Tina Brown dives into Diana details

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Brown said she tried to balance the joys and pain of Diana’s life. Fast-forward to perhaps the height of Diana’s world fame as a royal. Brown was proud to nab an interview with actor John Travolta about his memories of dancing with Princess Diana in 1985 at the Reagan White House. It made for one of her favorite chapters.

“As soon as we get out there, the whole place clears for our encounter,” Travolta told Brown. “And I look her in the eyes and reassure her with my eyes to say, ’We’re OK.’ We probably only dance 10 minutes, but it feels like 20.”

Brown said it was a magical night because the “fairy story” of Diana became a Hollywood story. “One of the happiest scenes ... is that night when the world was at her feet and she felt good about it all,” Brown said.

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The constant problem: Diana was always outshining her husband, Brown writes.

Among Diana’s strongest legacies, Brown said, was changing the monarchy by giving it a more modern, compassionate and accessible face. The birthday concert Prince William and Prince Harry are throwing for their mother this July 1 is a good example, Brown said.

Diana was also the forerunner for celebrity activists who take on serious humanitarian issues, such as Bono and Angelina Jolie, Brown said. “With each cycle of the era, everything she did had this very generational echo,” Brown said. “This was a very different kind of royalty than we’d seen.”

Brown met Diana for a long lunch in New York in the summer of 1997, just before her death. The princess had become a confident and “totally evolved sort of global superstar,” Brown said. But that was before a downward spiral leading to her death. The popular princess suffered from lapses into terrible insecurity and no self worth. Brown said she later realized Diana had just been rejected by her last true love, a Pakistani doctor named Hasnat Khan, and she was irritated that Charles had thrown a 50th birthday celebration for Camilla.

“It was a throwback to the worst moments in her life, where she felt so abandoned,” Brown said. “So she went off with Dodi (Fayed) in a sense just for the protection. That was the irony.” Diana’s critical mistake, Brown said, was giving up royal security. If she hadn’t, she would never have been driven with Fayed by a drunken chauffeur through that Paris tunnel.

Brown would like to write another book after two short-lived media ventures — the glossy Talk magazine and a short run with her own CNBC talk show. For now, though, she offers the “Chronicles” as a social history of the monarchy.

“There were no villains in this story,” Brown said. “There were human beings, struggling under pressure, put into a difficult box where they tried to do their best, but were often thwarted by passion and love and the press and the tradition.”

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