When Camilla Fayed was 12 years old, her brother Dodi Fayed was killed in a car accident in the underpass of the Pont de l’Alma in Paris. Later that night, his girlfriend of just a few months, Diana, Princess of Wales, died from her injuries. It was late August 1997 and the world erupted with the news.
Camilla’s father, Mohamed Al Fayed, at the time owner of Harrods, Fulham Football Club and the Ritz Paris, a full-front, full-wattage, flamboyant figure who routinely stuck up two fingers to the British establishment, was changed for ever. From then on, “there was such a weight” around him, says his daughter. “Always a weight.” And their family was changed too.
“Such a cataclysmic event – how could it not change our family? For my dad, like any parent losing a child, it was horrific and, as it is for any family that experiences loss, it was heartbreaking. But on top of all that, we were never allowed to grieve in private. That was the main thing. You couldn’t compare notes with anyone else who’d had the experience because it was never on that scale. It was part of history, something that was attached to my family, still to this day. It’s not an easy thing to forget. No one will ever forget.”
Had we met for this interview a month ago, Dodi’s death might not have been so front of mind. But, as Camilla, now 35, puts it, “It’s a subject again.” Diana’s character has been revived for the Netflix drama The Crown and, separately, there’s an independent inquiry into how journalist Martin Bashir secured the infamous Panorama interview (in which she admitted both her infidelities and those of Prince Charles) using forged documents suggesting she was under surveillance by the British security services – a fear that gripped Diana until her death (and indeed Mohamed Al Fayed afterwards). And yes, the subject will continue to be front of mind as The Crown plunges forward into the making of the next series, which will feature Diana’s romance with Dodi and, unavoidably, the crash.
Does it feel distant, like somebody’s else’s story? “It’s never going to be distant because it’s obviously affected my family in such a profound way,” she says.
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Dodi was the product of Mohamed Al Fayed’s first marriage, to Samira Khashoggi; Camilla is one of his four children by Finnish model and actress Heini Wathen. Camilla was close to all her siblings, “on and off. We fought, for sure. We were normal teenagers; explosive, rowdy.” Her sister, Jasmine, was in fashion for a while, her brother Karim is a landscape photographer. Omar, the youngest, is a difficult subject about whom she can’t answer questions, although I sense they were once very close.
This I can tell you from court documents and press reports. On May 18 this year, Omar’s driver dropped him at his parents’ house to have a chat with his father and use the family gym. There was a “verbal disagreement” with his mother and then with Camilla, who arrived with her husband, Mohamad Esreb. A scuffle took place over Omar’s phone. Omar says he was restrained by bodyguards and hurt in the process. He has sought damages of £100,000 in the High Court.
Family friends who spoke to the papers described Omar as “troubled and vulnerable”. In later documents submitted to the court, Camilla and her mother disputed her brother’s claims of physical harm, and Camilla said that his “demeanour” suggested he was “on drugs”. All she can say today is that stories happen in families, albeit without the adjudication of the High Court and details such as “happened near the family gym” and “intervention of two bodyguards”.
She’s telling me about her family across a table in Farmacy, her vegan restaurant in Notting Hill, while we sample cauliflower popcorn and no-fish fishcake from her new menu. This is the second time she’s fed me – the first was when I visited her farm last week.
Food is her thing these days – food, health, sustainability. She’s moved out of London to live on a farm in Kent. Her parents are “down the road” (Surrey) and her siblings’ houses form a constellation around them. Camilla takes her own vegan food to Sunday lunch. “I’m constantly bringing them biodynamic produce. That’s as far as I go with them now. I say, ‘You just do what you want with them. It’s fiiiiine,’ ” which instantly alerts me to a whole family saga on the subject of food.
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Folded into pockets of her conversation are little reveals such as this, of life growing up with her self-made father, a noisy figure in the City, politics and showbiz for 30-odd years. (Remember the Harrods sale? Cash for questions? His feud with Tiny Rowland? “Fuggin’ this, fuggin’ that”?) Mohamed will be 92 in January and she says his health is not so good. “Up until today or these days,” she hesitates. “He definitely needs his brain to be activated. If it’s not watching football or reading the news, it’s doing things, but to this day he’s still OK. He’s still wondering.”
But whatever the differences on food, she’s a lot like her dad, she says. She describes him as “a prankster”, not telling his family, for instance, that he would be on Da Ali G Show rapping with Sasha Baron Cohen (google it). “He just said, ‘Watch Channel 4 tonight.’ And we were like, ‘Oh my God!’ ” She cringes. “I remember having to go to school that Monday and just wanting to hide.” Another time, he released a big fish into the family swimming pool, sending her sister, Jasmine, screaming. “We thought it was a shark.” It’s inherited bawdy humour that she blames for a baby shower cake she made for a friend in the shape of a vagina, complete with tamed pubic hair icing and the baby’s head crowning. “At least it was vegan,” she deadpans.
Here’s another thing father and daughter are fused on: out-there theories about “electromagnetic fields”. Her father was “very, very aware of EMFs” for years, she says. No wifi was allowed in their home off Park Lane. Outside, the BT Tower was a looming symbol of terror. “We could see it from the window,” she says. “It was a constant thing for my father.” He feared the “electro smog” would be physiologically damaging for his children, “not good for our brain development”.
Now wifi is a sore point in her home. Camilla switches it off, most of the time, but her daughter Luna, 11, likes computer games. Someone who will remain nameless (A teacher? A nanny?) told Luna it was nonsense that wifi can damage her developing brain, which led to this exchange:
Luna: “[redacted name] said it was rubbish that wifi is bad for you.”
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Camilla: “[redacted name] hasn’t done the research.”
Luna: “Mummy, sometimes I doubt you.”
Camilla: “Luna, do not get me started...”
Luna: [Eye roll]
Indeed. Do not get her started on “geopathic” stress, or 5G or the high concentration of EMFs in London that she claims cause anxiety, arrhythmia, depression and other neurological issues, “because it disturbs the frequency in our brain”. A simple thing like the smart meter I was offered by the gas company is sinister, she says, like planting a ticking EMF bomb in my basement. “This is something the mainstream media won’t talk about enough. It’s something that I’m highly informed about. It’s not fear-mongering; it’s just being aware.”
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This seamlessly transitions into a conversation about the coronavirus vaccine, because I suspect there is some crossover of EMF/5G activists and the anti-vaccination movement. Will she have it? “No. It’s too risky. It’s Russian roulette.” She reels off the survival rates of Covid versus tuberculosis. Tuberculosis! Surely the comparison should not be a disease that’s worse than Covid? Why not the Black Death? “But I mean, 99.9 per cent of the people that had Covid survived,” she says, which is sadly not true. “Most of my community wouldn’t take a vaccine.” I take this to mean her vegan community. Her friends include Stella McCartney, with whom she collaborates on recipes (like the excellent no-fish fishcake), and the actor Woody Harrelson, a regular at Farmacy when he’s in London. (“He likes the adaptogenic mushroom smoothie.”) And she caters for Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop events when she’s over too.
She wouldn’t have a flu jab either, and this weaves into her food-health philosophy. (Farmacy, geddit?) “I believe strongly in building an immune system and in natural medicine,” she says. Ginger is a stalwart of her medicine cabinet along with turmeric and mushrooms (non-hallucinogenic). Oregano oil is “nature’s best antibiotic”. Headache? Have a glass of water. She grows calendula for her skin and eats to her blood group (A positive).
At her farm, I was greeted first by two dozen sheep and then by Camilla in Cleopatra eyeliner flicks and a cashmere shawl. Somewhere nearby were her eight-month-old daughter, eight-year-old son and husband, Mohamad, whom she met in Tramp nightclub aged 18 and married in 2012.
This earth mother version of Camilla is a long way from the representation of her life on Google images. There, her existence is a carousel of high-altitude fashion shows, gallery and restaurant openings, the kind of world where you can be friends only with billionaires. Often she’s with Dasha Zhukova, once married to Roman Abramovich, now to Stavros Niarchos III, or Natalia Vodianova, the model and wife of Antoine Arnault; elsewhere she’s in shades in the front row, on a yacht in St Tropez, at a gala fundraiser in Moscow. It’s almost as if she’s been backwards through the chrysalis, reversing from Manhattan butterfly into the entirely plant-based creature curled up in socks on the sofa now.
She went to her first fashion show when she was 12 and, with cautious caveats about how lucky she is, she says, “It wasn’t the real me.” Actually, she decides, “the majority of people are craving something deeper”. Those glitzy friends crowd round for pumpkin soup too. “And I still enjoy going out. I love, love parties. Just because I run a vegan restaurant doesn’t make me…” Dull? “Hate the world.”
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Her conversion to veganism came as a result of a deterioration in physical and emotional health. At 13, she was the only one of Mohamed Al Fayed’s four children by Heini Wathen to be sent away to board – at Roedean, the English girls’ school near Brighton. She hated it. “It was one of my biggest fears since childhood to be taken away from my family and then I ended up leaving home at 13. ” She doesn’t know why they sent her “to this day”.
She started eating for comfort. “I gorged on snacks, crisps, Cup a Soup, anything that was quick and easy and convenient. Just loads of shit, laden with chemicals.” She was overweight by 15, at the pub “every single weekend” by 16. During the holidays, she worked in Harrods, mother’s maiden name on her badge, “so people wouldn’t be nice to me in an inauthentic way”.
At 17, she started rebelling. She had tattoos on her neck – an ankh and the Eye of Horus and a pyramid rising from the nape into her hairline. She describes herself as “a monster, literally. I smoked. I drank. I was pretty abusive to myself. I look back and I often feel I have to apologise. I was such a mess.”
She hoped – dreamt – of going to drama school because she so wanted to act. “But my father said, ‘Absolutely over my dead body.’ ” There’s an irony, she recognises, that her mother was an actress, “although not famous”, when her father met her on a film set in the mid-Eighties. He wanted Camilla to do business studies or economics. If he wouldn’t allow her to act, “I was like, fine, then I’m not going to university either.”
She ended up doing a stint at Vogue, where she heard of a job as one of Anna Wintour’s assistants at American Vogue in New York. The hours were “round the clock” – late-night shoots. “And oh my God, the early mornings.” In her first week, it was Wintour’s 55th birthday. “These bouquets, hour by hour, were coming in. Another assistant and I were on a loop, just bringing up these bouquets all day. There must have been 1,000 bouquets.”
These days, Wintour will give her a “polite nod” if she sees her in the Ritz Paris, still owned by her father. “I’m happy to get a nod.”
While at Vogue, at a routine visit to the doctor, she learnt she had dangerously high cholesterol. I wish I could write here that the cholesterol issue was fixed and she became a vegan and lived happily ever after, but as she tells me this story, I’m beginning to think nothing in Fayed’s life is straightforward.
This is what happened: she gave up meat and thought, “I’ll eat fish. It’s a lighter, cleaner source of protein. And then again [she gestures obliteration], pffffff. I had this wave of feeling really not well.” Lethargy, hair loss; the anxiety increased. “It turned out I had heavy metal poisoning. I had very high levels of kalium [potassium] and aluminium and mercury in my blood, caused by industrial-level chemicals in the sea.”
Fayed adds chirpily, “I wear those trials and issues as a badge of honour now because, if I hadn’t been through that, I wouldn’t have seen what it’s like to come through the other side.”
She returned from New York when she was 23, pregnant with her first child, Luna. As soon as she was back on her feet (she became vegetarian and then vegan), she went into business with her father’s backing, buying the dress brand Issa – famously worn by Kate Middleton in her engagement photo – from administration. In five years, she turned it around and sold it on to House of Fraser.
But what she was increasingly conscious of was “the way that my emotional health was being triggered by what I was eating. It just makes so much sense.” This thought process became Farmacy. Friends and family told her that veganism was for hippies. “But I knew there was a gap in the market,” she says.
It seems odd that she doesn’t connect any of her anxiety or unhappiness to unresolved family trauma. “Hmmm,” she says when I broach this. “In some sense, anxiety is environmental, the way you grow up. I think it had some impact, but not… I’m a great believer that what you go through is personal perception. My perception is very different from my siblings’ about the way we grew up. I sometimes feel that we didn’t grow up in the same household because our perceptions of it are so different.”
Her perception is this: her father “had to pick up and continue to lead his life”. He liked to talk. “He’s always been open and very honest and didn’t hide anything.” Meanwhile, her mother is typically Finnish: “Stoic, direct, no bullshit.” But she’s also “a real homemaker. Our home life was always quite quiet and normal.” She stalls and uses air quotes. “Whatever you want to call ‘normal’.”
Anyway, now she’s focusing on next year. She’s opening a Farmacy 2.0 in London and a place in Los Angeles. A six-month “pop-up” in New York closed just before lockdown. “We were inundated with offers to open all over the world, but I’m so glad I didn’t,” she says. “Look what happened.” She gestures to the restaurant, empty because of lockdown.
Often, she’s thought about how her father “came from nothing” and “created empires”, how Harrods was a dusty store built around a food hall before he transformed it into the showstopping centrepiece of Knightsbridge. She reminds me that A-listers such as Madonna cut the ribbon for the Harrods sale. The area would grind to a halt because of the queues. She tells me that the gold Egyptian escalator that her father installed is described in the grade II listing of the building.
“He was a visionary. He brought the Paris Ritz back to its former glory. Fulham Football Club was third division; he brought it back to the Premier League. People loved him, but they also loved to poke holes in him. He’s such a Marmite character.”
She says her father “didn’t give a shit and he wouldn’t stop at anything. There’s a lot to live up to and I don’t know if I will be able to live up to that.” From the sound of it, she would like to try.
Shoot credits
Styling Hannah Rogers. Hair Jonathon Eagland. Make-up Emma Miles.
Camilla Fayed wears jacket, £1,150, and dress, £1,475, both stellamccartney.com; wellington boots, £100, lechameau.com; hat, £475, lockhatters.com