The Royal correspondent

AN AMERICAN journalist once described visiting the offices of the New Yorker when Tina Brown was editor. He watched the formidable Englishwoman sail down a corridor, heels clicking, while some flunky hurried backwards in front of her, talking non-stop. By the time they disappeared into the lift, Brown had said not a single word.

Another colleague claimed that in the five years she worked with Brown, she never saw her smile until she watched her on a television chat show. Little wonder, then, that the media rumour machine predicted - wrongly, as it turns out - that Brown's new biography of Princess Diana, The Diana Chronicles, would be a hatchet job. Brown conducted more than 200 interviews for the book, and it was thought that the result would contain more warts than a coven of witches.

In fact, the book is surprisingly empathetic. Brown displays understanding for almost every character's predicament in the whole tragic mess. Diana's weaknesses - her insecurity, her neediness, her manipulations - are all painfully drawn, but so too are her tremendous strengths. Diana was, after all, a princess. She wasn't a saint. "I did find her very, very attractive," says Brown. "She was tricky and she was difficult, but she was also extremely warm, incredibly kind and very innocent when she arrived on the scene. Okay, she was flawed, but she had massive things to make up for it."

The room where Brown and I meet is a symphony of bright, white perfection: filmy voile curtains, white leather furniture, gleaming glass and hints of silver to reflect the light. No colour. Brown herself is also a palette of neutrals: blonde hair, white shirt, beige suit. But make no mistake, she is used to providing the colour in environments like this. Once, I interviewed shoemaker Manolo Blahnik in a room where a pair of apple-green shoes was simply, stunningly, arranged against a white background, the white turning up the volume of the green. Brown is like these shoes against the stark elegance of this room. Crisp. Clean. Sharp.

Then there is the cultured, English-rose quality you might expect from a supremely well-connected woman who went to the same kind of English boarding schools as Diana. The Diana Chronicles had a £1 million advance, and is attracting the kind of publicity expected from publishers in return for such largesse.

Brown is used to attention. At 17 she won the Sunday Times award for young playwrights. At the time, she was full of admiration for the New Statesman magazine, whose writers included Martin Amis and Auberon Waugh (both of whom she would have affairs with), and she turned from theatre to journalism. In 1979, aged just 25, she became the editor of Tatler, then the grandad of British magazines: very old and very frail, well-loved by family but going downhill fast.

Tatler was where she first encountered the emerging Lady Diana Spencer, and she would meet her professionally over the years that followed. As Diana's role changed, so too did Brown's. She turned Tatler around, and the rose was plucked from English soil and planted in the hothouse of New York to edit two similarly established but failing magazines: Vanity Fair and then the New Yorker. Eyebrows were raised at Brown's emphasis on celebrity culture. She put OJ Simpson on the front of the staid old New Yorker, much to the chagrin of traditionalists, who would apparently have preferred to attend grandad's wake than his out-of-intensive-care party.

It was Brown who first exposed the troubled royal marriage, in a 1985 Vanity Fair article called 'The mouse that roared'. Factually, it proved to be surprisingly accurate, but she understands more of the context now. "What I didn't know about, and what was the difference between journalism and history in a sense, was Diana's bulimia. That made an enormous difference to how sympathetic you would be. Some of the so-called tantrums were really about the stress of her bulimia."

Back then, she described Diana clearing out Charles's supporters from the palace. Now, she says Diana was right. "They were the enemy. Camilla now has similar trouble with courtiers. She finds them oppressive, spiteful and eavesdropping."

Brown's reputation is steely, but she claims she is resilient rather than tough - and there's a difference. There is, in fact, an unexpected warmth, not just about her book, but about her too. She is empathetic in conversation, and the story of five unsmiling years is quite difficult to believe - she has the kind of smile that not only reaches, but lights up, her greeny-grey eyes. This is something that Diana, to a greater extent, and Brown, to a lesser extent, both experienced: in the public eye, you become the subject of other people's mythology.

THERE is an interesting moment when Brown's eyes harden in such a way that I feel a little frisson of expectation surge through me. Perhaps I am about to see the woman whose staff walk backwards in front of her. But I have just mentioned reading something interesting about her father, and later I realise the sharp look is merely a protective instinct for a father she loved.

George Brown was a film producer, and so Tina and her brother were used to celebrities being around. George had been married very briefly to Hollywood actress Maureen O'Hara before marrying Brown's mother, Bettina. In her autobiography, O'Hara describes going for dinner with George as a favour to someone else. They meet once more, O'Hara cutting short the evening on both occasions. But then, just as she is packing with her mother to sail to America, O'Hara receives a call from George, pleading to see her. O'Hara finally gives in. When she arrives, he is waiting with someone who will conduct a wedding ceremony. "I just stood there frozen, unable to speak, stunned and scared into silence," O'Hara writes. But she goes through with the ceremony, then leaves immediately for the boat. She makes it sound like the wedding was their last meeting. Later the marriage was annulled.

Has Brown read the book? Yes. She looks almost hurt. "She's very rude about him." But O'Hara's account doesn't sound convincing, I say. If it happened as she describes, O'Hara would have to be seriously unhinged. "It's a mystery," agrees Brown. "I know it was a young, short marriage, but she behaves almost as if he forced her to marry him." Didn't Brown's father ever speak about it? "No. I knew they were married, but he didn't like speaking about it. They were a generation that were so private. It's strange. I would love to know, but my mother's dead and so is my father. I wish they had been alive when the book came out because I would definitely have tried to get an answer."

When Brown and her husband, Sir Harold Evans, moved to New York, she bought her parents the apartment across the landing. "When I went to edit the New Yorker, they were always there for my kids when they came home from school. It was wonderful for me - and for them. My children were very close to my parents. They still talk about them at least twice a week."

Brown was particularly close to her mother, a quirky, offbeat woman who was a great writer. "She was very literary actually, and really guided my reading. She was my best friend. We were really, really close, as I am to my daughter. My mother was tremendously anti-establishment and very irreverent."

It is a quality her daughter inherited and would later admire in Diana. Brown was expelled from three schools. "I was a renegade too. I was always rebellious." What was she expelled for? "Attitude problems," she says flatly, then catches my eye and laughs. "'She doesn't seem respectful enough.' 'She is a tumultuous influence in the class.' Most of my attitude problems were to do with the fact that I thought they were completely absurd schools."

Brown's mother always backed her. "She used to come to my schools and say, 'How very sad for you that you have failed with this interesting child. Right, we're going somewhere better.'" Her mother's death, in 1998, precipitated Brown accepting an offer from multimedia company Miramax to edit a new magazine called Talk and present a chat show. "I was so distressed, and I think sometimes when you are distressed you sort of... you want a distraction. Which is not a great way to start a job actually, because you are not in great shape to do it. Losing a parent is so difficult, especially when you are close."

Her mother would have loved the attention The Diana Chronicles has received. "She was with me every step of the way." It's an interesting, colourful read, clearly well-researched, that gives insight into everything from Diana's troubled childhood to her doomed final love affairs. But perhaps its achievement is in pulling together strands of the story, in being the definitive Diana book rather than the groundbreaking one. With more than 400 pages, it's weighty, and the absence of a single photograph stresses serious intent rather than entertainment. Was Brown looking for her place in history? "I didn't feel that there was any book that gave the social, media, political context of Diana as well as the story of Diana. It's more ambitious perhaps than other books. It combines the personal and the public."

Tina Brown with her husband, Sir Harold Evans, in 2000

What interests me is how much Brown's personal life shaped her interpretation of Diana's. Diana was part of a triangle. So, too, was Brown. When she went to the Sunday Times as a young journalist, she fell for the married editor, Harold Evans, who was 26 years her senior. (They have been married since 1981 and have a son and a daughter.) Brown was a mistress. "Yes," she agrees, though she is quite obviously keener to talk about Diana's relationships than her own. She knows too much about probing other people's lives not to guard her own.

Did that make her empathise with Camilla? "I was more sympathetic to Diana in this situation," she admits. "I actually like Camilla. She's a warm, charming woman, and I am not one of those people who doesn't see what Charles sees in her. I do. But I think you have to be on Diana's side really, because here she was, so young, and Camilla knew better. She always clung on to Charles. People said he wouldn't let her go but, as we all know, you can have someone let you go if you want them to. You can say, 'I just can't do this to your wife.' God knows, we all know people who have said that and backed off and moved away, but she wouldn't do it."

Brown didn't back off. But perhaps the distinction she makes is that Diana was duped. She thought she was agreeing to marriage. Instead, she got 'an arrangement'. Charles never really broke off his relationship with Camilla, Brown believes, and even if there was a short period of physical fidelity to Diana, he returned to Camilla earlier than he admits. What Brown's book really captures is how stultifying royal life was for a teenager. She describes Diana and Sarah Ferguson escaping from a formal banquet and running, laughing, down the palace corridors, shoes in hands. For Diana, it was all duty without the love that might have made the sacrifice worth it.

Diana was accused of being mentally unstable, a favourite male put-down for emotional women. Was she? "I don't think she was a basket case at all. I think she was fragile and insecure, but had she had a husband who loved her in a less chilly, ungenerous environment than the royal family, I think she would have been a slightly highly strung, perhaps slightly skittish, thoroughbred of a woman who would have had a perfectly good, happy relationship with four or five kids and a husband like the James Gilbey or James Hewitt type. But then all the insecurities in her personality collided with the worst possible situation. Can you design a situation absolutely wrong for this girl? That was the situation."

Charles was almost as much of a victim as Diana. "He didn't want to get married, was pushed into it, then to his absolute dismay found he couldn't handle it. He was raised to be cosseted, protected and served, not to handle a turbulent child star, which is really what Diana was. It was like being married to Judy Garland or something."

Most people realised, even on some subconscious level, that Diana's luminous beauty was shaped by rejection. That's why she was riveting. Watching her emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis, we were voyeurs in a painful scene in which Diana mouthed a silent "look what you're missing" to the one man who didn't want her. (Never more so than the night of the black dress, when a stunning Diana appeared in public as her husband confessed his infidelity to Jonathan Dimbleby in a television documentary.)

Brown articulates that vague understanding more explicitly. Had Diana married a Hewitt, she might have remained the plump, gauche, girl next door. "In a funny way, pain made Diana special. It was the crucible in which her looks refined themselves into something extraordinary. First of all, the extraordinary weight-loss that came out of anxiety and bulimia. Secondly, the empathy that lit up those great warm eyes. Ultimately, pain made Diana more..." Brown pauses. "...in every way, more."

Brown, by contrast, had coasted through early adulthood, experiencing only success. Only when Talk magazine folded in the recession following 9/11 did she understand how formative failure can be. Yes, it was important to experience, she agrees, but she has a successful woman's dislike of discussing failure. Had it not happened, she wouldn't have gone on to write this very successful book. And when asked about the Washington Post's ombudsman, who described her opening column as a "precious, egocentric piece" that is "about the worst, most irrelevant thing I've read in my three years on the job", she reminds me that the column went on to be very successful. Anyway, she only cares about the opinions of the "discerning", which probably means those who rate her highly.

Brown points out the age difference between Charles and Diana, but her own marriage has survived a much greater one. Evans, she says, is hugely supportive of her success. "He likes strong women, and he likes me." Unlike Charles, who couldn't stand being upstaged by Diana.

Camilla, Brown claims, flatters Charles, putting him firmly at the centre of the universe. But Diana could have seen Camilla off if she had handled things differently. He may have only loved Diana in a skin-deep way, but he was very beguiled by her at first. So how would Brown have handled it? "Showing her jealousy rather than using wiles was a mistake. I think Charles is a man who doesn't like tears or expressions of jealousy. And I don't understand why Diana didn't try to get into country pursuits just a bit. If she had taken up gardening with some enthusiasm, that would probably have pleased him enormously. But she didn't do any of the things he cared about."

It's interesting that despite being asked what she would do, Brown answers in the impersonal third person. And anyway, it seems a slightly strange argument from a strong, successful woman. We didn't, after all, see Charles strolling round the King's Road boutiques saying, "Gosh, you would look great in that, Di." Isn't it an old-fashioned view of women that they have to fight their husband's infidelity with 'wiles', and feign interest in his hobbies too? Brown hesitates momentarily, then says, "But that was the situation she was in." So could Brown have done it? "No," she says immediately, and smiles. "No I couldn't. I would have been so furious."

The summer Diana died she was 36. Brown and another editor met her for lunch. That Diana could have handled it, says Brown. "She had a much greater maturity of understanding about what this marriage needed and should have been. I even think she could have tolerated Camilla later. But ultimately, Charles couldn't cope with having a superstar in his house and his bed."

Diana was capable of ugly things. Brown claims she fed the press Sarah Ferguson scandals to divert them from her. But perhaps she was never fully credited for her bravery. However misguided some people thought her television interview with Martin Bashir was, they could hardly deny her guts in defying the establishment so spectacularly. In fact, argues Brown, polls suggest that Diana made the right call. She didn't want approval from the palace. She wanted approval from the people. And she got it. "She had guts. And she was a witty woman, which I hadn't realised. I thought she was over-hyped in that sense.

"But when Prince Philip said to her, 'If you don't behave yourself, my girl, we'll take back your title,' she shot back with, 'My title is older than yours Philip.' That's when I like Diana. She was the only person in the royal family who wasn't afraid of Philip. I also like what she said to her divorce lawyer, Anthony Julius. He was a media lawyer, and when he said, 'This is my first divorce,' she said, 'It's my first divorce too.' She was funny, and I like that. She was such a daring girl, with a great sense of theatre."

Brown shares those traits. When she was under attack at the New Yorker, one of her high-profile employees resigned. He hired an actor to deliver his message, criticising Brown's editorship. Brown hired an actress to deliver her reply. "I am distraught at your defection. But since you never actually write anything, I should say I am notionally distraught."

SHE was the editor queen of celebrity. Isn't it hypocritical, then, for Brown to criticise the tabloid intrusion into Diana's life, as she does in her book? "I had standards, though," she protests. "There are things I wouldn't do. And didn't do." Celebrity is an interesting thing to write about. "My only complaint is when it drives everything else out."

Brown actually left Vanity Fair because she was tired of writing about celebrity. "That's why I went to the New Yorker," she says. "I thought celebrity culture had peaked. I just thought, 'This is crazy, it can't go on.' Then I get to the New Yorker and there's OJ Simpson. Whatever it was I thought had peaked has gone megawatt now, so it makes me think it never will burn out."

If The Diana Chronicles is of any interest to future historians, it will perhaps be for its illustration of the social and cultural markers of our age, including fascination with celebrity and the explosion of media. With media comes mythology. In her book, Brown muses: was Diana thinking of the soft English rain the night she died in Paris? Maybe, but probably not. We can never know, but we continue to speculate. The public are fascinated by the gloss of celebrity, but even more fascinated by what lies beneath it. All that fatal fascination came to rest on Diana, who had everything and nothing. Diana was the modern alchemist who mixed the two most potent of chemicals, royalty and celebrity. Instead of gold, she created an explosion.

Brown still lives in New York. Her happiest editing period was at the New Yorker, which is ironic given that it was her most serious and least celebrity-driven title. "It's still a marvellous magazine, and I think the legacy I left was all those terrific writers who are still there."

I decide that I rather like Brown, but I phone the New Yorker to ask those terrific writers who knew her better. A man says, "Yes, just e-mail the details of what you want to know." He never gets back to me. I bet they're all still scared of Brown. They probably should be. Although sometimes in our media age, reality and mythology are hard to separate. r

• The Diana Chronicles (£18.99, Century), by Tina Brown, is out now