I know what you're screaming, and you're right – there's no suicidal dog in this never-ending mystery play. There are only three characters: Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Their endless, presumably entirely confected interaction is perhaps the ultimate celebrity magazine formula: a cavalcade of imagined break-ups, make-ups and jealousies so die-hard it could survive a nuclear winter.
Like I say, you knew where you were with that. Angelina was hot and transgressive and had Brad, and Jen was sad and childless and not on Ban Ki-moon's speed-dial. This carefully calibrated set of certainties was nothing less than the lodestar of modern life, the fixed point used by humanity to navigate every dilemma from how to cut defence spending to how to sell innumerable copies of meretricious celebrity magazines.
And now what? Suddenly we're supposed to process a suicidal dog? Listen to me, Now magazine: you can't just throw in another character and expect anything other than meltdown. This is bigger and more ruinous even than the introduction of Scrappy Doo. You might as well just toss a suicidal dog into the Nativity story and affect surprise when Rome burns.
But before we proceed, allow Lost in Showbiz to furnish you with the so-called facts, as reported by Now. It seems that Jen has a corgi-terrier cross – "the one steady male presence in her life", the magazine can't resist pointing out sympathetically – who was accompanying his mistress on the set of her film shoot in Atlanta when he went missing for a night.
"When he was found," we learn, "all was not well. Now he rarely wants to go for long walks and he doesn't respond to Jen, 41, like he used to."
Sweet Jesus. What in the hell happened to Norman during that dark Atlanta night? Had it been Utah or Nevada, you'd have made the obvious assumption that he had been abducted by aliens, then anally probed, and is now functioning as some kind of canine drone, gathering intelligence and beaming it back up ahead of an invasion. But this was Georgia. The Others have never shown the slightest interest in the Peach State.
"He came back dazed and lacklustre," is all Now will say, "and often doesn't seem to recognise her." So according to the mag, Jen took Norman to a canine shrink, who diagnosed what Churchill called the black dog, and prescribed antidepressants.
And what of Poor Jen? "She's concerned it could be it for him and she's devastated," says "a source close to the actress". "She's hoping to coax him out of it herself," adds "an insider".
At this point, a word about the anonymous sources who populate second-tier celebrity magazines. Naturally, anyone over the age of four assumes these are simply made up by the publications, whose business is peddling ludicrous stories that stay just inside libel laws, and which – despite being openly disproven week after week – they never have the self-respect to retract, preferring instead to fart out the next string of "close pals" to make unsubstantiated claims in convenient tabloidese.
Like I say, this is the assumption – but it really could not be further from the truth. In fact, the reporters of Now magazine, and all others like it, spend months, often years, cultivating a network of high-level whistleblowers, who are met bi-weekly in underground parking garages, where they dispense history-altering investigative advice such as "follow the money" and "Kerry begs Mark: take me back".
So if we know anything about this story – and I think we know EVERYTHING about it – it's that Norman will be depressed for one of three reasons.
1. Because Jen can't keep a man.
2. Because Jen worries about whether she'll ever have a baby.
3. Because Jen is receiving late-night phone calls from Brad in which he begs: take me back.
Then again, why should it be a vicarious thing? Maybe Norm himself can't get a bitch; maybe it is he who wonders if he'll ever have a puppy – maybe his former ladyfriend ran off with some studlike little chihuahua and this new glamour couple now have a vast rainbow mongrel litter which they parade around the world, at the same time as making showy mercy missions to places of great canine suffering, such as Helmand or unapologetic restaurants in downtown Seoul.
All we can say for sure is that the eternal Jen/Brad/Angie story just went one-and-a-half dimensional. Consider the blood-dimmed tide officially loosed.
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