WHEN I heard about Mohamed Al-Fayed’s death, my mind went back to the time I was standing in the centre-circle at Fulham’s football ground Craven Cottage with him and then Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger.
It was 20 minutes before kick-off in a Premier League clash, and we were exchanging jovial chit-chat when Fayed – Fulham’s owner at the time – suddenly reached into his pocket and produced two blue pills which he handed to Wenger.
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“Give these to your boys,” chuckled the billionaire Egyptian tycoon. “It will help them get it up later.”
Wenger looked bemused. “Get what up?”
I studied the distinctive pills a little closer, realised it was Viagra, and burst out laughing.
“Put it this way, Arsene, I don’t think he’s talking about getting up for a header…”
Wenger suddenly clocked what was in his hand, went bright red, and hastily gave them back.
It was all very awkward and embarrassing, but also laugh-out-loud funny.
And that was often the case when in the company of Mohamed Al-Fayed.
The first time I met this remarkable character was over lunch at Harrods, the lavish Knightsbridge store he bought with his brother in the mid-1980s.
He was hilarious company that day, mixing the latest dirty jokes he’d heard with shocking claims about newspaper editors being spies – I was editor of the Daily Mirror at the time but wasn’t one of his MI5 suspects – the Royal Family being full of illegitimate children, and all politicians being crooks.
I found it all most entertaining. And behind all the flamboyant, outrageous, provocative bombast there was a razor-sharp mind.
Oddly, he wore clip-on ties.
When I asked why, he chuckled: “So they come off quickly when a nice girl comes along.”
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Given all the rumours about his extensive womanising, I could well believe this.
But his bodyguard told me it was really because his boss was paranoid about being strangled by his own tie.
Fayed insisted I take the tie as a gift.
I’d been warned that he’d thrust presents upon me and wouldn’t take kindly to rejection, so I thanked him and took it back to the office.
Then I called Harrods, found out what they sold them for, and biked him round a cheque for that amount.
“What a gentleman you are,” he responded. “I was only expecting a fiver in a brown envelope.”
That first encounter set the tone, and parameters, for a lengthy friendship that was full of memorable incident, and which landed me some of the biggest scoops of my journalistic career.
In 1999, pop superstar Michael Jackson was reported to have spent £1 million in a midnight private shopping spree at Harrods.
I called Fayed and said: “Mohamed, Michael’s not given a British newspaper interview for at least twenty years, reckon you can swing it for me?”
“Of course!” he immediately replied. “Michael’s a nice guy, and my friend, and he will do it for me.”
The next morning, my PA, Kerrie, put her head round my office door with a quizzical expression.
“Erm, there’s some bloke saying he’s Michael Jackson on the phone, but I think he’s a nutter.”
I laughed. “Actually, it probably IS Michael Jackson, put him through.”
It was indeed the King of Pop, and for nearly an hour he gave me a sensational tearful interview full of huge revelations including his suicidal thoughts over the child abuse allegations, his secret trips to the cinema with Elizabeth Taylor, and his despair over Princess Diana’s death.
But to this day, I have no idea if he knew he was giving an interview, or just talking to me because Fayed asked him to, possibly as a quid-pro-quo for the shopping spree which got Harrods stupendous publicity, and which I doubt cost Jackson a penny.
That was the way Fayed rolled, everything was a deal.
He was a trader at heart, starting from nothing by selling fizzy drinks and sewing machines in Alexandria, Egypt, and fighting his way up to become one of the world’s richest men with a vast portfolio of businesses from shipping and construction to real estate and a football club.
Fayed desperately wanted to be part of the British establishment but was rejected and ostracised by many of the same hypocrites who used Harrods as their corner-shop.
He wasn’t even allowed a British passport on the grounds of failing the ‘good character’ test, which he took as an egregious personal insult.
Fayed exacted revenge by exposing the infamous “cash-for-questions” scandal that rocked Westminster in the mid-1990s, revealing he had paid then Tory MPs Neil Hamilton and Tim Smith thousands of pounds to illegally table questions in the Commons on his behalf.
The political world never forgave him for dishing their dirty laundry, and he in turn never forgave them.
‘Fayed was no angel’
By contrast, working class Fulham fans absolutely loved him for what he did for their club.
Don’t get me wrong; Fayed was no angel.
He could be charming and amusing company, but also very demanding and controlling.
I know people who worked for him for decades and loved him, and others who had far less enjoyable experiences.
He was a flawed, complex man quite capable of being an egotistical dictatorial monster when it suited him, but equally capable of great acts of kindness, and he did huge amounts for charity, especially those involving children.
If you were his enemy, he’d try to destroy you.
If he liked you, he was a big-hearted friend.
When I was fired from the Mirror in 2004, he was one of the first people to call me to say: “So, the b*****ds got you too! Never mind, come and be a Harrods doorman for me.”
And when I wrote a subsequent book about my life as an editor, he laid on a book-signing for me at Harrods that included a horse-drawn carriage taking me down Knightsbridge and a Scottish piper to serenade me up to the book department.
Unfortunately, when I arrived at the 4th floor to find over a thousand people waiting, I heard the tannoy system announce: “Pierce Brosnan will now be signing copies of his new book…”
The crowd thought it was James Bond making an appearance and most of them quickly vanished on seeing me instead!
All of which, Fayed found incredibly funny.
When I reached the final of Donald Trump’s Celebrity Apprentice show in America in 2008 and needed high-profile people to bid for a charity auction, Fayed rang in and donated $50,000 to help me win.
So, he could be a very generous man.
But he also had very strong opinions, and a short fuse.
When I once enthusiastically praised Tony Blair and the Royals over support they’d given to the newspaper industry, he faxed me to rage: “What dreadful a**e-licking to the Royal Family and the Government. Take my advice and don’t suck up to these idiots any more in case you lose your balls altogether.”
Ultimately, the moment that defined his life was the terrible car crash in 1997 that killed Diana and his beloved son, Dodi.
‘Wracked with pain and torment’
Fayed never recovered, and became consumed with intense grief, rage, and frankly crazy behaviour in which he fuelled wild conspiracy theories about what happened in Paris, repeatedly lashing out at the Royals and British establishment for what he wrongly believed was some great murder conspiracy and cover-up.
I saw him a lot in the aftermath of that dreadful time – he gave me his first interview after the tragedy, and the first bombshell sit-down with his security guard who survived, Trevor Rees-Jones – and Mohamed was a broken man, wracked with pain and torment.
He told me that as a child, Dodi had shared his bed for many years after he split from his wife, and they spoke up to ten times a day until the day he died.
Losing his son destroyed his own life.
Fayed disappeared from public life a decade ago, and latterly suffered from dementia.
He wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and undoubtedly had an unsavoury side, but he was one of the most extraordinary tour-de-force characters I’ve ever met, and I’m glad he’s now reunited with Dodi who he was buried next to on the family estate.
RIP Mohamed, you old rascal.
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