Did Mohamed Al Fayed Really Hire Paparazzi?
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On August 10, 1997, the Sunday Mirror published photos of Princess Diana and Dodi Al Fayed kissing. Titled "the Kiss," the shot taken by Italian paparazzi photographer Mario Brenna of Diana and Dodi on Mohamed Al Fayed's yacht the Jonikal broke the news of their relationship. Brenna made around £3 million from the photographs.
In The Crown, Brenna is able to capture these pictures of Diana and Dodi's blossoming romance because Mohamed Al Fayed tells him where to go. However, there's no evidence of this happening in real life. In fact, after the episodes premiered, Brenna said the idea that Mohamed hired him was "absurd and completely invented."
As the Independent reported at the time, "It is understood Brenna, a 40-year-old Italian who lives in Monaco, happened to spot the Fayed boat, Jonikal, as he was in the area on other photographic assignments." He then went to Jason Fraser, a photographer based in London, to help sell the photos in the UK. Fraser, the paper notes, "once handed a roll of film to Princess Diana when she was upset at being photographed leaving a dinner party with a stranger."
Rumors have swirled someone close to Princess Diana was, in fact, the one who called the paparazzi. As Tim Clayton and Phil Craig write in Diana: Story of a Princess, "The author Kate Snell believes that Diana was in shock at the news from Khan and wanted to make him jealous. This, she says, was Diana’s motive for helping Mario Brenna take a photograph of the couple kissing during this cruise." (Diana had just split from boyfriend Hasnat Khan.)
They continue, "Brenna acted on a tip-off from his London colleague, photographer Jason Fraser. The day before Diana left, Fraser received a call from someone close to her, telling him that the Princess was on her way to the Mediterranean. He was told the name of the boat, who she was with and approximately where the couple could be found. The caller made it clear that there would be no complaints if photographs were taken. All Brenna had to do was to shadow the boat to Corsica and wait for the right moment. Some of his pictures were taken from just ten yards away."
The New York Times reports that the theory the Crown research team found most credible "was that one of al-Fayed’s employees leaked the boat’s location to Brenna."
Then, as we know, Brenna alerted Fraser, who reached out to the press, setting off a bidding war. "Mario wouldn't tell me what he had over the phone. He flew to London, came to my house and simply said: 'You’re not going to believe this. You might want to sit down,'" photographer Jason Fraser recalled. "When he showed me the prints, we spread them out over the kitchen floor and we sat in silence. I didn’t know what to do. I knew that Diana had wanted them to be taken. But I knew nothing would ever the same again. I didn’t want to change people’s image of her."
However, the truth of how Brenna discovered the yacht has been lost to history.
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