It was once an iconic part of the Princess Diana story, but the yacht on which Diana spent her final summer partying with Dodi Fayed now lies at the bottom of the Mediterranean.
The boat, Cujo, sank after apparently hitting a mystery object off the coast of Beaulieu-sur-Mer in the South of France, the Times of London reported.
Now resting in a watery grave some 7,000 feet beneath the surface, Cujo was once a byword for glamor when it was the floating playground of the film producer and playboy Dodi Fayed, the son of the billionaire Harrods owner Mohammed Fayed.
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It was on board Cujo, off the coast of St. Tropez in the summer of 1997, that Dodi and Diana were first photographed together. The pictures on board sparked tabloid rumors that they were a couple, which built into “love boat” hysteria as the summer progressed.
“St. Trop” was swiftly swarmed by an army of paparazzi photographers and at the end of August, the couple decamped to the Fayed-owned Ritz hotel in Paris. The paps followed and it was from here that the couple set off on their fateful last journey in a speeding car driven by a drunk chauffeur, which then crashed in an underpass, killing Diana, Dodi, and their driver, Henri Paul.
The Times reports on the boat’s “long and glamorous history” saying that it was built in Italy in 1972 (long before Stephen King would give the same name to a monstrous St. Bernard in one of his novels) for a millionaire Porsche dealer who declared he wanted the world’s fastest yacht. Cujo, which could do 40 knots per hour as a result, was subsequently sold to the son of arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, reputedly the world’s richest man at the time. He then sold it to his cousin, Dodi Fayed.
Fayed hosted glamorous guests such as Brooke Shields, Clint Eastwood, Tony Curtis, and Bruce Willis on the boat, but, after his death, the Times reports, the yacht fell into disrepair.
It then sold at auction to its current owner, a wealthy Italian, for $250,000, in 2020. The owner was at the helm when the boat sank, the Times said, citing French media reports which also suggested the boat had “regular maintenance problems.”
