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NEW YORK - The former queen of celebrity journalism, Tina Brown, says there is no mystery to the death of Princess Diana even though many people, including one of her sons, still question what happened on that night in Paris 10 years ago.
The former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker said she understood people's reluctance to accept the facts of the princess's death as she covered the transformation of a "shy, blushing mouse" into "a global superstar" for her new book The Diana Chronicles.
Diana's youngest son, Prince Harry, 22, told US network NBC in an interview released last week that he thought his mother's death would always remain a mystery.
But Brown, 53, who spent two years researching the princess and interviewing 225 people for her book, said there was no mystery, just a car crash with a drunk driver.
"I understand why people don't want to accept the facts of her death, perhaps even including Harry," she told Reuters in an interview in her elegant, three-story Manhattan home where she lives with her 79-year-old husband, Harold Evans.
"There is something incredibly almost unbearable of the idea that someone so special, so beautiful, so young, with all her life poised before her, should be snatched from the world in such a banal way - a lousy car crash in a Paris tunnel."
It will be 10 years on August 31 since Diana's death, but the fascination with the princess, who won over the British nation but whose marriage to Prince Charles failed, has not waned.
DANCE OF DEATH
"I think what was interesting about Diana was the stunning theater of watching her change before our eyes," said Brown, a Briton, whose book is being launched in London's Serpentine Gallery today at an event hosted by Reuters.
"There was a wonderful poignancy about Diana that made men want to rescue her and everyone console her because she was a woman suffering behind palace walls and there is something immensely romantic about that."
Brown said Diana's unhappiness transformed her into someone with the courage to break boundaries such as kissing a child with AIDS and campaigning against landmines while she sought publicity to feed her insecurities and prove herself desirable.
But in the end, her manipulation of the press became a "dance of death" because there was no going back.
"When she died it left a great yawning hole of glamour," Brown said.
"In a way, the rise of people like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan . . . [is] almost filling the void left by a figure such as Diana was, who could really fill that whole vacuum and sell newspapers."
Brown said her respect for Diana had grown as she researched the book - her charity work, the way she raised her sons William and Harry as normal children, and helped transform the royal family from a stuffy, distant institution.
"Diana was a much more important figure than I, myself, had realised. She was a revolutionary in her own way," she said.
- REUTERS
