If the Bush presidency strikes you as unacceptably monarchical, be glad Princess Diana never got her way. At the time of her death, the Prince of Wales's ex-wife was plotting to become First Lady by marrying American financier Teddy Forstmann and helping him win the White House.

That's one of many bombshells in The Diana Chronicles, a new biography by Tina Brown. A former editor in chief of the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, Brown interviewed more than 250 people for the book (many of the deep inside sources have never before spoken on the subject), cobbling together a portrait of the late princess that's decidedly less flattering than anything yet printed.

In Brown's rendering, Diana emerges as a scheming, mentally unstable gold-digger who used the press to spread self-serving falsehoods. Her flirtation with Forstmann was part of a more general pattern of choosing suitors based on the size of their assets. In the wake of her 1996 divorce from Charles, writes Brown, "What she was really seeking was a guy with a Gulfstream." So transparent was Diana's social-climbing, she adds, that her own mother opposed her marriage to Charles, arguing she was doing it for the wrong reasons.

The prince, who came off badly in Brown's 1985 portrait of the royal couple for Vanity Fair, benefits somewhat from the greater emphasis on Diana's faults. On the other hand, Brown reveals that Camilla Parker Bowles struck up her adulterous romance with Charles not out of attraction to him but as a means of stirring jealousy in her own philandering husband.

And in one of the more detailed peeks inside Charles and Diana's relationship, Brown even describes stormy fights in which Diana threw shoes at her husband, who once retaliated by hurling an antique clock.

The Diana Chronicles will be serialized in Vanity Fair. It goes on sale June 12.

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