The party in the private bungalow at Los Angeles’ famous Beverly Hills Hotel was in full swing. In one corner stood Bond girl Britt Ekland sipping champagne.
In the other, a household name A-list actor was ‘high as a kite’, surrounded by giggling starlets. As the champagne corks popped, one man sat quietly watching the scene.
The party would continue for three days – with guests coming and going at all times of the day and night – but Dodi Fayed did not sleep a wink.
This was one of his infamous ‘3Cs’ parties – champagne, cocaine and caviar – and Dodi stayed up the entire time snorting ‘industrial quantities’ of cocaine in full view of his guests.
As the sixth and final season of The Crown prepares to release the last part of the story on Netflix from Thursday, one man watched the first four episodes with a growing sense of incredulity.
While the series’ opening episodes focused on Dodi’s summer fling with Princess Diana and the couple’s death in a Paris car crash in August 1997, it left out the one thing all Dodi’s close friends knew… his ‘rampaging’ cocaine addiction.
Paul Cohen met Dodi in 1980, the year Dodi arrived in Hollywood as ‘executive producer’ of the Oscar-winning film Chariots Of Fire.
The Goldcrest movie had been funded by his billionaire Egyptian father Mohamed Al Fayed as a way to give his wayward son a ‘job’, but Dodi had no interest in making films.
London-born Cohen, a Hollywood talent manager who was introduced to Dodi via his long-time client Ekland, said: ‘Britt knew Dodi from London. When Dodi came to LA she said, ‘You have to meet this friend of mine’.
It Is Inconceivable He Wasn’t Using When He Was With Diana… But I Don’t Think She Knew
‘Dodi had no interest in making Chariots Of Fire. The great love of his life wasn’t women or film. It was cocaine. People think of Dodi as a great seducer of women because he was photographed with gorgeous actresses such as Brooke Shields and Winona Ryder and, of course, because of his relationship with Diana. But he was weirdly non-sexual.
‘He’d take industrial quantities of cocaine and become withdrawn and paranoid. Women were always hitting on him because he was nice looking and generous with money but in all the years I knew him I never got the impression that he was a womaniser.
‘In the beginning I asked someone if he was gay because he showed so little interest in the beautiful women who were always around.
‘When I got to know him I realised he just wasn’t interested in sex. He was hit on all the time, by women and men, but he would shrug it off. Everybody in Hollywood knew about Dodi’s rampaging drug habit.
‘It’s inconceivable to me that Dodi wasn’t using when he was with Diana. I don’t for a minute think she knew about it because they were together such a short time but if The Crown’s researchers had talked to any of Dodi’s friends his cocaine use would have been one of the first things that came up. It dominated his life.’
