GOSSIP, GLITZ AND TRUE GRIT

Tina Brown, the prodigiously talented Queen of Buzz, has published a riveting memoir about her years as editor of Vanity Fair, a reign of brilliance that changed the face of magazine journalism

the lid on Charles and Diana’s rank unhappiness. It was the first the world had ever heard of it. She reported that Diana would ignore the family at Sandringham or Balmoral, cut off by her Sony Walkman, dancing to Dire Straits and Wham!; her murderous rages that were beginning to concern the Queen and Prince Philip, and the hours she spent studying her press clippings, “almost as if she’s trying to figure out the secret of her own mystique”. Charles, she said, had abandoned the image of Action Prince and was surrounding himself with “a motley band of mystics and self-sufficiency freaks”. We’ve long known the details of the unravelling of the Wales marriage, but it was Brown who originally blew the story.

Brown was herself, if not a dinkum blue blood, steeped in those circles. Her father was a film producer and she grew up in a country house where her parents entertained “rising starlets, operatic art directors, tragic comediennes, moody directors, on-the-make leading men and the odd literary lion . . . you could spot the latest James Bond or the star of a Carry On comedy lying contentedly inebriated under the Christmas tree.”

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