The Height Of Gossip

But the Diana-Tina connection didn't stop there.

In 1984, Conde Nast brought Brown to New York to salvage its bungled relaunch of Vanity Fair. She succeeded where two previous editors had failed, thanks to what Britain's Observer once called "a then freshly postmodern mix of high and low culture, superstar millionaires and superannuated billionaires, Washington and Hollywood; all packaged in the gossamer gloss of the confident new."

One of her first moves was to assign herself a journalistic vivisection of the troubled Charles-Diana marriage.

By 1997, five years after she'd moved on to the New Yorker, Brown had made herself the most influential figure in American magazine journalism -- so much so that the now-divorced princess sought her out for a New York lunch. It took place at the Four Seasons in July 1997.

The princess's agenda?

To make the point that she'd moved on.

She wished the royals could have been, in Brown's remembered paraphrase, "mature enough to understand that I could have brought so much to the monarchy and I really regret that we can't be a team." Instead, the month before her death, she was planning to become "a major humanitarian ambassador for Tony Blair."

Yes, Brown repeats, she couldn't help liking "this very confident, striding global superstar."

The memory comes with a "but," however.

"I did feel that I was being sort of spun," she says.

'You Feel Uncomfortable'

"Us, too!" we want to say when the subject of being spun arises. "Us, too!"