Today’s celebutantes can’t hold candle to Lady Di

Tina Brown offers this observation about celebrities and their larger-than-life mien: “I have a theory that you physically change by being looked at.”

In fact, she continued, one’s head appears to grow in proportion to one’s body. “Hillary [Rodham Clinton’s] ... is like something on a Macy’s carnival float. Angelina Jolie’s head — I’m sorry, it’s vast.”

If there’s someone who knows a thing or two about celebrities, it’s Brown, arguably the world’s most talked-about magazine editor. After a run at the helm of celebrity-driven Vanity Fair, she went on to reinvigorate the staid New Yorker and even launched her own short-lived magazine, Talk. Most recently, she’s been back in the news with a book, “The Diana Chronicles,” about the late Princess Diana.

The journalist said the public’s fascination with Di continues unabated because “she was the last golden A-list celebrity. Nowadays everybody’s famous and nobody is interesting.... When she died, there was a great silence in the celebrity graveyard.”

The Lindsays, the Britneys and the Parises of the world have “stepped into the void left by Diana” but fall short, Brown said. Now society has pitiful star wannabes with “anorexia and hair weaves. We have to keep manufacturing product to fill that great grasping media maw,” she said.

The journalist was in town Tuesday to discuss her new book during a swank fete at the Hotel Bel-Air thrown for her by AARP the Magazine, devoted to baby boomers. The event drew an eclectic crowd, including former Disney head Michael Eisner, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard J. Riordan, actors Steve Martin and Emily Mortimer, socialite Barbara Davis and model Cheryl Tiegs.

The normally jeans-clad DreamWorks billionaire David Geffen had donned a blue suit to introduce Brown at the luncheon in honor of her and her book. “It’s sort of like Guantanamo with an English accent,” Geffen said, describing to the crowd what it’s like to be peppered with questions by Brown.

After a British lunch of fish and chips, Brown, clad in an ivory form-fitting suit, discussed the book with AARP Editor Hugh Delehanty. Brown explained that she wanted to do the book because there was so much “noise and not that much understanding” about the Princess of Wales, and she wanted to “scrape away all that stuff that had been dumped on her reputation.”

She explained how Diana was full of both great compassion and “vindictiveness,” and how she learned early to associate “the camera with love” because her father showed his love for her by taking pictures of his photogenic daughter.

At one point, Brown even did her own imitation of Di, tilting her head down and raising her eyes in shy and studied allure.

rachel.abramowitz@latimes.com