Lady Di, a gifted manipulator
“Diana books are not the kind of literature I usually like to read. By releasing this warning in the greenhouse in the garden of her New York apartment, Tina Brown makes it clear that it took nerve to get started, ten years after her disappearance, in the umpteenth biography of Lady Di.
It certainly needed all the nerve of the Briton who saved the very glamorous American magazine Vanity Fair before taking the lead, in the mid-90s, of the New Yorker. An image of media genius, barely tarnished by the failure of his magazine Talk, which allowed him to pocket for his biography of Diana, which was released in France on August 27 (1), an advance of $ 2 million . "Lady Ti" could tackle the legend of Lady Di all the better because she herself participated in it to some extent. Patroness of Vanity Fair, she was thus the first, in 1985, in a resounding article, to evoke the setbacks of the princely couple.
Daughter of a wealthy British producer, Tina Brown has rubbed shoulders with the English aristocracy since her childhood, but she left it to live her American dream. She lives in Manhattan with her two children and her husband, Sir Harold Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times. And it was as an American more than as a Brit that she watched Diana transform royalty, "revolutionize" it, she says. The portrait she paints of the “people's princess” is anything but that of a naïve. We see Diana as a peerless expert on how to use the media. And it is finally this pas de deux between Lady Di and the press the real subject of Tina Brown's book
Le Point: Reading your book, which describes an often manipulative Diana, and in no way a victim, one wonders if you liked your heroine?
Tina Brown: I loved her more and more as I discovered what she really was. Because she was imperfect and complicated, I loved her more than if she had been pure goodness. She was 19 when she got married. People say, “Oh Diana, she knew what she was getting into. How could she know? My daughter is 16 and she has no idea what to expect. Diana thought she was going to marry a prince charming and love him forever, and at 21, she was pregnant, married to a disliked man and a superstar. She was very courageous. She even managed to modernize the monarchy, in her own way, she forced it to change. She used her fame to make it good.
But this transformation, she achieved it by showing itself Machiavellian ...
No one has ever been so good at handling the media as she is. She had an incredible instinct. One of the reasons is his fascination with images. Her father was an amateur photographer and taking a picture of her was the only manifestation of fatherly love. So she associated the image with the attention she could get.
And was that really conscious of her?
At times, yes. When Andrew Morton's book, which she actually totally dictated, came out, she knew the story of her marriage breakdown needed to be known. She knew that phone conversations with her lover had been taped and that those tapes would come out sooner or later. She needed to get her side of the story published, to show that she was a victim, that she was very unhappy within the royal family and that she was having an affair because Charles had cheated on her. The way she did it is amazing. She recorded her testimony on cassettes, which her childhood friend James Colthurst passed on to journalist Andrew Morton, responsible for writing the book, without revealing that her source was Diana herself. She corrected the text and when members of the palace said to her, “We know that you have cooperated with this book,” she replied, without looking down: “I don't know what you are talking about. Trapped in this marriage, she had two choices: implode or explode; she chose to explode.
So she wasn't a victim?
At the start of her marriage, she was unmistakably a victim. But from the start of the 90s she went beyond that. She got what she wanted: to get out of this marriage. And she got £ 17million for the divorce. She had hired a lawyer who specialized in the media and not in separation cases. When she went to see him, he told her, “This is my first divorce. "She replied," This is my first divorce too. Perfect, you are the one I need. She knew her case was going to be played out in the media and that she would only win this divorce by winning the media battle.
Yet her popularity was largely due to the fact that the people saw her as a victim of the establishment, of the royal family, right?
Her popularity was first linked to the fact that she was sincere in her commitments. In making this book, I never caught her in the act of pretending. In her humanitarian actions, she did not pretend, she really felt compassion. Admittedly, she sometimes had dual motivations. She could decide to go visit a hospital because she knew that that same day Charles would go hunting and that she would have a wonderful photo. She also knew the importance of the images taken during her visits. When she opens the first AIDS center and touches patients without gloves, or when she kisses lepers without protection, the impact is enormous. But when she was in the presence of the sick she was really sincere. She had a talent for addressing them and reassuring them. And she did a lot of things off the cameras, she kept in touch with the relatives of the people she had visited in the hospital.
Has she ever been in love?
She adored Charles. He undoubtedly had tenderness for her. A tenderness that could have turned into flame, but he never loved her with the intensity she claimed. I think she was also very much in love with James Hewitt, her riding teacher, that she was madly in love with cardiologist Hasnat Khan, and that she had a huge sexual attraction for Oliver Hoare, the art dealer. She eventually fell in love very often. The problem is, few of those relationships have satisfied her, other than Hewitt and Hasnat Khan, each in a different genre. Hewitt really saved his life when he appeared. Her marriage was a failure, she was thin, pale, and Hewitt restored her confidence as a woman. With Hasnat Khan, it was more of an adult story. He's an intelligent, serious man, he really loved her. They had a fantastic but impossible relationship. He is a Muslim, penniless. He married a young Muslim girl last year, the kind of marriage his Pakistani parents could accept, which was not the case with Diana. He could never have married her. But Diana was an absolute romantic.
With Dodi al-Fayed, you are less kind ...
She may have become more cynical, but she hadn't given up on her romantic dream of the Savior. She had this fantasy to the end. She thought there was a man somewhere who could rid her of her star life, of her media addiction. In fact, only she could protect her privacy, but she did not. She was the one who let reporters know that she was on the boat with Dodi, she was the one who arranged the photos where she kissed Dodi. You cannot behave like this and at the same time blame the journalists for chasing you. In the end, this attraction to the media was fatal to her, because she totally depended on them to assert herself. She never got that from her husband or her lovers.
Prince Charles you describe is ultimately a weakling.
Charles is weak, but he is a good man, and original. He was treated unfairly by the press. Strangely enough, they had a lot in common. She was revolutionary, and so was he, in her own way, in her interest in the environment, for example. She told me during the lunch I had with her in June, just before her death: “We would have made such a good team. " And that's true ! But there was Camilla. And not only Camilla, but also Charles' inability to handle the fame, the starization of Diana. He felt threatened by his wife. And Diana couldn't forget Camilla ...
