DOUBLE DUMPEE Aniston

For someone who claims her breakup is an invention of the tabloids, Jennifer Aniston hasn't been trying very hard to prove them wrong. The former Friends star has been out and about lately, turning up at a Glamour magazine event in Los Angeles last week and performing in a charity theater festival in New York, but her failure to appear in the company of Vince Vaughn, or even in the same area code, has many convinced the relationship is being propped up for PR purposes.

According to one source with contacts in the Aniston camp, the actress's handlers fear it would damage her market value to have her seen as a two-time dumpee. "Keeping this 'relationship' on the map is a face-saving maneuver," says the source. "The 'Poor Jen' headlines are something she despises, and she's desperate to avoid another round of it."

A well-informed tabloid editor puts it more bluntly: "She doesn't want to be seen as a loser."

But while Aniston may be selling the happy-couple narrative, the entertainment press, having played along with too many of her past charades, isn't buying. Us Weekly is leading the charge, with a running timer on its home page tracking, to the second, how long it's been since Aniston and Vaughn were last seen together. Over the summer, Aniston pooh-poohed an Us report that she and Vaughn were engaged; Us retaliated with a list of all the times her rep, Stephen Huvane, had been caught lying on her behalf.

It would help Aniston's credibility if she and Vaughn had ever bothered to confirm their couplehood before the reports of their split began to appear. Aniston's Oct. 16 Oprah appearance, when she tepidly denied there had been a breakup, was her first public acknowledgement of the romance. "They would never talk about the relationship when they were actually having one," says a skeptic. "Now that they're not having a relationship, they're going out of their way to talk about it. It's perverse."

Convincing the doubters may require extreme measures. Yesterday afternoon, as Aniston prepared to leave New York, one source told Radar she was believed to be headed for London, where Vaughn has been filming Fred Claus. Huvane declined to confirm or deny that, saying, "I don't think Jennifer's personal travel plans or wherabouts are anyone's business but her own."

But even a well-executed photo op would fail to persuade most professional celebrity watchers at this point. Says one, "Jennifer Aniston is sort of Clinton-esque in her choice of words. She parses them so that they're technically accurate, but she's a well-known liar."