First, she remained silent. For months. Pitt and his new girlfriend Angelina Jolie both granted interviews to promote their movie "Mr. and Mrs. Smith"; did louche photo spreads in W where they posed as a happy family; went to Africa; played with Jolie's kids in front of photographers. Aniston worked. And stayed quiet and kept her head down. There were long-lensed photos of her, sure -- in Chicago on film sets, sunning herself on her Malibu deck, playing with her friend Courteney Cox Arquette's baby. But there was no scandal there. Only room for us to wonder: Was she sad? Was she mad? Was she dating?

"She was always on the newsstand with a latte or walking her dog or whatever, and yet she didn't participate in any of that," said GQ's Healey. It was the first lesson of Desirability 101: We were teased and teased, left unrewarded by anything substantial, until we were breathless and gasping with anticipation.

Then, in late summer came Vanity Fair. On the cover, Aniston looked rumpled and vulnerable, almost childlike. The interview was heralded by the red-lettered headline "Jen Finally Talks! And talks and talks. And cries. And talks" The profile included, yes, tears. And comments from her friends about what a cad Pitt had been. Aniston carefully took the high road on the matter of her ex's rumored dalliance with Jolie, breaking once to comment on the subject of that dastardly W photo spread: "There's a sensitivity chip that's missing."

Two months later we got our next chapter. Elle's cover showed her in a sundress, a hard-ass smirk of defiance on her face, and a cover line that read, "Jennifer Aniston: Next!" In Elle, the actress said, "My women friends -- they're all my mothers, they're all my sisters, they're all my partners, they're all my wives, my everything. It's hard to find a man who can live up to any of them."

This month, she's posing on GQ's cover in a pair of take-charge Daisy Dukes, one suspiciously globe-like breast mostly in evidence, telling Healey, "One day it's like a switch went off, and all of a sudden it was like, Men! Everywhere!"

It's not just that Aniston has landed covers aimed at varied readerships, it's that she has known just what each of those readerships wants to hear. That doesn't mean that what she says isn't authentic, but that it's very well plotted. After breakups, we go through stages: rubbed raw, comforted by women, freshly excited about men. But it happens in that order, just as Aniston's cover stories conveniently happened in that order. The men-are-everywhere piece could only have come after the girlfriends-are-my-wives piece, which could only come after she'd vomited her grief to Vanity Fair. She may be completely candid and bracingly honest. But she's also playing us like a fiddle.

Star's Dolce agreed that her cover incarnations have been part of a larger story arc. "The idea was to turn around her image from victim to 'Hi, I'm independent and I can take my shirt off and show you part of my breast,'" he said.

Liz Smith added that Aniston's public "imagines she is evolving into a stronger person because of her travail, and so they love her more for that." As to how Aniston is actually evolving, Smith said that it hardly matters. "Once the media and public pigeon-holes you, it's easier to accept the fictionalized version. It plays better. Publicly she is the polar opposite of Angelina Jolie, who seems like a handful of turbulent woman. Jennifer appears to be less complicated, but not a doormat, either ... She inhabits a comfortable middle ground. Of course, the reality on both these women might be very different!"

Star's Dolce said that women will continue to feel for Aniston, "as they should feel sorry for a woman whose very good-looking husband was stolen by a younger, more beautiful woman. This has mythic appeal."

It sure does. Whether circumstances, Brad and Angelina, or Aniston herself have shaped her plot, Aniston has become an ur-heroine. She's Viola in "Twelfth Night," finding her way in a new world after a shipwreck; she's Dorothy Gale, trying to get back to a home that's been whisked away by a pillow-lipped, tattooed tornado; she's Mary Richards, throwing her hat in the air and assuring us and herself that she's going to make it after all.

Except it's not theater, books or TV. It's way better than TV.

The romance between Pitt and Aniston always had the sheen of something born on a back lot. The couple were introduced by their managers, practically cast in the parts of Hollywood super-couple. Their courtship and wedding -- even the architectural work on the house they were building -- were covered in the tabloids with abandon. The question of whether Aniston was showing a "bump" that would prove two gene pools had joined to form one tanned and highlighted embryo was afforded more editorial space in recent years than the question of whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The narrative of their breakup, while sad, has frankly been almost as intriguing as their coupling. First came the dark suggestion -- voiced here as well as everywhere else -- that the message Pitt sent in dumping Aniston was that the way to keep a man was by having his babies when he said so. It was not lost on anyone that Jolie, for whom Pitt forsook Aniston, had most recently incarnated herself as adoptive earth mother after stints as a heroin addict, brother-lover, self-mutilator and blood-fetishist.

But could anyone have imagined a better other woman than bodacious vampire Jolie? Or, to be honest, a more slippery rake than Pitt? Aniston's "sensitivity chip" assessment was almost poetic in its description of a man who has behaved with an indelicacy that could only be mustered by the truly stupid. Trotting around the globe with Jolie, grunting unintelligibly at Diane Sawyer when given the opportunity to say something nice about his former wife, firing a pregnant employee of the production company he founded with Aniston because she spoke (with Aniston's permission) to Vanity Fair? Does Pitt have two brain cells to rub together?

He's been perfect in this role. A pitiable scoundrel whom most thinking people cheerfully guess will get ditched by Jolie for some Doctors Without Borders stud she picks up at a U.N.-sponsored pancake breakfast.

Recent Stories