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Tina
Brown offers this observation about celebrities and
their larger-than-life mien: “I have a theory that you
physically change by being looked at.” In fact, she
continued, one’s head appears to grow in proportion to
one’s body. “Hillary [Rodham Clinton’s]...is like
something on a Macy’s carnival float. Angelina Jolie’s
head—I’m sorry, it’s vast.”
If
there’s someone who knows a thing or two about
celebrities, it’s Brown, arguably the world’s most
talked-about magazine editor. After a run at the helm of
celebrity-driven Vanity Fair, she went on to
reinvigorate the staid New Yorker and even launched her
own short-lived magazine, Talk. Most recently,
she’s been back in the news with a book, The Diana
Chronicles, about the late Princess Diana.
The
journalist said the public’s fascination with Di
continues unabated because “she was the last golden
A-list celebrity. Nowadays everybody’s famous and nobody
is interesting....When she died, there was a great
silence in the celebrity graveyard.”
The
Lindsays, the Britneys and the Parises of the world have
“stepped into the void left by Diana” but fall short,
Brown said. Now society has pitiful star wannabes with
“anorexia and hair weaves. We have to keep manufacturing
product to fill that great grasping media maw,” she
said.
The
journalist was in town recently to discuss her new book
during a swank fete at the Hotel Bel-Air thrown for her
by AARP the Magazine, devoted to baby boomers. The event
drew an eclectic crowd, including former Disney head
Michael Eisner, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard J.
Riordan, actors Steve Martin and Emily Mortimer,
socialite Barbara Davis and model Cheryl Tiegs.
The
normally jeans-clad DreamWorks billionaire David Geffen
had donned a blue suit to introduce Brown at the
luncheon in honor of her and her book. “It’s sort of
like Guantánamo with an English accent,” Geffen said,
describing to the crowd what it’s like to be peppered
with questions by Brown.
After a
British lunch of fish and chips, Brown, clad in an ivory
form-fitting suit, discussed the book with AARP editor
Hugh Delehanty. Brown explained that she wanted to do
the book because there was so much “noise and not that
much understanding” about the Princess of Wales, and she
wanted to “scrape away all that stuff that had been
dumped on her reputation.”
She
explained how Diana was full of both great compassion
and “vindictiveness,” and how she learned early to
associate “the camera with love” because her father
showed his love for her by taking pictures of his
photogenic daughter.
At one
point, Brown even did her own imitation of Di, tilting
her head down and raising her eyes in shy and studied
allure. |
