Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux announced their separation exactly a week ago today. America was heading into a long weekend. But there was still one full business day remaining. Instead of burying their release on a Friday afternoon, at 5pm, when many outlets have packed up to enjoy a few days off, the Thursday gossip dump ensured that we spent all of last Friday talking about their split. And, as I predicted in my post about their breakup timeline:
Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux just made it so that every tabloid, one of the pillars of what she calls the “gossip industry”, could rearrange their upcoming issues to accommodate her divorce on the front page. Don’t tell me that she and Stephen Huvane, her longtime publicist, both veterans of the fame game, don’t know how this works.
Well, here’s Jennifer Aniston on the cover of PEOPLE, US Weekly, and InTOUCH magazines. That worked out well, didn’t it?
PEOPLE is going back to the “Jen wants babies” storyline, about how she and Justin wanted to start a family early on in the relationship – even though, you’ll recall, their sources were telling them that Jen and Justin were solid just four days before they confirmed the split.
InTouch is, naturally, leaning in on the Brad Pitt angle, trying to convince us that he and Jen have been having “secret sleepovers”. And US Weekly is playing on that too, claiming that Justin found old post-it notes from Brad Pitt and has never gotten over the jealousy. I know, right? The post-its are pretty inventive and it almost makes you want to believe it. I would like to believe it because of the comedy – that Brad Pitt is SO thoughtful and romantic that he shares his feelings…on POST-ITs. Nothing says you’re The One like POST-ITs.
And nothing could be more off-brand for how Jennifer Aniston wants to present herself than to have people thinking that she cherishes multi-coloured scraps of adhesive paper with “I miss you”, or whatever, scrawled on them by the man who eventually ended up with Angelina Jolie and had several children with her. This is exactly the image of herself that she’s been trying to fight all these years – that she is not the girl who, every Friday night at 2am, opens up that sacred carved wood box and gently runs her hands over all the mementos documenting her life with Brad: that movie stub, a box of matches, and now…POST-ITs.
Like I said the other day, if “single and loving it” is the message, and Angelina Jolie happens to be in the same position, wouldn’t that be the ultimate play? If that actually happened, Jennifer Aniston would be the grand master of gossip forever.
