FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: FABLED "VALENTINO PEARLS" MISSING!

August 7, 2011
　
The iconic "Valentino Pearls"--long the style signature of fabled international star of stage and screen, best-selling authoress, chanteuse and aviatrix, Sophie Von Licorice--are missing.

Insured by Lloyds of London for in excess of $700,000.00, the Valentino Pearls have long been the centerpiece of Ms. Von Licorice's wardrobe and the touchstone for a generation of girl Beagle/Dachshunds eager to copy her less-is-more elegance and style.

Von Licorice was reportedly attending an informal gathering at the Santa Monica home of long-time frenemy, Terrier Charliegirl Weiss.  Also in attendance was noted socialite and Chowmix, Gina Giacomo.

While the three had known each other for years, only Giacomo and Von Licorice had remained close. The Weiss/Von Licorice friendship had reportedly cooled since the "My Bone!" incident of 2010. Also in attendance were four humans, including Von Licorice's current paramour, "The-guy-who-feeds-me."

While police are not ruling out any suspects, a Santa Monica Police Department spokesman was quoted as saying "We're hoping that a thorough search of the couch cushions will produce the missing pearls."

Detectives arrived fourteen hours later to begin the search.  Their findings will be made public later this month.

As for how the century's most celebrated pearls ended up around the slender neck of the century's most celebrated pooch, accounts differ. In his meticulous 1978 biography of Von Licorice, "America's Pooch" author Burford Barkley asserts that the single-strand necklace was a death-bed bequeathal from Rudolph Valentino, an early paramour of Von Licorice, and that she wore them for the very first time at his 1926 funeral.

This sparked decades of speculation that she was the mysterious "Beagle/Dachshund in Black" --the unknown mourner who visited Valentino's grave annually, on the anniversary of his death, to leave a single red rose on his tombstone and piddle on Ramon Novarro's.

Von Licorice has always denied this--but with a wink. The truth was finally revealed in August of 1980, when inquisitive journalists ambushed the mystery pooch and discovered it was not a Beagle/Dachshund at all, but a very tiny, very old, very male Chihuahua in a heavily-padded Beagle/Dachshund costume.

His name was Pepe and he was the son of Mariah, the love of Valentino's childhood in Castellaneta, Italy. He had performed the ritual at his late mother's behest for fifty-four years. When asked why he'd always disguised himself as a Beagle/Dachshund, he explained that "In the early years, they didn't let Chihuahuas in."

As for his decision to impersonate a female, he is reported to have said "Hey--everybody likes to feel pretty."

Pepe died in 1982 in a shoot-out in El Paso. Subsequently a number of individuals have taken up the ritual, most memorably, Irwin Schlank, a 230-pound retired Enron accountant whose Beagle/Dachshund costume was custom-built by NASA's Jet-Propulsion Laboratory, in collaboration with Frederick's of Hollywood. Schlank portrayed the "Beagle/Dachshund in Black" from 1993 until 2001, when he mysteriously disappeared.

In her recent unauthorized biography of Von Licorice, "Eat, Sniff, Love," Leesha Sheltie, debunks the entire Rudolph Valentino story as Hollywood mythmaking, pointing out that Von Licorice "would have to be nearly ninety years old--and dog years don't work that way." In a particularly lurid chapter of a famously lurid book, Sheltie asserts that the pearls were a gift from designer Valentino Garavani, after a particularly arduous night of "being his girl" at a private club in London, owned by Karl Lagerfeld.

Still others contend that Valentino was a guy who worked at Ray's Pizza who loved to toss anchovies to Von Licorice whenever she went by on walkies. The pearls are said to have belonged to his daughter, Bernardetta, whose neck had recently gotten too fat.