NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Six weeks before Diana, Princess of Wales, died in a Paris tunnel in 1997, Tina Brown had lunch with her at New York’s Four Seasons restaurant. “The Diana Chronicles”, reflects the 53-year-old Brown’s long-time interest in the princess whom she first covered as editor of the Tatler, Vanity Fair and, finally, the New Yorker.

We spoke at Bloomberg’s New York office.

Question: Can you describe that lunch at the Four Seasons?

Reply: When she walked into the Four Seasons, she was this absolutely self-confident superstar. I mean I had first seen Diana in the 1980s, when she was this little shy mouse, you know, a little overweight and very charming and beguiling, but not really very confident. The woman I met at the end was just this incredible sort of world celebrity that could knock everybody dead, and she seemed extremely self-possessed that day. She was very excited about Tony Blair having won the election in May.This was in July, and she felt that this was going to be a whole new broom in Britain, that all the kind of fusty old skeletons had been swept out the door and this was going to be the England that in a sense was more in tune with her vision of England.

And she thought that Tony Blair was going to use her as a humanitarian ambassador. That was her great hope. She was eager to see her children learn how to be communicators as she had been. You know, she said to me how much she admired Jacqueline Onassis and how much she admired the way she’d raised John F. Kennedy, Jr. and she said, you know, I want William to be like that, really media savvy and not afraid of the media in the way that Charles has been.

She really felt set for this great second act. So it was extremely interesting and sad and awful, really, to see how in the six weeks that followed she went into the last sort of spiral where she wound up with Dodi Fayed in the car that killed her>Question: <$>She could have had any number of remarkable and attractive and wealthy and powerful men. Why him?

Reply: The truth was, as she kept saying to me at lunch: Who’s going to take me on? She said: Who wants my baggage? And although it would have seemed that this most beautiful woman could have had anyone she liked, actually the men of substance, you know, significant men with wealth and serious pursuits, really didn’t want to take the craziness that went along with Diana — it was a bit like dating a major rock star.It was an extremely scary experience to date Diana and it drove a lot of good guys away. So she was, in a way, reduced a lot of the time to hanging out with fashion people and sort of slightly unsavoury celebrity types. And I mean, in the end, Dodi Fayed was the guy who invited her away when everybody else was off with their families or didn’t really want to take it oB>

Question: <$>What do you know about Ted Forstmann’s interest in Diana and her interest in an American billionaire?

Reply: He was very candid about it. He thought she was absolutely divine and gorgeous, but he also saw what went with it. He said, you know, the first time he took her out, he suddenly became Di’s new guy in all the papers and it was extremely irritating and embarrassing.

He did say that he found her immensely needy and sad. She used to call him all the time. She also hadn’t shed her kind of romantic fantasy. She did say to Ted: You know, why don’t you run for president and we’ll get married and I’ll be first lady, which actually shows that Diana was still looking for her Prince CharmiQuestion: <$>I was going to say, she’s 36 and she’s attracted to a rich American old enough to be her father?

Reply: After you’ve been the Princess of Wales, living in Buckingham Palace, you need a certain kind of, you know, lifestyle and you need a certain kind of protection from the press, and she was always looking for that rescue fant.

Question: <$>Was she looking for money? Did she have money?

Reply: Diana wasn’t specifically looking for money. She had $17 million ($33.6 million) from her divorce settlement, and she had Kensington Palace as long as she wanted to live there, so she was not a girl who needed a roof over her head like Fergie did, because that was a different case with her. But I think she did want the protection of a man who could circle her round and protect her from her life and the crazis.

Reply: You came to conclusions in this book about many things that have been widely talked about for all these years. When you report that Diana and Charles’s sex life was sort of a roll on, roll off affair and that His Royal Highness had difficulty finding her erogenous zones, one is forced to wonder: How in the world could you or anyone know that to be true?

Quesn: <$>Because she said it. Diana. She said it to her friend James Colthurst, who, you know, repeated it to me.She was very unhappy with her sex life and told friends so. Really the first time that Diana had a satisfying physical relationship was with James Hewitt (her riding instructor). He was her second lover actually, not her first. Her first was the bodyguard, Barry Mannakee, when she was in the very early days of her marriage. But the lover that really made her feel like a woman was James Hewitt. It was a five-year affair and at the end of that affair, she was a far more kind of developed, sophisticated and sexually self-confident woman.Queon: <$>An interview suggested you didn’t like or respect her perhaps initially.

Reply: I think all of us at the end of the ‘90s developed ambivalent feelings about Diana because it was hard, really, to almost forgive Diana for going off with Dodi Fayed at the end and letting us all down when she’d been doing the land-mine campaign. She’d been behaving magnificently and then she somehow went off on this exceedingly silly caper with a guy who was so clearly not worth it and then died in a kind of irresponsible way in a sense.I wanted to feel that she’s worth writing about and by the end of it, I really did feel that. I felt that she had created something very special in her initial life, that she had shown a completely new way to be royal and to show what royalty can be when harnessed to the global power of the media. She showed a great courage in the way she took on AIDS and the land-mines campaign and she showed that she would not be imprisoned by palace walls, and a woman’s story. You know, she fought back and wouldn’t allow herself to be erased, and she won my respect for that and I came to be very fond her.‘The Diana Chronicles’ is published by Doubleday (542 pages, $27.50)