THE FAYEDS: OUTSIDE LOOKING IN

For a few weeks this summer, much in the world seemed right for Mohammed al Fayed. In July, at his villa in St.-Tropez, the Egyptian tycoon personally set in motion a romance between the Princess of Wales and his eldest son Dodi by plucking him off one family yacht to join his father on another one nearby, where Diana was tanning. As the romance blossomed into the possibility of an engagement, al Fayed feigned nonchalance. "Normal people fall in love," he told an interviewer. "That's it." But al Fayed surely exulted inside. His battles with the British establishment--over his 1985 purchase of Harrods, his unrewarded quest for citizenship, his hand in bringing down Tory ministers--had left him embittered. In Diana he picked up the jewel both prized and tossed aside by the English elite, a diamond with an edge that could cut. Snaring her, and perhaps even installing her in the former residence of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (which al Fayed holds), would simultaneously concoct an alternative monarchy and remind the real one of a time when it had faltered.

But al Fayed's world collapsed that Sunday morning in Paris, when he lost the son he loved and the princess he sought, and, too, the chance for acceptance from the country he adopted. From the start of the fated relationship, the force that pulled Diana toward the Fayeds was powerful: beyond sharing their sense of rejection, the princess undoubtedly craved the cocoon made possible by Dodi's family planes and mini-palaces, as well as the glamour of his Ritzy life. And after years in a family repelled by emotion, here was a family driven by it, whether in its public vendettas or in its private Mediterranean moments. To embrace all this, Diana, having left one dynasty that had used her, was ready to enter another. The Fayeds and she would find redemption together.

The union of Diana and Dodi would have culminated three decades of exhaustive and expensive attempts by the sixtyish Mohammed al Fayed to prove his British bona fides by collecting some of the nation's trophies. In addition to Harrods, he owns the famed humor magazine Punch, the Fulham Football Club and Balnagow castle in Scotland; his millions have sponsored the annual Royal Windsor Horse Show, where he has shared the royal box with the Queen. Al Fayed's younger brother Ali owns Turnbull & Asser, the prestigious tailor used by Prince Charles and his sons William and Harry. And al Fayed has long courted Diana and her parents; he put her stepmother Raine on the board of Harrods. Diana's father Earl Spencer, while dying, reportedly told al Fayed to "keep an eye" on the family.

Despite these ingratiating efforts, and his considerable commitments to various charities, acceptance within the British elite has eluded al Fayed. In France his restoration of two fabled Paris properties, the Ritz Hotel and the Bois de Boulogne villa of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, earned him La Legion d'Honneur. But in Britain al Fayed could recite--and often did--a list of the many slights directed at him by the Establishment. After he poured $50 million into restoring the Windsor villa, he grumbled to the New York Times, "Not one single official said, 'Mohammed al Fayed, thank you. We are grateful.' Not one single letter."