The Height Of Gossip

We can feel ourselves being more and more charmed by Brown. We're in the process of forgetting that when she wrote a New York-based column for our very own Style section -- which she did from 2003 to 2005 -- we were not on record as its biggest fan.

Hey, that was then. This is now. We've bought Brown's "Diana as emblematic figure" line, suppressing the occasional nagging doubt. And we love the way she pronounces "figure" as "figger."

Still, we can't help noticing that there's a good deal more titillating gossip in "The Diana Chronicles" -- some fresh, much recycled -- than cultural history.

We were startled to discover that Brown cites the man she once called "bio-porn king Andrew Morton" more than a hundred times in her footnotes. Kitty Kelley is there, too -- 10 times -- though when the ferocious celebritologist's name comes up, Brown recalls citing her just once.

"Even with her named sources," she explains, "I was really concerned that it was really what they had said."

In fairness, Morton -- whom Diana hand-picked to present her side of her sordid marital standoff with Charles -- is unavoidable for a Diana biographer, and Brown takes care to point out when she thinks the princess was lying to him. She's put a lot of effort into truth-squadding gossipy memoirs, too. A fairly typical "Diana Chronicles" sentence begins: "In the housekeeper's account -- confirmed by others I have talked to. . . ."

Tough job, but someone had to do it.

Or did they?

At this late date, we wonder, is there really a need to reexamine the question of how the socially undesirable romance novelist Barbara Cartland came to be barred from the royal nuptials in 1981? Or to revisit the tabloid frenzy over Diana's alleged pre-wedding visits -- but wait, maybe it was Camilla! -- to the "Royal Love Train"?

Brown has no doubts. "There've been so many Diana books that feasted on this kind of trivia," she says, "that it was quite fun to sort of Sherlock out the truth."

When it came time to deal with the intimate phone chat between Charles and his then-mistress that was intercepted in 1989, however, Brown did admit to some squeamishness. "Even after many airings," she wrote, "you feel uncomfortable listening in."

This didn't stop her from devoting multiple pages to reproducing and dissecting these "Camillagate tapes," along with the equally invasive intercepted conversation Diana had with the caddish lover who called her "Squidgy."

"That's called private life," Brown says. "The last thing you want to do is see it out there." Still, she found the Camilla-Charles tapes too "revealing of their relationship" to ignore.

Was there anything she was too queasy to include?

"Couple of things, yes," Brown says. "I mean Diana could be, you know, a naughty girl." Even with her dead, "there are things I wouldn't want to say."

What about the part where we learn the name poor Charles likes to be called in moments of sexual ecstasy?

Brown laughs, then explains.

"I thought: This is too hilarious. I have to put it in."

'A Great Heroine Figure'

Okay, okay, we thought it was pretty funny, too. But you're going to have to get Brown's book and look up that tidbit yourselves. We're trying to maintain a vestige of journalistic dignity here.

Besides, it's time to step back and contemplate The Meaning of It All.

After Diana died in that August 1997 crash, a massive outpouring of grief showed those of us not tuned in to the Diana myth just how out of touch we were. Not long afterward, our smart and perceptive friend Marjorie Williams wrote a piece called "The Princess Puzzle" in which she tried to clue us in.

"Diana brought to life, on the grandest scale, the archetype of the princess inscribed on every girl's heart," Williams wrote -- but women's visceral connection to her story was more complicated than that. For the whole point of aspiring to be a princess is that you're aspiring "to perpetual daughter-hood, to permanent shelter. To dependency." And despite the feminist revolution, young women's lives remain defined by "a succession of choices between the possibilities of independence and the seductions of dependence."

We are reminded of Williams's point as Brown talks about what seems to us the most myth-subverting aspect of "The Diana Chronicles." This is its author's belief that the onetime princess bride -- a deeply insecure woman trapped in an awful marriage and straitjacketed by royal circumstance -- fought with desperate courage to break free of the perpetual dependency that others assumed to be her fate.

"I began by thinking that it was going to be difficult for me to sustain interest in her," Brown says. "But actually, as I went along, I realized that she was just a great heroine figure."

Take that Andrew Morton episode. Driven by a deep psychic need to be heard, Diana first handed her story to the hitherto obscure journalist and then, when the storm broke, steadfastly maintained she'd had no part in it.

"She just stared down Prince Philip and the queen," Brown says admiringly, "and said, 'I have absolutely nothing to do with this book' -- even as she was negotiating serial rights with the Sunday Times."

Crazed by her disastrous relationship with Charles, Diana still managed to carve out a psychologically fulfilling role promoting humanitarian causes like the fight against AIDS. And she was determined, as she told Brown at that 1997 lunch, that the loss of her royal power base wouldn't stop her. Leveraging her celebrity in support of her latest cause, banning land mines, she put on body armor and walked through an uncleared mine field. Twice.

"I certainly wouldn't have done it," Brown says.

It's a provocative notion, this idea of Diana as more heroine than victim, and we're not prepared to pass judgment on it yet. Not that we likely ever will be: We're quite sure that Brown's is the last Diana book we'll read.

Still, we expect to remain intrigued by the meaning of Brown herself.

Like Diana, Brown left an institutional power base (in her case, Conde Nast and the New Yorker) for a brave new world that promised more independence. Nothing she has done since -- not Talk magazine, which folded in early 2002, not her ratings-challenged cable TV show, "Topic A," which left the air in 2005, not her newspaper column -- has gotten her back to anything approaching the same level.

Unlike Diana, however, Brown has never, ever been seen as anybody's victim.

It's not clear yet what the author of "The Diana Chronicles" will go after next. She may do another book, she says, if she can find the right emblematic story to tell, or she might opt for "some other kind of startup thing."

But right now, she's not worrying about the future.

"This is the summer of Di," Tina Brown declares. And who are we, her ideal reader, to suggest otherwise?