The Height Of Gossip

Tina Brown Wanted to Do More Than Dish About Diana In Her New Biography. Hers Is a Tale of Pure Ambition.

NEW YORK

Tina Brown has our number, and she lets us know it before the interview even begins.

The photographer is just finishing up. The former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Talk, whose latest star vehicle is a book called "The Diana Chronicles," straddles a chair in front of a bookcase in her spacious East Side apartment. She has changed outfits twice already, most recently into a crisp-looking cream-colored jacket.

"Have you read many Diana books?" she inquires, straight-faced, as if one look at rumpled, male us hasn't established our membership in the class of American consumers least likely to be obsessed with the life, death and cosmic meaning of the Princess of Wales.

Hers is our first, we confess.

A hint of a smile.

"You're my ideal reader, then," she says.

* * *

Tina Brown has been called a lot of contradictory things over the years. To take just the best-known case, she has been lauded as a magazine genius who rescued the musty old New Yorker from irrelevance and she's been denounced, at the same time, as a buzz-crazed hack who did her best to destroy it.

But she's never been criticized for lacking ambition. And "The Diana Chronicles" is no exception to this rule.