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Diana and the cult of celebrity
By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer
Tina Brown, the high-profile journalist, editor and author, recently paid a visit to UB to talk about the death of Princess Diana and the ways in which that event sheds light on our current celebrity-obsessed culture and 24-hour news media.
Brown, the former editor-in-chief of The Tattler, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, and author of The New York Times best-selling book “The Diana Chronicles,” spoke on March 5 as part of UB’s Distinguished Speakers Series.
“Diana was the first great glamour icon to live and die in the age of around-the-clock, around-the-world media,” Brown said. “And when she died, it happened all at once and everywhere—on television and radio, the Internet, newspapers, magazines, cell phones and email.”
If the electronic media had not put such an intense focus on the funeral and car accident in which the former princess died, Brown said she doubted the sense of loss it created in England would have morphed into such an “extraordinary global phenomenon.”
In fact, Brown focused much of her talk on the complicated relationship between the press and Diana that helped fuel the public’s interest—and later obsession—with her.
Brown pointed out that Diana’s father, Earl John Spencer, the eighth Earl of Spencer, was a reserved man who expressed his affection primarily through taking photographs of his daughters from a very young age. After Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles, Brown said the media’s fascination with her created powerful jealousies within the royal family. Eventually, she said, Diana’s interactions with the press grew so sophisticated that she was able to wage war against her husband’s infidelities through clandestine communication, include an infamous secret television interview in which she “broke the ultimate taboo” by publicly acknowledging Charles’ extramarital affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles.
One of the most startling examples of this relationship with the media, particularly photographers, was on view several weeks ago in a courthouse in London, she added, during yet another government inquest into the former princess’s fatal car accident in Paris in 1997. Brown said Diana was caught on footage taken from a security camera the night of the crash smiling into the corner of the elevator in which she is riding—into the invisible recording device that watched everyone who entered and exited.
“One of the photographers who used to follow her told me: ‘Even when you couldn’t see it, Diana knew the camera was on her,’” Brown said. “She could feel a camera wherever she was.”
Although a personal hunch that the public’s appetite for news about the rich and famous was on the decline contributed to her departure from Vanity Fair in 1992, Brown said Diana’s funeral—or “the first great grief-a-thon,” as she calls it—as well as lingering fascination in the cause of her death after more than a decade—later put that notion to rest for good.
“The cult of celebrity has escalated tenfold since she died,” Brown said. “Diana left a great void into which rushed all these celebrity contestants and ‘pop-tarts’ in rehab—it’s almost as if we’re still crying out for [another] full-scale, full-wattage celebrity.”
Yet Brown, who currently is focusing on politics rather than pop culture as she pursues her latest book project, “The Clinton Chronicles,” notes the current presidential campaign seems to suggest people also are interested in figures who they feel can provide the sort of strong inspiration and ideals that our culture is currently lacking.
“Barack Obama sort of reflects that,” she said, “because it’s as if he is being idolized for ideas and for his inspirational core, as it were, which is almost diametrically opposed to the dross we’ve been living with so long.”
Nor is there a lack of passion on the part of the supporters of Hillary Clinton, added Brown, who arrived in Buffalo from Columbus, Ohio, the day after Clinton’s victories in the primaries for that state and Texas.
“There is a real sense of anger in a lot of people about the way they feel Hillary’s been treated by the media,” she said. “But I think she will probably out-campaign everybody in the end. It was a very exciting feeling to be in that hall in Columbus when the numbers started to change—particularly in Texas. When she came out, I must say, she was absolutely radiant. It was a very lovely moment. She was feeling very vindicated and very festive that night.”