In the ring at the Atlantic City Convention Center in January 1988, world heavyweight champ Mike Tyson was pounding his challenger, Larry Holmes, into mincemeat, but the real show was just north of ringside. As though they were at a Ping-Pong match rather than a prizefight, the spectators kept shifting their gaze between the bloodbath in the ring and a stylishly dressed blond couple sitting knee to knee a few rows back. In a crowd that included Jack Nicholson, Kirk Douglas, Barbara Walters, Bruce Willis, Norman Mailer, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Muhammad Ali, the sight of Barbra Streisand and Don Johnson holding hands riveted everyone in the crowd who could see them. Whispers rippled around the arena as more and more people spotted Barbra with one of America’s hottest male sex symbols: “Isn’t that Barbra Streisand with Don Johnson? Wow! Are those two a couple now?”

Following the brief fight—Tyson knocked Holmes out in the fourth round, just as he had predicted he would—the celebrity guests adjourned to the Imperial Ballroom of the Trump Plaza Hotel for a lavish soiree. “Don and Barbra walked into the party hand in hand,” recalled one of the guests. “They mingled, together and separately. Everyone was thrilled to see Barbra there, but to see her with Don Johnson really surprised everyone. They were really cute. Even while talking with other people, they would smile at each other from across the room.”

To a press corps ever salivating for a new superstar pairing, even the hint of a Streisand-Johnson romance proved irresistible. “It’s Barbra & Don & don’t say it isn’t!” screamed the headline of Liz Smith’s column the following Monday. “They are supposedly giving each other those looks you could pour on waffles,” Smith wrote. In a follow-up report, Smith described a dinner date the two had had at Manhattan’s Mayflower Hotel: “They... were seen getting so cozy [in their banquette] that eventually they all but slid down out of sight of the few other diners. [The romance] is something big and electric.”

Within days columnists all over the country were running whatever tidbits they could unearth about “Hollywood’s newest odd couple.” The pair even ended up as the subject of a Bloom County comic strip that dubbed Johnson, thirty-eight, “Streisand’s Toy Boy Goy.” Longtime Streisand watchers noted that Barbra, who always professed to crave privacy, had once again chosen to publicly unveil a new lover at a highly ballyhooed prizefight, just as she had done fourteen years earlier with Jon Peters, a man to whom Don Johnson bore several important similarities. Barbra’s desire for privacy, it seemed, is less important to her when she wants to show off a new male bauble.

Barbra had met the rakishly handsome star of the flashy, innovative television cop drama Miami Vice ten months earlier backstage at the 1987 Grammy Awards in Los Angeles. Johnson and Whoopi Goldberg had announced that year’s nominees—including The Broadway Album—for the Album of the Year Award. The camera focused on Barbra in the audience as Johnson read the names of the nominees, and when he pronounced her name “Streizund,” a close-up showed her mouthing the correct pronunciation. Their encounter at the ceremonies was brief; Johnson barely had time to tell Barbra, who was with Richard Baskin, how much he enjoyed her work. She responded with a cheerful thank-you.

Barbra’s romance with Richard Baskin had, over the years, cooled to a friendship—one that continues to this day—and thus she spent a 1987 Christmas holiday in Aspen on her own. It was then that she ran into Johnson again, at a party thrown by friends. Johnson had also come alone, and when he noticed Barbra sitting quietly amid a group of chattering guests, he reintroduced himself to her. After a few moments he led her by the hand out to a cozy balcony where the couple talked and laughed intimately in the moonlight for the rest of the evening as the other party guests tried not to be too obvious in their fascination.

A few days later Johnson was a conspicuous guest at a party Barbra threw at her rented chalet in Aspen’s exclusive Red Mountain enclave. The couple also dined privately at Johnson’s hotel. Because of the demands of his series, Johnson was based in Miami, and after he and Barbra returned to their respective coasts, they spent hours on the phone getting better acquainted. Although well known in the press as a slick womanizer, Johnson was also intelligent, funny, ambitious, and a caring father to his five-year-old son, qualities that drew Barbra to him. That he had recently been chosen “The Sexiest Man Alive” by People magazine couldn’t have escaped her notice either.

A SELF-DESCRIBED hell-raiser as a kid in Missouri who lost his virginity at age twelve to a seventeen-year-old baby-sitter, Don Johnson first came to public attention in the late sixties when the former teen idol Sal Mineo cast him in a Los Angeles stage production of the controversial prison drama, Fortune and Men’s Eyes. As a pretty-boy rape victim, the teenaged actor received rave reviews and keen interest from the movie industry. But he made only a handful of films in the seventies, including the 1973 cult favorite The Harrad Experiment, in which he appeared frontally nude. During filming, Johnson fell in love with Melanie Griffith, the precocious, flaxen-haired fourteen-year-old daughter of his co-star, Tippi Hedren. They married three years later.

It was the twenty-six-year-old Johnson’s third attempt at matrimony, and lasted only two years. After the divorce he settled into a long affair with Barbra’s Main Event co-star Patti D’Arbanville, who became the mother of his son, Jesse, in 1982. By the early eighties, Johnson found himself mired in made-for-television movies such as Elvis and the Beauty Queen (in which he played Presley) and Katie: Portrait of a Centerfold.

It was well known in Hollywood that Johnson’s career problems had for years been exacerbated by drug and alcohol dependency. On any given day, he admitted in one interview, his intake of alcohol “included a case of beer, a few martinis, several bottles of the best wine, and some good Napoleon brandy after dinner.” In 1982, shortly after Jesse’s birth, Johnson joined Alcoholics Anonymous. The following year he was cast as Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice.

Set in the Art Deco world of Miami Beach, against a sound track of surging techno-rock, the vividly photographed show became an instant hit for NBC and by its second season had grown into a pop culture phenomenon. With their wardrobe of silk Armani suits and loosely fitted pastel sports jackets worn over snug T-shirts, Johnson and his co-star Philip Michael Thomas became the epitome of hip, unshaven masculine sex appeal. In a matter of months the full-fledged stardom that had eluded Don Johnson for fifteen years was now heaped upon him, and he reveled in it.

Johnson’s high-profile celebrity status coincided with the dissolution of his relationship with D’Arbanville, and since maturity had only enhanced his sexual allure, it surprised no one that “Don Juan-son,” as he was tagged in the fan magazines, reportedly took full advantage of the Miami Vice groupies who followed his every move.

Johnson was the most famous, glamorous, and unlikely man Barbra had been linked to romantically for many years, and the tabloid press in particular went into a feeding frenzy over the couple. During the first months of 1988, hardly a week went by without the supermarket rags running some new “inside” scoop about Barbra and Don.

She had “dragged him to Brooklyn” to meet her family, the tabloid writers claimed—although none of them still lived there! He had commissioned Gianni Versace to whip up a wedding gown for her. She “desperately” wanted Don’s baby. She insisted Johnson be circumcised prior to their marriage. He had put a down payment on a four-bedroom love nest for her in Aspen. She had lost fifteen pounds because she was too much in love to eat regularly. He had given her an engagement ring of clustered diamonds and emeralds. They planned to buy their own private island off the coast of Mexico. They would co-star in a remake of The Thin Man. They intended to record a duet of the Rolling Stones’ classic “Get Off My Cloud” and an album of Christmas songs written by Stevie Wonder and Lionel Richie.

The gossip got sillier and sillier, in part because the couple remained largely mute about their affair. When Barbra and Don did speak about their romance, it was to British reporters, with whom Barbra has always been franker than she is with American journalists. “I’ve been with thousands of women,” Johnson told London Today magazine, “but Streisand is supreme, unequaled in all the ways that count. I love her strengths, her direct approach to music, acting, people, and, yes, making love. To me she is beautiful. I know some people make fun of her nose, but let me tell you, she can smell a phony with it a mile away. She makes me laugh, and she makes me think.”

“I like sharing my life with a male counterpart,” Barbra told the Daily Mail while she was in London to promote Nuts. “I have found one now, Don Johnson, and it is going very well. Like me, he is often misinterpreted and called a tough guy and difficult—and it is not true. That is one of our common bonds. He is very gentle, sensitive, and nurturing. He has wonderful manners and he can make me laugh. Will it last? How do I know? All I know is this moment. Would I marry again? Yes. But don’t ask if I would marry him. I don’t know. He makes me happy. I have never been so happy before, so it’s something I am learning as if I am a child again. It is a new thing and I have to get used to it.”

To another writer she said, “When I’m with Don, I can enjoy my celebrity, because I don’t have to apologize to the man I’m with for getting all the attention. Don gets as much attention as I do.”

Eager to wring as much “news” as possible out of the Streisand-Johnson affair, the weekly London tabloid Chat ran an interview with Elliott Gould in which he “warned” Johnson against marrying Barbra and aired his grievances about his ex-wife. “I don’t know why I’m loyal to you,” Elliott claimed to have told Barbra weeks before. “You’re not nice to me. You don’t like me. You’re mean to me. You don’t help me. You’re rude to me.”

BACK IN THE states, Barbra was named “Female Star of the Decade” by the National Association of Theater Owners at the group’s annual convention in Las Vegas on February 23, 1988. Scheduled to arrive alone for the luncheon ceremony at Bally’s Hotel, Barbra caused “near pandemonium” when she swept in an hour late—hand in hand with Don. The couple of the moment were “embraced warmly” at the VIP table by Jon Peters (of all people), and Barbra brought the house down when she quipped, “Sorry I was a little late. I was auditioning for a part on Miami Vice.” Just days later Barbra did indeed tape a wordless walk-on for the show’s “Badge of Dishonor” episode (aired March 18), while she visited Johnson in Florida. Co-stars on the show were hounded by the press for details of what local papers were referring to as “The Visit,” but they all took a “no comment” stance. A minor flap erupted when Johnson confiscated a tabloid photographer’s film after the man sneaked onto the set. One observer noted that Barbra seemed to turn “positively giddy” whenever Don drew near.

A few weeks later the venerable show business reporter Hank Grant casually mentioned in his Hollywood Reporter column that when Barbra and Don attended a surprise birthday party for Quincy Jones on March 14, they told a few select friends that they were planning a September wedding. This juicy tidbit, coming as it did from a reputable journalist in an industry trade paper, was taken seriously, and press scrutiny of the affair heated up. Asked about the possibility of her daughter marrying Johnson, Diana Kind said, “I only met him once. I don’t know what to think. I’ll know when she sends me an invitation.”

At the end of April it was reported that Barbra was devastated when Don failed to attend her forty-sixth birthday party because he couldn’t get away from filming a new picture, Dead-Bang, in Canada. Gossips insisted, however, that Johnson had avoided Barbra’s party because it was thrown by Jon Peters and attended by Don’s ex-lover, Patti D’Arbanville, a Malibu neighbor of Barbra’s. Don sent flowers and an apology, but Barbra’s mood soured again when she heard rumors that Johnson was romancing his pretty young co-star, Penelope Ann Miller.

Perhaps to keep an eye on him, Barbra joined Don in Calgary, Alberta, the first week in May. The visit was idyllic, she told friends; she and Don had held each other all night long and had smooched at a private screening like teenagers on a date. “It was so warm and loving,” she said. Later in the month the couple returned to Aspen for the final ski weekend of the season, and in July they were spotted with Don’s son, Jesse, at an L.A. Dodgers game. (Barbra adored Jesse, who spent several weekends with his father frolicking at the Malibu compound.) A week later they cheered on the L.A. Lakers at the Forum. Clearly, any rift had been patched up. The lovebirds were billing and cooing again.

AS SHE HAD often done with men she loved, Barbra elected to bring Don into her career. For an album she planned that would trace the evolution of a love affair from beginning to end, Barbra decided to include “Till I Loved You,” a duet from an unproduced pop opera, Goya... A Life, that Placido Domingo hoped to bring to Broadway. Barbra saw the song as a perfect vehicle for her and Johnson, who was eager to prove that the success of his Top 10 single “Heartbeat” hadn’t been a fluke.

On the day Don was scheduled to visit Barbra at the B&J recording Studio in West Hollywood, where she was laying down tracks for the album, Barbra couldn’t resist a little showing off. “Of course, there were a couple of her framed gold records on the walls,” recalled one of the album’s recording technicians, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, “but I heard her tell an assistant to make sure all her gold albums were on display as well as some of her most famous magazine covers. It was kind of touching, really, that she felt she had to impress Don Johnson—who couldn’t sing his way out of a wet paper bag.”

About the “Till I Loved You” sessions Barbra said, “It was a lot of fun singing with Don because he’s very musical and has a unique sounding voice. When he sings, he’s an actor—and a really good one—so he knows about being in the moment, which is always new and different and the way I like to work.”

At an early screening of Johnson’s latest film, Sweet Hearts Dance, a romantic comedy-drama co-starring Susan Sarandon, Barbra couldn’t help but suggest a few changes. The picture’s director, Robert Greenwald, was unusually receptive. “[She made] some very, very good suggestions,” he said. “Nothing major. A laugh that seemed inappropriate [or] ‘This moment here I thought was a little bit ragged’—and she was right.”

As the rumored September nuptial date came and went, more and more column items suggested that Barbra’s new romance was in fact fizzling. Johnson was spotted with a nameless blonde in New York and a “ravishing brunette in Miami, while Barbra attended a party with Richard Baskin in Hollywood. But Don joined Barbra in New York on September 14 at a concert-party thrown by Stevie Wonder at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Wonder had performed there for three days before a live audience for his latest music video, and on the last night he was joined onstage by Barbra, Don, Jesse Jackson, Quincy Jones, and Time-Warner head Steve Ross. To the delight of the audience, Barbra joined Stevie in an impromptu duet.

A few days later Don was seen out on the town with the gorgeous eighteen-year-old actress Uma Thurman. Some press reports proclaimed the Streisand-Johnson affair dead, others quoted an “intimate friend of the couple” to the effect that the wedding had been rescheduled for December. The truth was that the affair was all but over—because, some claimed, Barbra was disturbed by Don’s suggestion that they embark on a nonmonogamous open marriage.

Still, the duo attended the Hollywood premiere of Sweet Hearts Dance on September 18, and their arrival created bedlam. “The doors of the black limo fling open,” wrote a Los Angeles Herald Examiner reporter, “the paparazzi push forward, knocking over the red velvet ropes but still managing to keep the strobes firing as they trip over each other. Fans scream, bodyguards appear out of thin air, even uniformed LAPD officers are in the human wedge that forms around the arrivees.” Following the screening, Barbra and Don attended a small party where they shared a table with Patti D’Arbanville.

Three weeks later Columbia released a single of the “Till I Loved You” duet to mixed reviews but heavy radio-audience response. Of Johnson’s performance, Time said the song had him “sounding more like a cop than he does on TV.” Many disc jockeys made fun of Johnson’s gravelly vocals; one was so unremitting that Johnson called him to complain. “I don’t sing that bad!” he pleaded. Although it hit number one on adult contemporary radio formats, the record stopped at number twenty-five on the pop charts, primarily because the public had now learned of Barbra and Don’s breakup, which rather spoiled the song’s sentiments.

Although her intimates say she was deeply hurt by the collapse of the romance, Barbra kept characteristically mute on the subject. Johnson, however, told Life magazine, “Barbra was more willing to stay [in the relationship]. She’s an incredibly bright woman, and she’s been through a great deal of therapy. I don’t think I’m speaking out of school when I say that. We genuinely tried to make it work. But we’d reached a point where we had to make a commitment or let it go.”

The Till I Loved You album was released on October 6, 1988, peaked on the Billboard chart at number ten, and went platinum in a matter of weeks. It proved an unsatisfying collection of love songs, and rumors in the record industry claimed that Barbra was so distraught at the collapse of her relationship with Johnson that she couldn’t face the rigors of another album of theater songs to follow up The Broadway Album and so had decided on this less demanding pop effort. Till I Loved You proved yet again Streisand’s fallibility when it came to choosing appropriate material from contemporary sources.

ON OCTOBER 16, 1988, Barbra sang at a Los Angeles fund-raiser for Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis. Sponsored by the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee and held at the home of Ted and Susie Field in Beverly Hills, the gala attracted politicians from Jesse Jackson to Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and celebrities from Faye Dunaway to Bette Midler.

Hollywood liberals were in an optimistic mood. After eight years of “benign neglect” of social programs by the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan, Massachusetts Governor Dukakis seemed to have an excellent chance to defeat Reagan’s lackluster vice president, George H. W. Bush. Barbra threw herself behind the Dukakis campaign, although she did express disappointment that neither he nor Bush had chosen a woman as a running mate, as Walter Mondale had in 1984. “Either Dukakis or Bush could have buttoned it up right now if they had chosen to run with a woman in November,” she said.

Barbra, of course, was the highlight of the evening as she sang “Happy Days Are Here Again” and “America the Beautiful.” The event raised $80,000 for the Dukakis campaign and put a scare into the Bush camp. Ten days later, Bush flew into Los Angeles for a $5,000-per-person reception at Bob Hope’s home. An internal campaign memo pointed out that “the press is allowed in briefly to capture the celebrities and the festivities. This event will impact all of California and offset the post-debate Barbra Streisand reception.”

When the memo was leaked to the press, Mark Goodie, a Bush campaign spokesman, took pains to point out that “‘The Way We Were’ is a Bush favorite. And actually we were very pleased when Governor Dukakis appeared with Barbra Streisand because we have been trying to remind American voters of the ‘misty water-colored memories of the way we were’ just eight short years ago when the economic ox was in the ditch.”

George Bush won the election after Dukakis proved to be a less than formidable candidate. But Barbra and her fellow Democrats would have their day four years later.

BY THE END of 1988 Don Johnson had rekindled his relationship with Melanie Griffith, following steamy love scenes they played when Melanie appeared on Miami Vice. Johnson and Griffith soon announced plans to remarry, and press reports claimed that Barbra had urged the couple to reconcile even as her own romance with Johnson ebbed. “It was at the time that Barbra and I were seeing less of each other,” Johnson told the New York Daily News. “During one conversation I told Barbra about the affection I still held for Melanie. Barbra said to me, ‘Don, in spite of your reputation, you’re a family man at heart. You need a base and a family life. It may be that you’ve never stopped loving Melanie.’” Following the couple’s remarriage on June 26, 1989, Barbra continued to stay in touch with Johnson. “She’s really sweet,” Griffith told Life magazine. “She sent Alexander [Griffith’s son by the actor Steven Bauer] and Jesse the cutest Valentine’s Day cards.”

“Barbra is part of the family,” Johnson added.

Perhaps the most enduring legacy of the Streisand-Johnson romance was Barbra’s discovery of The Prince of Tides. A friend in the music business had first raved to Barbra about Pat Conroy’s lyrical story of the deeply buried secrets of a dysfunctional southern family, but it was Johnson who urged her to read the book. Don hoped that he and Barbra might co-star in a film version of the powerfully emotional drama. But after their romance ended and Robert Redford acquired the book’s movie rights, Johnson was never seriously in the running to play the lead in what would become Barbra’s second directorial effort.