In June, 1997, Princess Diana met in Manhattan with Anna Wintour and Tina Brown, the editors, respectively, of Vogue and The New Yorker. Over lunch at the Four Seasons, the trio discussed Diana's new, post-divorce life and an array of other topics: the Princess's former in-laws, her charity work, her hopes for her young sons. Two months later, on August 31st—twenty-five years ago today—Diana died in a car accident in Paris, a crash that became one of the seismic news events of the decade.
In the issue of The New Yorker produced immediately after Diana's death, Brown published her first bylined piece in the magazine, an account of the lunch and, here and there, a reverie about the life that might have been. "She plainly hankers for America—for the optimism, the options, the openness," Brown recalls. "She says she would love to move here." Among Brown's many achievements since her departure from The New Yorker, in 1998, she has continued to write about Diana and the Royal Family, including in "The Diana Chronicles" and "The Palace Papers," both of which became best-sellers.
In her 1997 piece, Brown is clearly struck by the transformation that she has witnessed in Diana, "the self-possessed woman who comes to lunch." "The Princess that once was," she writes, "the miserable girl who went mad in her cage—must now seem to her to be from another life."
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