Hampton Style - May 25 -

On a recent, sunny Saturday morning, Tina Brown was relaxing at her charming beach cottage in Quogue awaiting the publication of her first book, The Diana Chronicles. The former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker had already been on a madcap pre-publication tour where she dashed out the back door of a hotel in Germany to evade the paparazzi--as if she were channeling her subject, the late Princess of Wales. Before Brown's sure-to-be-buzzed-about book hit stores, she set aside some time to chat with Hampton Style at the beloved 1938 beach house she shares with her husband, Harry Evans.

Brown and Evans found the house in the winter of 1984. "I had just started at Vanity Fair. Having lived in England, I found New York so fast-paced and stressful," recalls Brown. "We decided to rent something to escape to. I asked my assistant at the time where I should go. She said, 'My grandmother used to live in Quogue.' I asked, 'Where's Quogue?'"

At the end of a long day touring houses in the pouring rain, Brown's real estate broker reluctantly mentioned one more house they could check out if they didn't mind seeing something old-fashioned and weather-beaten. "My eyes began to ding and she brought us here," says Brown about the cottage set back from the beach, with a screened-in porch, garden, and pool. "It was like something out of a time warp, furnished like the set of a Somerset Maugham play. It was all set up for a bridge game and was completely untouched. We rented it on the spot." They eventually bought it from the Post family, and have been spending weekends and every August here since.

While their 16-year-old daughter, Izzie, slept in and Evans toiled away on his latest book about American History, Brown sat down at a table on her back porch to discuss her career, her home, and her latest literary endeavor.

WHEN DID YOU START THINKING YOU WANTED TO WRITE THIS BOOK?
I've had a Diana book in me for years and thought at some point that I might write it. Phyllis Gann, who is now at Doubleday, would ask me every couple of years about it. And she came to me again when I was doing my show and pointed out it's the 10th anniversary of Diana's death, and I thought this is a great time to do it. Writing a book was a relief, in a way, because having done a column in the Washington Post, Talk, and a TV show, I was ready to sink my teeth into something.

BUT WRITING A BOOK IS SO ISOLATING.
Well, it's nice being married to another writer. We came out to Quogue and we just cut off. And I love reporting. It's hitting the phones and talking and meeting people. I interviewed 250 people. I could have gone on and on, but at a certain point you have to start the writing.

HOW DID YOU START REPORTING?
Having edited Tatler for five years, I knew a great many people in the upper classes, but a lot of them, of course, I hadn't seen--by choice. However, I suddenly sent them all messages: "I'm passing through London your grace, wouldn't it be nice to have a little lunch?" One contact leads to another and that's how it goes.

WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT DIANA?
Now that I have a 16-year-old daughter, 19 seems incredibly young. By the age of 20 she was a princess, a mother, a global celebrity, and the wife of a man who was unfaithful to her. It was an extremely hard plate of goodies to be sold. So I was surprised how much I came to respect her. She had the balls to take the nobility on. She fought them. She refused to accept infidelity in her husband, and she refused to go under. Before the divorce negotiations, Prince Philip said to her, "If you don't behave yourself, my girl, we'll take your title away from you, your HRH." She replied, "My title is older than yours, Philip." No one dissed Prince Philip--she was the only person who wasn't afraid of him.

I also thought I might discover that the compassionate and caring "people's princess" stuff was fake, but, actually, she did have this amazing gift. One person said that she had an ability to create a circle of intimacy. It didn't matter how many people were around, how grotty the surroundings, she could do that Clintonian thing, except in her case there wasn't another agenda.

I also learned she had this huge buried rage that came from the wound of her childhood. It was a wound you didn't want to disturb. The only thing that could be assuaging for her was to achieve some emotional security from her marriage and family. She always looked for a mother substitute. There were no positive role models in her life. Her mother left when she was six, her stepmother was vile, her grandmother was even worse, and her sisters really were very self-involved. There was nobody who was a mentor. And she's looking for this warm, cozy mother-in-law and she winds up with Queen Elizabeth II. It's almost comical to think you're going to get any warm and toasty mothering from her. She's a woman of formidable characteristics, but she's not someone to call and have a cup of tea with when you're feeling a bit low.

And [Prince Charles] was not really in love with her. I think her agony was not that she lost him but that she never had him. What a life! It was a bit of a rough deal. She did excessive, crazy, and vindictive things, but I just feel the right was on her side through and through.

WHEN DID YOU SIT DOWN TO FINALLY WRITE?
I finally cracked it when I went to Paris with this terrific war reporter from Paris Match. He had been an expert on the French case and he took me through the crash site blow by blow. And then we had lunch together at the Ritz, and I walked through the corridor where she walked out and I had this real epiphany of her last hours. I saw these Hermes scarves and Eurotrash things in the windows, and I thought, this is what she was seeing before she got in the car. The first chapter is that last day.

DID YOU FEEL LIKE YOUR MAGAZINE BACKROUND HELPED?
It was very useful. I knew Diana and had met her. I wrote a cover story in Vanity Fair in October 1985, which broke the news about her marriage and caused a huge eruption at the time. Secondly, it meant that I saw how she morphed out of society into celebrity culture. In a sense, my magazines had done exactly that: I had gone from doing a society magazine in London to doing a celebrity culture magazine. Having edited Vanity Fair meant that I could get some terrific interviews. John Travolta gave me a wonderful account of the night at the White House when they danced. Baryshnikov was there and he gave me some fabulous unique material. I just said, "Walk me through it blow by blow."

WHAT DO YOU THINK DIANA WOULD THINK ABOUT THE BOOK?
Diana was quite literal-minded. She would have loved the stuff about her humanitarian causes, but I think she would have been worried about the dark side. People who liked her have read it and felt that they liked her more. Men are a little tougher on her, which was true in her life.

DO YOU MISS MAGAZINE EDITING?
Yeah, I do. But I've sort of segued out of it. I'd like to edit something again, but not to the point that I wouldn't do it if the circumstances weren't absolutely right. I don't think I'd want to do another start-up, like Talk. I think it's too iffy a marketplace for print now. If I were to start something it would be online, it'd have to be. I've always wanted to do a newspaper. I could do that if I went back to England, and I've been offered that, but I don't want to go back to England. I don't want to move out of New York.

WHAT WOULD BE YOUR PROCESS OF A DAY OF WRITING IN QUOGUE?
I'd get up at 6:00 a.m., jump on my cross-trainer and watch CNN. At 7:30, Harry and I would bicycle to the Quogue market. By that time I'd be ravenous. We would buy the newspapers, and we would sit on a bench and have a toasted bagel and coffee, and it was the great treat of the day. Then we'd bicycle back and sit in our rooms until 1:00 p.m., when we would eat a turkey sandwich purchased from the Quogue market on the deck. Then we'd go back to our rooms, work till 10:00 every night, and then there would be a video to discuss and we would watch that. And it was absolute bliss. I had such a great time. It was so delightfully simplifying. I realized the stress of social life is "what a shame I can't go to that because I've accepted that. Wow, I really don't want to go but I ought to." It's just great to say, "Actually, I'm not doing anything at all."

DO YOU GO OUT TO DINNER AT THE QUOGUE INN?
We have a housekeeper and we prefer to have dinner by the fire. I don't ever take part in the Hamptons social scene. In the last two summers I've probably been out two or three times. The thing about Quogue is, it's just a bit too far. I go to Lally Weymouth's thrash in July, which is fun--it's the only place you can see Eliot Spitzer on the dance floor if you know what I mean.

DID THE PEOPLE AT THE QUOGUE MARKET KNOW YOU WERE WORKING ON A BOOK?
I don't know. We always look like such a wreck when we go out there. They're used to Harry coming in with one sock on and one off.

DID YOU GO ON INSTINCT WHEN STAFFING YOUR MAGAZINES?
Yes. And I saw it like casting a show. If I had two neurotic ones, I'd think, where's my calm? All my managing editors have been Taurus. I also very much think about inside and outside people. It's very important that you take care of your writers, and you care passionately about their words and their sentences. But those people are the inside people--they're not likely to be the ones out and about bringing in the story. I wouldn't expect the outside people to be line editors. I would have two or three people whose roles were undefined, perhaps, but brought in very good stories. We had a girl called Sarah Giles who I took to Vanity Fair for a while. She now sells Indian carpets. Reinaldo Herrera was fantastic because his Rolodex was always at our disposal. Unlike some social people, he loved doing it. He always had some weird back-door method to get people for the magazine: Noriega, Imelda Marcos, Arafat. Not because he knew Arafat, but because he'd say "I was at a charming dinner the other day at the Syrian embassy." He'd just know the key person at the embassy who'd know the key person to get in touch with.

SOME PEOPLE CAN PLAY THAT GAME AND SOME CAN'T.
I always regarded my social life as the journalism, whereas some people regard the journalism as the social life. I always thought the point of going out was to come back with stories. When I was doing my show, dinner parties were about booking all the guests. Of course I have a lot of people that I really want to see, but a lot of going to events is about copy. It feeds itself.