The little white car: Diana, Paris, and the tiny hinges of history.
Who was driving the little white Fiat that collided with Princess Diana's car? If the driver wasn't in that tunnel, would it have happened at all?
Twenty-four years ago tonight, on August 31, 1997, the Mercedes car carrying Diana, the Princess of Wales and her lover Dodi Fayed crashed into a concrete pillar along the Pont de l'Alma underpass in Paris. The car had taken a detour from the Hotel Ritz to avoid the paparazzi lying in wait for the Princess. As is well known, Fayed and the driver of the car, Henri Paul, were killed, and Diana herself died a few hours later from injuries sustained in the crash. This is probably the most well-known event involving the British royal family in the last 50 years. It’s been the subject of countless stories, investigations, retellings, retrospectives and conspiracy theories over the past quarter century. Most of us think we know something about what happened that night. In reality, perhaps the most crucial part of the story is usually left out.
By some accounts, seconds before the crash of the Mercedes, the car collided with another vehicle, described as a "little white car." Some witnesses claim to have seen a large dog, muzzled, in the back of the car. The car's driver sped off, but the distraction of the collision may have been the cause of the fatal crash of Diana's car. After the disaster investigators found white paint on the Mercedes and a piece of a taillight that they traced to a Fiat Uno manufactured sometime in the early 1980s.
As with literally everything else involving Princess Diana's death, the role of the little white car in the crash is highly controversial. Several suspects were investigated and ultimately cleared, with none of them definitively connected to the scene of the accident. Although investigators exhaustively investigated over 4,000 Fiat Unos present in Paris that fateful night and narrowed the possibilities down to two, after questioning both drivers they could not conclude that either one was definitely there. Thus, the identity of the driver of the "little white car," and whether they really did have something to do with the crash, remains an official mystery to this day.
In 2004, British novelist Dan Rhodes, author of the Lassie parody novel Timoleon Vita Come Home, wrote a novel (under the pen name “Danuta de Rhodes”) called, appropriately, The Little White Car. The book hypothesizes that an innocent woman, Veronique, troubled by love, has a happenstance encounter with a strange black Mercedes while driving her Fiat Uno with her pet St. Bernard in the back. Drunk and stoned, she has a brief collision and flees the scene without realizing who is in the Mercedes. Once she hears the news of Diana's death she realizes she "killed" the Princess of Wales, which obviously complicates her already complex life. A series of comic misadventures ensues. The car is eventually painted bright orange, and Veronique is never directly or officially implicated in the Princess’s demise.
Given its arguably pivotal role in such a high-profile event, it’s astounding that the legend of the little white car is not more prominent in retellings of the event. Enough time has gone by that the death of Diana has lost some of its immediate emotional sting and has begun to appear, perhaps furtively, in media portrayals. Yet the little white car is often excluded from the narrative. There’s no mention of it, for example, in Stephen Frears’s 2006 film The Queen, which deals mostly with Queen Elizabeth II’s response to Diana’s death. The Netflix TV series The Crown is not chronologically up to 1997 yet; they may get there in season five, but I’m curious whether there will be any mention of the white car in the story. The podcast You’re Wrong About (which I highly recommend) did a lengthy series last fall on Princess Diana and Charles’s marriage and concluded with the story of her death, but if hosts Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall even mentioned the role of the Fiat in the crash, they didn’t spend much time on it.
Among Princess Diana conspiracy theorists, though—and also among some investigators—the matter of whether there was a little white car and who was driving it did not go away. In December 2006, the UK paper the Daily Mail purported to have solved the mystery. Their somewhat sensationalist article (it's the Daily Mail, after all), describes how a young Paris man named Le Van Thanh, owner of a 1982 Fiat Uno, may have been involved, and acted strangely after the crash—going so far as to hastily repaint the Fiat red (though he told investigators he painted the car the previous day, before Diana was killed). Thanh was one of the two Fiat Uno owners questioned, and cleared, in 1997. He also owned a Rottweiler which he often transported in his car. Thanh, then 22 and working as a taxi driver, is from a Vietnamese-French family and in later years became a bodybuilder.
The question of Thanh’s involvement is murky. On several occasions he denied being the driver of the car. The principal British investigation, called Operation Paget, looked into the question of the little white car, but it curiously limited its conjecture as to whether the other principal suspect, James Adnanson, might have been the driver. They concluded he (Adnanson) wasn’t. Thanh is never mentioned. Operation Paget concluded in 2018; here is its extensive (871-page) report.
Le Van Thanh was back in the news in 2019, when a new book about the Diana case, Diana: Case Unsolved by Dylan Howard and Colin McLaren, was published. This book tends toward conspiracy theory and its reliability is in question, but the authors made the claim that Thanh was told by French police in 1997 not to talk to British inquiries into the accident, and also that Thanh had been contacted by Scotland Yard in 2017 and again refused to talk. Howard and McLaren claimed they themselves spoke to Thanh on two occasions during the writing of their book. He has assiduously avoided the public eye. While the evidence that Thanh may have been driving the Fiat Uno, although circumstantial, at least exists, there is none whatsoever that he was part of some deep-dyed plot to assassinate the Princess. If he was there, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
History does sometimes work this way. Another infamous automotive mishap may have altered the course of American history on a night in July 1969, when Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy lost control of his car and ran it off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, on Martha’s Vineyard, resulting in the death of the passenger in his car, Mary Jo Kopechne. There are conspiracy theories about that too, but, as in Diana’s case, none have any real validity. On occasions, history does turn on serendipitous—or disastrous—accidents. If whoever was not driving the Fiat that night had decided not to go out, or had delayed just a couple of minutes and avoided the collision, would Diana still be alive? It’s a fascinating historical question and one that gets us into the thicket of probabilities and game theory. I’m not competent to go there, but it’s interesting to think about.
I read Dan Rhodes’s novel The Little White Car. Honestly I didn’t think it was that good, but there’s an interesting quote from it that occurs toward the end of the book that catches the serendipity of history:
But no matter what was revealed by the detectives and the press in the months following the crash, one crucial factor was never mentioned—that a girl who had just left her boyfriend had been driving around with a bellyful of wine and a joint in her hand, listening to the radio and talking to her dog. And if she hadn’t been, then the princess would probably have made it safely to wherever it was she was going.
The novel The Little White Car is fiction, a fantasy. To hear Le Van Thanh tell it (to the extent he talks about it at all), perhaps the notion that he was driving the real 1982 Fiat Uno that encountered Princess Diana is fantasy too. We may never know for sure. But one thing is certain: the little white car that sped away into that tragic Paris night 24 summers ago was doing nothing less than driving into the pages of history—a curiously incomplete page.
THE HEADER IMAGE INCLUDES (DIANA) A PHOTO BY JOHN MATTHEW SMITH, WWW.CELEBRITY-PHOTOS.COM, USED UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS 2.0 LICENSE. IMAGE OF THE BOOK THE LITTLE WHITE CAR IS PRESENTED AS FAIR USE. THE BOOK IS AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE HERE.
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