Another Mouse, Roaring?
Reading Tina Brown feels like gossiping over a glass of wine with your sharpest friend at the chicest bar in the city. Here's why anyone interested in royal gossip needs to know who she is.
If you’ve been within glancing distance of an online newsfeed or a print publication at some point during the past few weeks, it’s safe to say you’ve been confronted with news of Kate Middleton, the (maybe) wayward Princess of Wales.
And fear not: I won’t be dissecting or discussing any specific rumors here. Not because I don’t believe them - but because I do that enough in my daily life; this is a conversation that has made it’s way out of group chats and 1x1 conversations into water-cooler work talk (even straight men - my husband included - are bringing it up of their own accord).
Until yesterday, however, there was one voice notably absent from the rota of royal reporting:
Tina Brown.
Luckily, she’s thrown her hat into the conversational ring with a segment on CBS This Morning (produced with Lorde’s Royals playing as background music - bit on the nose, that), offering up as astute a perspective as ever.
But - like I said - I’m not here to talk Kate Takes. (FWIW, I also liked this). I’m here to talk Tina. Because, over the course of the past few days, as my desperation to hear from the only royal source I truly trust deepened, I realized how much I value her journalistic voice and wish she said more, more often. Lucky for us: she does have a few vintage (and relatively recent) works under her belt. If you’re even remotely interested in pop culture, you’re going to want to a bit of background knowledge on the woman who successfully intellectualized it in the first place.
A self-described “bluestocking,” Brown was born to an industry family, just not the one she ended up in. Her father was a film producer, her mother an executive assistant on film sets. Perhaps thanks to that influence, she wrote a number of plays growing up. One got her expelled from boarding school (to be fair, it was allegedly about said school blowing up); another won her a UK Times literary award while she was still at Oxford (guess the boarding school expulsions - x3, as a matter of fact - didn’t set her too far back). She wrote for Oxford’s school paper and literary magazine, and her fearless irreverence caught the attention of editors.
TATLER
After a brief stint at Punch magazine, Brown took over as Editor-in-Chief of TATLER, a formerly stuffy UK society rag - at the ripe old age of twenty-five. Told you she caught the attention of editors.
Brown took what was once a dull and self-serious black book on the British upper crust and injected it with her signature sharp wit; it became a publication that somehow toed the line between celebrating and skewering high society. Whether you loved or loved to hate the landed gentry - you were reading TATLER. She also introduced their now ubiquitous “London’s most eligible bachelor” lists. Brown’s influence persists to this day, and TATLER’S allure lives on. I still pick up a copy whenever I’m in Europe, and was naturally inclined to do a deep dive when I found out that one of their posh office dachshunds - who was a Twitter hit - died in a Vogue House (RIP) revolving door accident (yes, really).
Brown accomplished said societal satirization through whatever means possible. In fact, she once sat through a dinner with an English footballer, meant to be off-the-record, only to report about it later on. She told the New York Times that he later sent her a postcard that read ‘this is the worst act of social betrayal since the Massacre at Glencoe.’ The type of stuff that would never get past PR these days, let alone legal. Truly a bygone era.
VANITY FAIR
In 1984, Brown moved from London to New York to edit Vanity Fair - and there’s no need for me to go into details here, because she’s published her personal diaries from her time at the VF helm as a book - which, of course, you must read (reading rec #1, for those skimming). Under her tenure, she introduced the concept of “high-low” journalism; where serious political commentary sat comfortably aside a salaciously gossipy piece on a minor celeb. Because that type of journalism is so commonplace today, it’s hard to overstate how revolutionary this was - but you’ll get an idea if you read the book.
The Vanity Fair Diaries charts the 1980s mags publishing industry exactly as you’d imagine it: corporate cars, power lunches (including one with Diana, weeks before she died), cross-country flights, and torrid affairs (perhaps this is part of what we futilely attempt to recapture when we indulge in ‘corporate fetish’).
As a lifelong print magazine devotee with editorial aspirations, I devoured it. But even if you’re not interested in the publishing industry, and are simply looking for a brain break without wanting to sacrifice actual brain cells, give it a try. All the readability of an airport page-turner, polished with Oxonian prose. I’ll take it.
THE DIANA ARTICLE
While at Vanity Fair, Brown wrote the now-infamous Princess Diana cover story “The Mouse That Roared,” available to read in full (which, again, you must: reading rec #2, skimmers) on the VF site. It’s a searing indictment on Charles, then the Prince of Wales (“pussy-whipped from here to eternity,” a “lonely, eccentric figure haunted by self-doubt”), but Diana doesn’t come out clean either (“one of the new school of born-again, old-fashioned girls who play it safe and breed early”), nor does their marriage. The piece is almost hauntingly relevant:
“What is required [of Diana] is an image, a symbol, a charismatic focus for Britain's inchoate feelings of nationhood in a gloomy period of history. She had perfected the art of detaching herself and being a presence.”
Pull quotes like these could easily apply to the current Princess of Wales (that’s Kate, btw); hence why the public is freaked out by her absence.
Once I read the Vanity Fair Diaries, in which Brown references the aforementioned article, I knew I finally needed to dip my toe into The Diana Chronicles.
THE BOOKS
I received a copy of The Diana Chronicles (reading rec #3) in 2007, when Brown came to speak at a school assembly (her daughter attended the same school as I did, a few grades above), when I was far too young to appreciate her brilliance.
THE DIANA CHRONICLES
Once I’d finished the Vanity Fair Diaries, I vaguely remembered I still had a copy of The Diana Chronicles on my shelf (we’d all received them after the talk), dusted it off, and got started.
At 561 pages, it might look like a doorstop of a book, but it flies by. I took Melatonin every night while I read this book because I knew I’d stay up all night turning pages if I didn’t have something stopping me. Here’s why it worked for me.
There are three categories of typical royal biographers:
Professional sycophants. Obvious palace (+ now, Harry) mouthpieces, feeding us comms-approved language via “books” that might as well be press-releases.
Shock-jocks. Famously publish hatchet jobs in order to sell books and get press.
Respectable, earnest, hardworking non-British journalists throwing their hats into the royal reporting ring. Here’s the thing: not being British (and ‘posh’) is an issue here. The British upper class won’t trust someone who isn’t “one of them.” These journalists will never get a real scoop or a juicy palace source.
Brown, however, sits at an intersection. She is certainly not a sycophant (see: her earlier description of Charles); but she’s also not writing for shock value. She tells you about the time Diana pushed her nanny down the stairs (yes, that happened), but you know she’s telling the truth. Why? Because a lot of the people she writes are acquaintances of hers (this is where she transcends #3), thanks to her own social status and that of her late husband, Lord Harold Evans, a former editor of the UK Times, invested as a Knight by Queen Elizabeth in 2004. She’s gone on country weekends with Camilla Parker-Bowles - and been invited back, despite the fact that she seems to live by the famous Ephron maxim: everything is copy.
The book is packed with push-down-staircase level-wild anecdotes about Diana and offers up a comprehensive look at who she was as a person, not the sanitized narrative the media widely accepts, but, again, it’s not a hatchet job. If you’re interested in understanding the full picture, warts and all (and gathering some royal gossip) - this is an ideal beach read, I promise. Just maybe get it on Kindle…
THE PALACE PAPERS
Following the 2007 publication of The Diana Chronicles, there wasn’t a ton to say. The 2011 royal wedding, I guess, but it was hardly enough material to fill a book. Until 2016. When, of course, Meghan both entered the picture for what felt like the blink of an eye, until the dramatic Megxit. At that point, there was enough to fill multiple books.
So, in 2022, Brown published another book, The Palace Papers (reading rec #4), which picks up after Diana’s death and provides insight into and gossip on each “core” member of the royal family: we get chapters on Elizabeth + Philip, Charles + Camilla (apparently, Charles takes a velvet toilet seat with him on country weekend), Will + Kate (LOTS of goss here about how Carole Middleton helped to orchestrate Kate + Wills’ marriage, which is why I’d be shocked if she ever left him), Meghan + Harry, Andrew (and how he was shielded by his position as the queen’s ‘favorite’), and we even get some good insight into Edward (not the sharpest tool, Brown claims) + Anne (no-nonsense & hardworking, like her father, casting sensitive Charles’ shortcomings into even sharper relief for Philip). It’s another doorstopper (546 pages this time around), but again, it flies by.
ALL OF THIS IS TO SAY…I’m not sure where Kate Middleton is, but if you spend the next few weeks deep diving into Tina’s work, you’ll not only feel sharper for it, but you’ll also find a sufficiently juicy means of distraction until she emerges from wherever she’s hiding. Happy reading.