Tina Brown Tells All About Princess Diana
New book 'The Diana Chronicles' blames parents' divorce for ongoing troubles.
June 7, 2007 — -- Princess Diana, almost 10 years after her life ended in a Parisian tunnel, still holds a treasured place in the hearts of so many. Now, here's a complete picture of the tragic, beloved princess of Wales that could be told by only one woman: Tina Brown, who many consider the most-renowned magazine editor of her generation for her work at Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.
Talking about her new book, "The Diana Chronicles," Brown says, "I felt that Diana had been obscured by all the stuff about her, rather than illuminated. That at the core of it was a young woman who had an extraordinary gift for empathy on the one hand, and on the other hand, was also emblematic of so much about the era of the 1980s and the 1990s."
That intuitive empathy led "the people's princess" to connect with others as no royal ever had. Her glamorous look and trying times brought her state-of-the-art celebrity, and she would leverage that fame to draw attention to her causes, as Bono or Angelina Jolie do now.
"She was not a victim," says Brown. "Diana really was somebody who took control of her life in the most amazingly empowered way. She fought herself out of that box that she found herself in as a very young girl. …"
Click here to read an excerpt of "The Diana Chronicles."
Even as a child, Diana was a girl of radiant beauty. Yet the end of her parents' marriage left her with emotional scars that would never fully heal. "Most of Diana's flaws really came from her chronic insecurity, the great wound of her early hurt, which was her mother leaving when she was 6," says Brown. "That really caused her to have this kind of rocky foundation, the thing that she was always trying to compensate for. The MP Hugo Swire said to me, 'Diana wanted more love than any Englishman can give.'"
Certainly, she wanted more than Prince Charles could provide. After what looked like a fairy tale wedding, this young, exuberant woman found herself trapped in the chilly, emotionless world of Charles and the royals. Mary Robertson, an American businesswoman who'd hired a young Diana to be her son's nanny, recalls letters that suggest how lonely she was. "I remember one of her letters had a very poignant line saying, 'I long for the company of people my own age,'" Robertson says. "So she just, you know, had nobody."
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