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.

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 12, 2007

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.

Was it enough for Brown to take home an estimated $2 million advance for her first venture into long-form narrative writing?

No, it wasn't.

Will she be satisfied if she sells a zillion copies to the Diana-obsessed?

She will not.

Success, for Brown, will mean convincing the skeptics that she has done something important as well. It will mean capturing a crossover audience, successfully wooing the kind of reader who didn't snap up Andrew Morton's "Diana: Her True Story" or curl up with Kitty Kelley's "The Royals."

And we're a pretty good test case, if we do say so ourselves.

In 1981, we failed to join the roughly 750 million worldwide TV viewers who watched Diana Spencer tie the knot with Charles Philip Arthur George Whatshisname. In 1985, we went slack-jawed with bemusement as our bosses wiped out whole forests with 24-7 coverage of Charles and Diana's Washington visit. (Omigod! She danced with Travolta!) Word reached us, eventually, that the marriage of the century wasn't working out, but we couldn't have distinguished "Camillagate" from "Squidgygate" if you'd offered us the crown jewels.

We're not so hardhearted that we didn't feel bad about Diana's sad end. But we can't help asking, as we approach the 10th anniversary of that paparazzi-haunted Paris crash: Does the world really need another book about Di?

"I don't think of it just as a Diana book," Brown responds.

She set out, she says, to write cultural history, not just celebrity biography. For someone interested in "the '80s and '90s in England, the media and celebrity culture," Diana was the perfect narrative vehicle: a "transitional, emblematic figure who moved between all that."

Fair enough, we think. When Brown focuses on cultural change, she can be fascinating.

She talks about how the public fever for all things Diana -- combined with the princess's adroit exploitation of her Elvis-level celebrity for her own ends -- helped create today's out-of-control celebrity press. A key factor, Brown says, is the sheer volume of photographs in circulation: As a result, "the camera now searches more and more and more for the one image which seems to play against the other images." This means it "invades every corner of your life."

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.

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!"

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?