Tina Brown dishes the dirt on her new biography, The Diana Chronicles

THE UNSINKABLE TINA BROWN After a few quiet years, the queen of media reclaims her throne

Few editors in the magazine world attain the kind of iconic success that imparts first name status. There is Anna, there is Graydon, and then, of course, there is Tina, the controversial and charismatic editor whose gossipy new bio of Princess Diana, The Diana Chronicles, was released last week with typical fanfare, with profiles of the author gracing the covers of USA Today, Newsweek, and New York magazine all in the same week. From Tatler to Vanity Fair to the New Yorker, Tina Brown has transformed the magazine industry in ways large and small. Along the way she's also had some very public defeats, most notably the $50 million collapse of Talk magazine, which she launched with former Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein in 1999 and shuttered three years later. But the ordeals haven't seemed to slow her down. After a brief attempt at a TV career and a few quiet years researching her book, she's back in the spotlight. Last week, her party for the book, hosted by Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer, attracted more luminaries than the Chateau Marmont at Oscar season.

"They slammed me for writing about Roseanne in the 'New Yorker.' Now you turn on the nightly news and it's wall-to-wall Paris Hilton on CNN!"A day later, Radar editor in chief Maer Roshan, a friend of Brown's since they worked together at Talk, spoke with her about her wild media ride and the controversial princess who has fascinated her for over 20 years.

TINA BROWN: Hello? Can anybody hear me?

MAER ROSHAN: I can hear you. But you sound like you're underwater.
I feel like I'm underwater. I just spent an hour and a half in a studio, perkily chatting up my book for Entertainment Tonight.

I'm in my office with the shades drawn recovering from your party
last night. What a blast. Michael Bloomberg, Barry Diller—all your boys
were there.
Wasn't it fab? I had a great time. I couldn't believe Bloomberg showed up. He said he was going to do a stop by, but then he stayed for practically an hour.

He seemed very jovial.
Very jovial, and sporting a billion-dollar tan.

And was that Harvey Weinstein holding court in a corner? Someone was
trying to start an evil rumor that he'd crashed.
No, Harvey was on the guest list! He came with Tom Freston. And I'm glad he did. I wanted it to be a fun, inclusive event. You know, come all ye faithful. And come all ye unfaithful as well.

So ... the book. Several writers have noted the similarities between you and Diana, both physically and personally. The same adjectives are deployed to describe the two of you: "ambitious," "savvy," "seductive," "superficial." Do you think you have a lot in common with her?
God, I like to think I have nothing much in common with the airhead daughter of a pedigreed Earl who left school, became a nanny, and married a prince with a tenacious mistress. I don't see much of a resemblance, to be perfectly frank. Except for a haircut. But the truth was I had more in common with Camilla Parker Bowles's haircut, if anybody cares to examine my coiffure on my first Today Show.

But Diana's been a constant in your career, from Tatler to Vanity Fair to Talk. What explains your fascination with her?
When I became editor of Tatler, we were all completely focused on the next round of British upper class girls who were utterly different from Diana—girls who were posing for Andy Warhol's Interview and doing coke off people's furniture. Suddenly, along comes Diana with her pearls and twinsets, bragging about how she kept herself "tidy" for the Prince of Wales. We all thought who is this odd retro creature from the '50s and '60s?

What most struck you about Diana when you first met her?
Her incredible youth. She always had this incredible skin. It was really her great beauty, her coloring—intensely English, with pink cheeks and great big, blue, soulful eyes. You don't really get it in the photographs. Also her height—it really was supermodel height, particularly when she was in heels.

In your book, Diana comes off as a complicated, compromised person. On the one hand, she's a brave and funny woman who stands up to Britain's elite. On the other hand, she's smug, manipulative, and paranoid—a woman who runs after unsuitable rich guys and regularly sweeps Kensington Palace for bugs. Which one is the real Diana?
Diana was a very sweet, undereducated, slightly confused girl who then collided with this very unforgiving culture with the Windsors. I think it was toxic for her. If she was a little insecure before, the Windsors made her paranoid. If she felt unloved as a child, the Windsors made her feel utterly rejected. It was one those things where nothing could have been worse. This was a girl who had always wanted a mother, so she turned to older women for mentors. But quite frankly, if you're looking for a sweet, touchy-feely mother substitute, Queen Elizabeth II, for all her admirable qualities, is hardly the person you'd turn to.

Though your book largely portrays her as naive and kind of dumb, Diana seemed to be very savvy when it suited her. You contend that she was angling to marry Prince Charles ever since she was a teenager.
She did have this incredible EQ. The very first thing that she said to Charles on that first picnic when they were thrown together was very shrewd. She said, "You looked so sad when I saw you at the funeral of Lord Mountbatten." And it went straight to the mark, because it said to him immediately: "Here is a caring and sensitive girl who, amidst all of the pomp and circumstance at the funeral, saw that I, Charles, was lonely and melancholy." She always managed to say the right thing. She was brilliant at it actually.

In England and across the world, there's a public, largely heroic image of Princess Diana, which is contradicted by the portrait painted by some of her closest confidantes. While researching your book, you had access to several of her tightest friends and advisers. What's their evaluation of her?
There are still people who feel burned by Diana, and they will tell you that she became immensely capricious and vindictive as her life became more and more that of a superstar, and she got a little crazier as the divorce started to happen. That was when, for instance, she got this absolutely obsessive idea that Charles was having an affair with the children's nanny, Tiggy Legge-Bourke. Diana spread around that Tiggy was pregnant by Charles, and at a party she went up to her and said, in front of the group of 50 people, "Oh, I'm so sorry you lost the baby, Tiggy."

No way!
This was the kind of thing Diana was doing in those years before the divorce. It was a divorce that was as crazy as Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger's. Think about it in those terms.

What was the most surprising thing you discovered about her?
I was really quite surprised at the extent her nerve, her sheer kind of calculated, courageous, reckless nerve. Like when she wanted to do the Martin Bashir [BBC] interview she knew that she would never get the palace to consent to do it, so she got Martin Bashir to smuggle the cameras up to her suite at Kensington Palace disguised as hi-fi boxes. One of the people who worked on the show told me she was like a coproducer of the entire segment and knew exactly what she wanted. She wanted to look tragic and haunted. So she did her own makeup, making her face extremely pale and putting big shadows under her eyes. I wasn't aware that she was quite that savvy about stuff.

Media savvy, too.
Genius. She was inconceivably media savvy. When Diana was going to cooperate with Andrew Morton for his book on her, she lied to everybody. I mean, just stared them blind. Prince Philip and the Queen had her up to the castle and said, "We know you've cooperated with this book," and she said, "Absolutely not. Andrew who? I have no idea what you're talking about." Meanwhile, she was negotiating the book for serial rights.

Another time, she discovered that a woman called Lady Colin Campbell was writing a book that was going to show her in an unfavorable light and threatened to totally take the shine out of Andrew Morton's hagiography. So Diana decided to leak news of Fergie's divorce to deflect attention from herself. At the time, Fergie was in the middle of a very quiet divorce from Prince Andrew, but when news of her split hit the newspapers it completely drowned out Lady Colin Campbell's book, which was exactly how Diana planned it.

And yet most people in Britain believe that not only was she a heroine, but that the royal family knocked her off.
Yeah, they do believe that. These devious tricks Diana did were not particularly attractive, but by the end of this book I still liked her a hell of a lot more than anyone else in the sad story. She was genuinely compassionate and caring, too. She was up against so many lies and such treachery. She basically fought back with the only thing she had, which was a bit of lies and treachery of her own.

You've been pretty firm in your belief that Diana's death was an accident.
I can understand why people feel she might have been murdered, because it's unbearable to think that someone so special died in such a banal way, but the truth is that night was an accident. She was in a car with a drunk driver wearing no seatbelt and driving at 75 miles an hour into the most dangerous tunnel in Paris. The car was found in the tunnel smashed into a pillar. She bounced off, and she died. All their movements that night were too erratic for it to have been a murder.

Many people think Diana brought down the monarchy with her exposure.
She certainly rocked the monarchy on its heels. Inside the palace, they still recall the week of her death as a kind of revolution.

How does her son, William, prepare to be a monarch in this new age?
Well, he's kind of a serious guy, not a rocket scientist. Which is useful because, frankly, anyone really intellectual is going to have a rotten time living in that box. He's very rural and wants to be a farmer, which is good. It's all good if your job is to be king.

So he seems like kind of a bore.
Conservative, certainly. [Laughs.]

Harry seems a bit more fun.
Harry is a complete cut-up and a hell-raiser. Much more like Diana. She used to say, "I'm like the naughty one, I'm like Harry."

It must be difficult for him to have people suspect that his real father is Captain James Hewitt.
Yeah, that must get on his nerves. [Laughs.] There are all these rumors, but I come down on the side that he's Charles's—unless we get his DNA, we'll never know the truth.

It adds to Harry's mystique.
Not in the palace, unfortunately.

One of the interesting things about the press you've received for this book is that it's so positive, which was not the case when you were editing Talk. A few years ago, New York magazine columnist Michael Wolff, that dapper fashion plate, derided you as a "bag lady." Now the same magazine is hailing your enormous pendulous breasts.
[Laughs.] You gotta be glad for any cheers you get these days, even if it's for your cup size.

What do you think explains the venomous press you received during and after your Talk years?
I think that lots of people believed that I'd had it too good for too long. Everybody's always looking for the next episode in the drama—and waiting for the final fall.

You've said that failure has made you a better, more well-rounded person. What did you learn from failure?
Well, I learned a lot actually. I learned how to handle a problem. I learned to be very careful about reckless decisions. I've also learned that you have to be very careful who you go into business with. Something that happens when you have a lot of good things happen to you is that you tend to underestimate the role logistics play. You tend to think, It doesn't matter that these ducks aren't in a row, I will be able to make a great success anyway. Well, you can't actually. You just can't. You have to have the backing. You have to have people to do it. It [Talk] wasn't filled out enough as a scheme. So I've learned a lot about that. As have you.

Do you think it was a mistake to leave the best job in magazines to edit your own magazine?
If I say that it was a mistake, it feels like I'm disavowing what we accomplished at Talk. I loved Talk. I really was very, very proud of it. But I think it was a mistake to do it in the way that I did it. I also found out that my friends were fantastic. It's corny to say, but you do learn where your friendships are and how much you treasure them.

Were there people who abandoned you when you went down?
It was really more that I withdrew, because I only wanted to see certain people. You know, when there's no business reason to see certain people, you tend to go to the people you just like seeing. So in a way I ended up being more and more with people I genuinely liked, and that's just great because I find I have made warmer friendships. I've had time to nurture them.

You seem happier, too.
I'm much happier. I had a really great time doing the book and Harry [Evans, her husband] and I get along really well, so thank God. We just love being together and when we we were both writing in the country it was really fun.

Do you miss magazines?
Of course I miss magazines. I miss the collaboration. I miss being able to respond to things in real time. I miss being able to find stories for things that are being missed by other media and are interesting to me. But I also know that things evolve and things change in the media. Magazines are in a sort of chaotic state at the moment. It's not a great time to do a new magazine, so I'd rather stick with what I'm doing.

After the death of Talk, you publicly proclaimed that print was dead and said the future of media was online. But a few weeks ago you complained to the Wall Street Journal that blogs were a poor substitute for journalism. What would you do if you were trying to start a magazine today?
I'm loath to say you can't start a print vehicle from scratch. I think a smartly targeted niche magazine of the type you're attempting has a real shot at success. The trick is to keep it manageable. Instead of trying to start the next Reader's Digest, it makes more sense to do something exclusive—something with a circulation of 200,000 or 300,000 and keep it for that market and not try to do some sort of huge, great, unwieldy thing. The biggest problem with online journalism is that linking to long-form pieces doesn't have the tactile and visual luxury of print. But of course, financing those long, well-reported pieces is not easy either.

What magazines and websites do you regularly read?
I read all the media websites. Of course I read Radar. I read Salon and Slate, Smoking Gun, firedoglake.com, Andrew Sullivan and Mickey Kaus and Huffington Post. Ed Epstein has written brilliantly on the Russian spy case, and Jane Hamsher, the Hollywood producer, was best on the Valerie Plame story and Libby trial. For publications, I like the New Republic at the moment. I also think Newsweek under Jon Meacham is very good. And, of course, I like Vanity Fair and the New Yorker.

You are both credited and blamed with starting the current infatuation with celebrity culture. At Vanity Fair you blurred the line between hard news and what was then considered fluffy celebrity journalism. Do you regret the role you played in that shift?
I glory in the role, I glory in it! They slammed me for writing about Roseanne in the New Yorker, but that was by John Lahr for God's sake. Now you turn on the nightly news and it's wall-to-wall Paris Hilton on CNN!