The Height Of Gossip

She evokes the turbulent, brazen era in the 1980s when new money and celebrity shoved their way to the front of the social queue in Margaret Thatcher's London. It was a time, she says, when PR types figured out that if you could attract Diana to a sponsored charity event, "you could have your CEO on the front page of the Daily Mail."

She's also good on the changes Diana forced on her archenemies in the hidebound British monarchy. These days, Brown points out, Prince William's communications person is "David Beckham's former PR guy," not "some stuffy old former naval officer, which is what they used to be."

Small wonder that the current batch of royal courtiers, when speaking of the pre-Diana era, say things like, "Of course, that was before the revolution."

Or that William and his brother, Harry, were informed that if they wanted to keep playing polo, like their hopelessly elitist dad, they'd have to show some interest in soccer as well.

'A Piece of Work'

But enough sociocultural seriousness. We've heard that Brown does a mean Diana imitation, and we're not too proud to request it. We're rewarded with a subtle tilt of a blond head, a burst of rapidly batted lashes and a faux royal monologue delivered more demurely than anything you'd associate with the Queen of Buzz:

"Frightfully, you know, it's just really, really, really, you know, I just really, I just feel really, really sad about it all. . . ."

Diana was "a piece of work," Brown says. "But I liked her a lot by the end."

Every journalist, Brown believes, has one or two stories he or she has always been involved with. The princess is hers. The beginning came in 1980, when the Oxford-educated editor was an upwardly mobile 20-something trying to rejuvenate a boring "social shiny sheet" called Tatler and Diana Spencer was the ultravisible fiancee of the Prince of Wales.

What to do?

It was a no-brainer.

Brown turned Tatler into "one-stop shopping for everything anybody wanted to know" about the hottest tabloid subject in the world. The royal wedding did for her magazine's circulation, she writes, "what the O.J. Simpson chase did for the ratings of CNN." The editor found herself on the "Today" show, with what she calls "a Camilla Parker Bowles wings-of-victory haircut," opining on all things royal.