escape his vile electronic surveillance.
Paul Spike is developing a screen adaptation of his book Photographs of My Father, about the unsolved murder of his father, the civil-rights leader the Reverend Robert W. Spike
