The Diana Chronicles (Hardcover)

by Tina Brown (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Princess Diana was "the best thing to happen" to the British royals "since the restoration of Charles II," concludes Brown in this dishy biography, and the royal family's error was not realizing that. It's tough to pigeonhole a peacock, but Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, tries, calling the late Diana a diva, "a siren of subversion" who "even as a small girl... had been dangerous when hurt." Brown shows how Diana excelled at manipulating the media; her in-laws could only stand by helplessly as she captivated the cameras by batting her eyes or lowering them in her trademark "Shy Di" look. So enamored of herself was Diana, according to Brown, that she claimed not to understand why a certain cardiologist preferred his work at the hospital to seeing after her. Brown interviewed more than 250 people, from Mikhail Baryshnikov (who found the late Princess "so much more beautiful than any photographs or TV") to a friend of Diana's late mother, who says that mum disapproved of her daughter's too hasty royal marriage and tried talking her out of it. In the battle of unpleasant revelations made by both sides in the Di-Charles battles, Brown speculates that Squidgy-gate was the product of MI5 bugging the royal phones. Brown gives her book a tabloid-lingo touch and can fall into melodrama (while everyoneo saw Di's life as a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, the author says, it "was becoming more like something out of Hitchcock"), but then, given the nature of the subject matter, a little melodrama is entirely fitting. However, the final portrait of Diana as a heroine who broke free of the royal bonds and changed the monarchy forever will be familiar to most readers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Diana McLellan

I wonder if Tina Brown ever had the Queen Dream? Back in the mid-'80s, around the time Brown moved from editing London's Tatler to Vanity Fair, an astonishing 65 percent of the English -- including actors Judi Dench, Alec Guinness and several socialist politicians -- confessed to dreaming of a cozy tête-à-tête with Her Majesty. (Full disclosure: I had my second tea-with-the-Queen dream after reading Brown's book. It ended in a genteel food-fight, amid gales of chummy laughter.)

For those who haven't had the pleasure, Brown's jam-packed, juicy roll in the high cotton is even better, fragrant with the rich schadenfreude that makes Top People so much easier to bear. And in return for its rumored $2 million advance, it includes shovelfuls of hot fresh dirt, tucked among the standard (and amazingly detailed) iconic fare. Remember the sex-soaked phone tapes (Diana as Squidgy, or Charles's Tampax fantasy)? Remember the Royal Love Train? Dueling media manipulation? Jealous attention-grabbing? Top-of-the-line adultery, divorce and money-grubbing?

One charming image is new to me: The night before her fairy-tale wedding, the just-turned 20 Lady Diana Spencer gobbled everything in sight, got "sick as a parrot" (presumably to fit into her wedding dress) and then, at loose ends, tripped gaily downstairs at Clarence House to chat with the Queen Mum's elderly page. Spotting the old boy's bike, she hopped on and began peddling joyfully in circles, jingling the bell and singing over and over, "I'm going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow!"

That triumphant crow crowned months, if not years, of meticulous plotting -- not only by Diana, but also by the desperate-for-a-virgin-bride Windsor tribe, all laid out here for our delectation like a really good hunt breakfast. It also heralded the dawn of 16 years of hell. Hell for Di, hell for the Royals, hell for everyone but the press -- hell that didn't even end on Aug. 31, 1997, the night the black Mercedes carrying Di and her coke-snorting beau crashed into a wall of the Pont D'Alma tunnel in Paris, kicking off a decade of conspiracy theories, to which Brown gives a rather cursory and politic nod.

As it happened, Diana's bike caper was entirely in character. All her life, Earl Spencer's daughter hung with the help. Skimpily educated, she learned everything she knew below stairs at her family's splendid Althorp estate. She loved the gossip and chatter of housemaids and pastry cooks. Personally, I've always thought that her total ease with the British press -- and the reason its hard-boiled hacks fell so madly in love with her -- was that deep-down she considered them all matey surrogates for the gang in the scullery back home. She relished menial work, too -- to clean house, to wash and iron clothes, nanny small children and cook bread-and-butter pudding for the staff, was bliss. During her honeymoon aboard the royal yacht Britannia, as her cerebral Prince buried himself in the highbrow books of Laurens van der Post, Di slipped away whenever possible to crash the crew's parties. At one point, she had to be elbowed away from playing the piano for a crowd of cheering sailors. Even her accent -- flat, affectless and airing some surprisingly vulgar vowel-sounds -- struck many snobs as stunningly low-class for an earl's daughter. (In Charles's and Camilla's set, they use funny vowels, too, but they're the right funny vowels: "House" is pronounced "hice." "Very" is "virry." "Bouncy" is "bincey." Don't try this at home.)

Perhaps most important, Diana read what housemaids read -- down-and-dirty tabloids and sugary shy-virgin-marries-the-prince romances. Barbara Cartland, the pink-ostrich-plumed mother of Di's own hated stepmother, Raine, wrote hundreds of these, and would claim they were Diana's downfall: "They weren't awfully good for her." Fifteen years after the wedding (to which she wasn't invited), the Queen of Romance opined that the marriage was doomed all along because Diana "wouldn't do oral sex." Well, that wasn't in the romance novels, was it? But while we're down here in the trouser zone, it's worth noting that Diana herself called her marriage's sexual problems "geographical," and reported that Charles only sought her out every three weeks. We now learn that Charles likes to be called "Arthur" at the height of his amorous endeavors. Who would know? Not Di. But Camilla would, with her "long, languid understanding of her man" and her striking physical resemblance to his beloved childhood nanny.

The sour wisdom Brown gleaned during decades spent editing chic magazines glints throughout her book, like rhinestones under sackcloth. She blames Diana's bulimia on media exposure, pure and simple: "Us magazine today is filled with the sunken cheeks of formerly pneumatic starlets who are turned by round-the-clock exposure into tiny famished ghosts attached to hair weaves." "For women over thirty-five, glamour has three Stations of the Cross: denial, disguise, and compromise. As she entered her thirty-seventh year, Diana told herself she was looking for love. But what she was really seeking was a guy with a Gulfstream."

The young Diana was no angel. As a child she tormented her unlucky nannies. She locked one in a bathroom; she threw another's undies out the window; she spiked one's cushions with pins; she tossed another's engagement ring down the drain. As a teen, when James Gilbey stood her up on a date, she poured flour-and-egg paste all over his Alfa Romeo. When she and her sisters read about their father's marriage to Raine, recently divorced from the Earl of Dartmouth, and realized that they, the girls, hadn't been invited to the ball, she confronted the groom, hauled off and slapped his face. "That's from all of us, for hurting us," she said, before stalking out and slamming the door.

Word of the guerrilla warfare she launched against her new stepmother -- poison pen notes, harassing phone calls, yanking out the wiring from beneath the floorboards -- might have given the Royal Family pause before they launched their relentless campaign to have the heir to the throne marry England's sole remaining high-born virgin. One night, perhaps sensing she was being short-changed, she became so enraged with Charles kneeling beside his bed in prayer that she bonked him on the head with the family Bible. She used the f-word with some frequency. And she had an especially soft spot for garbage bags: When stepmother Raine was finally kicked out of Althorp, upon Earl Spencer's death in '92, Di had Raine's glorious clothes unpacked from her "S"-emblazoned Vuitton suitcases, stuffed into garbage bags and then kicked downstairs. (Her brother Charles, heir to the Spencer title, bowled Raine's other possessions after them.) And after her divorce from Prince Charles, she shoved the priceless Prince of Wales china into a heavy-duty garbage bag and went at it with a hammer and a will.

A great glory of this book is the behind-the scenes close-ups of life at the various castles, palaces and Stately Homes. Picture Diana on her first two-month boot-camp in Balmoral, the sovereign's Scottish retreat: The long days slaughtering wildlife, picnics in the freezing rain, dinners seated between two elderly courtly stiffs ("heavy furniture" in Di-speak); Prince Philip booming on for hours about the evils of trade unions; Princess Anne barking about her day's kill; the Queen's bagpipers at last wheezing traditional Scottish airs around the table to signal time for the women to leave, perhaps for tiddlywinks and jigsaws. As nobody ever goes to bed before the Queen, Di could be stuck listening to Princess Margaret tinkling old show tunes on the piano until 2 a.m.

London's Kensington Palace, the luxurious grace-and-favor royal compound in which Diana and Charles lived for some time after their marriage, was a hive of loathing. Princess Anne called Diana "the Dope." Diana called the Austrian-born Prince Michael of Kent "the Führer" and "the U-Boat Commander."

Diana had not, of course, married for chums, a good time or even ambition, but for her ideal of romantic love. Finally understanding that Charles would always love Camilla Parker Bowles, and never her, she began the string of affairs that spiced up the end of her short life. Brown really goes to town here. She, worldly piece of work that she is, thinks everything would have been hunky-dory if Di had only got it on with Prince Philip, the Queen's consort. He fancied her anyway, and it would have kept the fuss inside the family. But Di aimed lower. Her first affair, Tina believes, was with Di's cockney bodyguard Barry Mannakee. For this flash, Tina pumped Di's pal Dr. James Colthurst, who helped the Princess tape all the dirt used by Andrew Morton in Diana: Her True Story, the H-bomb dropped on the House of Windsor in 1992. Not only had Diana admitted an affair, Colthurst said, but she thought Barry was "bumped off" when he died. Next came the red-haired Life Guards Maj. James Hewitt, her (and the boys') riding instructor. Later, when the discarded and broke Hewitt sold his memoirs, he was widely scorned as the Love Rat.

Was he or was he not the father of ginger-haired Prince Harry? Tina thinks so. "Well, I don't know what she was doing at the time," Prince Charles once responded, not too gallantly, when the subject arose. A succession of tall, handsome beaux, both before and after the official royal separation of Dec. 9, 1992, were dubbed "the Dianamen" and the "42 Longs" by her bodyguards. She fell hard for married art dealer, Oliver Hoare, becoming his "phone sex pest." She carried on with Will Carling, the rugby star. But by this time, she was already evolving into Saint Diana. The spurned but genuinely kind and empathetic princess comforted the sick, embraced AIDS patients, shook lepers' hands, touched bloody bandages. As she bent to speak to dying children or tenderly caress the wheelchair-bound, she seemed a veritable healing angel.

And now, she had a great love. He was a Pakistani heart surgeon, Dr. Hasnat Khan. Impressed that the devout Muslim would not consummate their affair until her divorce decree was absolute, Diana actually considered converting to Islam. She bought several sexy Pakistani outfits -- love those bare midriffs! -- cooked for him, ironed his shirts, vacuumed his modest apartment, and for his birthday turned up wearing sapphire-and-diamond earrings and a fur coat with nothing beneath. Ah, l'amour! And glamour! Unfortunately, his large, close family wanted him to marry a nice Muslim girl, and he obliged. Poor Dodi Fayed, who died in the Paris crash, was really just a stand-in.

Diana's tragicomedy is Shakespearean in scale, with its slippery royal machinations, its agonized ironies, its seething jealousies and heartbreaking inevitability. Brown is no Shakespeare. But she gives us a walloping good read.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 542 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday (June 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385517084
• ISBN-13: 978-0385517089
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (137 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #118,077 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

194 of 219 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At last: Diana as a person! At last: you can understand her & feel for her, June 14, 2007

By	Jesse Kornbluth "Head Butler" (New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"August 31, 1997," the book begins. "Paris. The car that sped into the Pont D'Alma Tunnel at twenty-three minutes past midnight was carrying the most famous woman in the world."

Really? I know I rolled over and went back to bed when my then-wife --- who was 45 minutes late to our wedding --- woke up in the middle of the night to watch the Royal Wedding. Sure, Diana was a stunner. But very few men will tell you they want to spend more than a few hours with a bulimic woman of uncertain sanity. No, Diana was a chick fantasy.

The death? Another story. A horse-drawn wagon carrying a coffin and an envelope with one word, "Mommy," had the entire world blubbering. "I still weep when I see clips," a friend told me yesterday. "And the flowers in front of Buck House always get me."

But there have been so many books. And an excellent movie, "The Queen." What's left?

For most writers starting out on a Diana book in 2005, not much. But Tina Brown has a sharp eye for the telling fact. And her enormous Rolodex led her to sources who never talked before or who trusted her to Get It Right. The result is a reading experience that will take over your life until --- exhausted by unexpected empathy --- you turn the last page.

How is this? The end of the story is the most common memory on the planet. What don't we know about this woman?

Well, the "engagement ring" that Dodi Fayed bought Diana on the last day of her life --- he was in and out of the jewelry store in "seven minutes, twenty-seven seconds."

That last dinner at the Ritz --- Diana was "quietly weeping in full view of the clientele."

Camilla, on horseback, told Charles, on horseback, the first time they met, "That's a fine animal you have there, Sir."

How many times did Diana see Charles before their wedding? Thirteen.

When the marriage ended, what did Charles do with the unused wedding presents? Had them piled up in the garden --- and burned.

And there's so much more. Do the strange rituals of the Royal Family appeal to you? Are you curious about gossip columnists and photographers? And, most of all, do you get off on the sense of being in the room with real-life celebrities as their lives fall apart? Then "The Diana Chronicles" is an extra-large box of chocolates.

But this book is not just the greatest Vanity Fair cover story never written. Brown has a thesis. She doesn't bang you over the head with it --- it develops naturally. Like this: A shy, uneducated, dreamy girl from a dysfunctional family pushes herself into her country's ultimate family. Instead of finding Prince Charming, she finds herself married to a man who sneaks off to his lover every chance he gets. She's desperate for a hug from his mom, which is, of course, the last thing the Queen is able to give her. The marriage turns into the royal version of "A Star Is Born" --- she's going up, he's coming down. Envy, misunderstanding and misery ensue. Which leads to the wrong man, and another, and another, until she bottoms out with Dodi Fayed. "Diana told herself she was looking for love," Brown writes. "But what she was really seeking was a guy with a Gulfstream."

And the writing! Although the book is very much a narrative, the narrator does not seem like a writer at all --- "The Diana Chronicles" reads like a transcription of a brilliant raconteur. Here is Brown on the Ritz Hotel at summer's end:

...even the more exclusive areas of the hotel --- such as its restaurant, L'Espadon --- have a louche air of rootless extravagance. South American call girls with hirsute operators from emerging markets and rich old ladies with predatory nephews can be seen poring over the wine list under the trompe l'oeil of its opulent ceiling. Dinner for two sets you back $700.

Or this, Brown's takeaway of her lunch with Diana in July, 1997:

The heads of world-class celebrities literally seem to enlarge. Hillary Clinton's, for example, has grown enormously since she was the mere wife of the governor of Arkansas. It nods when she talks to you, like a balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. The years of limelight so inflamed the circumference of Jackie O's cranium, it seemed her real face must be concealed by an oversized Halloween mask. If you looked into her eyes, you could see her in there, screaming.

In these pages, we see Diana in there, screaming, and it makes all the difference. I always thought beneath that thin veneer was another thin veneer; Brown gives us a person. Indeed, she gives us all the people, fully fleshed. And, thus, surprising. Charles is much less of a jerk than you may have thought. And Prince Philip, a consistent dunce in "The Queen", does something quite magnificent at Diana's funeral.

Are there dead spots? Diana's childhood goes on and on. And the last few paragraphs made me uneasy --- I'm not at all sure Diana's sons are her "legacy". But those are small quibbles. Much more memorable is the intelligent conversation you have with a book like this --- for what is a more interactive experience than a smartly written book?

I sat on my window seat, book in hand, and read through the morning, was handed a sandwich, read on through the afternoon, ignored the child, day becoming night, the air cooler now, turning the pages faster, feeling the blood churn, wanting to shout no, no, don't...don't, and then the abreaction, the reliving of the funeral and the tears we shed for ourselves as much as for Diana --- yeah, the day I read "The Diana Chronicles" was a good one.

And the thing was, when I started reading, I didn't give a damn.

68 of 74 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Is there anything new to say?, June 25, 2007

By	J. Marren "jtm497" (Glen Ridge, NJ USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

I thought so. With special access to sources as a result of her stint as editor of the Tatler in the UK, Tina Brown has written the story of Diana as both a media creation and media manipulator.

Shockingly uneducated and raised in a broken home, Brown says Diana focused on Charles early as the embodiment of all her life had lacked. Diana was judged to be aristocratic, pretty, malleable and above all a virgin. Charles was, according to Brown, more or less pushed into it by his parents, who along with "Uncle Dickie," the assassinated Earl of Mountbatten, were growing tired of Charles' unsuitable dalliances.

But Diana refused to play along. I'm sure we've all secretely wondered, "so how bad could it have been?" Brown convinces us that it was very bad indeed. Charles was dull, unemotional, and more interested in books than his pretty young wife. The Queen ruled the roost. Surprisingly to me at least, even in private all the courtesies of royalty had to be observed--everyone was summoned to breakfast at 9 am sharp at Balmoral, the summer retreat; no one could retire for the evening before the Queen. Costume changes were endless, as were tramps through the rain and hunting. And of course Camilla was ever present.

In response, Diana became a star. Perhaps she surprised herself at first but it didn't take her long to catch on. She'd tip the media off to her whereabouts, learned how to dress, and used her amazing warmth and charm, not to mention English beauty, to upstage the Royal Family on a regular basis. They were furious. And so was Diana. She could not acccept the royal practice of state marriage and a lover on the side. She was too young, too romantic. But Brown also shows us that she was very canny, and her media gambles--the Morton book, the famous TV interview--paid off. In her divorce negotiations she came off much, much better than her hapless sister-in-law Fergie. Stunned at how badly Sarah Ferguson was treated, Diana vowed it wouldn't happen to her--and it didn't.

Sadly we know the end of the story. How ironic that the most famous and desireable woman in the world spent her last summer in the arms of Dodi Fayed, who, Brown claims, was also pushed into it by his status-seeking father. One wonders what would have become of her; by the end of her life the chances of her finding a happy relationship seemed quite remote.

I raced through this book, fascinated by Brown's wealth of detail. Diana wasn't a saint as some claimed, nor an airhead. She was deeply troubled and quite amazing at the same time, and to Brown's credit I finished this book feeling I'd gotten a glimpse of the true person. Highly readable; highly recommended.

75 of 84 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great read, even if not a Diana fan, June 13, 2007

By	Apple (California) - See all my reviews

Don't read the Diana Chronicles if you're expecting new bombshell gossip about the life of Princess Diana. But do read it if you're looking for an interesting book that offers a unique take on a famous life.

In the early 1980s, when Lady Diana Spencer was on the verge of marrying her prince, Tina Brown was the 25-year-old editor of Tatler Magazine. A few years later, Princess Diana was the most famous woman in the world and Tina Brown was the most famous woman in publishing. The women knew each other and even met for lunch six weeks before Diana's death.

At times, the Diana Chronicles seems like an encyclopedic version of every book ever published on the late princess - the footnotes alone run 34 pages! But, because the author has connections that most of her fellow biographers can only dream of, it does offer some new insight into Princess Diana's life and the lives of the family she married into.

The Diana Chronicles is less a history and more an analysis. Brown takes some of the more famous moments in the Diana/Charles/Camilla mythology and offers her opinion on what actually took place. She looks not only at Diana's childhood, but also at the English aristocracy in the late 70s and early 80s. And she explains why the Windsors thought Diana would fit a certain mold.

Brown is respectful of the late princess's memory, yet not in awe of it. She is less interested in breaking news than in offering explanations for the different facets of a very complicated, and very human, woman. Ultimately, what makes the Diana Chronicles so worth reading has little to do with the subject and everything to do with the author. Tina Brown can write. And she can write brilliantly.

Four and a half stars.