

“I wonder if he still - maybe he still feels that way,” Warren muses of Brolin, lovelorn insomniac and father of Thanos. “So I do that a lot.” And a few months later, when director Michael Bay needed a pop song to anchor his new movie, a modest little indie called Armageddon, Warren set to work crafting a hymn worthy of both that song title and the literal end of the world. “I love a good title,” Warren told me in mid-June, some two decades after the fact. She wrote down a song title: “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” Just the title. But lucky for Aerosmith, über-songwriter Diane Warren did. It is likely that very few fans of Boston arena-rock gods Aerosmith tuned in for this. Her eyes opened, her smile brightened, a nation swooned.

“And so I say, ‘Why not?’ And he says, ‘’Cause then I’ll miss you.’”Įnd of anecdote. “And he says, ‘I don’t want to fall asleep.’” She kept her eyes closed as she recounted this, to better simulate the experience of almost falling asleep with Barbra Streisand. “And we’re just about to fall asleep, I thought,” Babs recalled of one such super-romantic incident. In 1997, the über-diva and her new fiancé, the actor James Brolin, snuggled on a couch opposite Barbara Walters for an enormously sweet 20/20 report on the fearsome intensity of their young love and the finer points of their nightly cuddling routine. It began, as our greatest cultural artifacts must all begin, with Barbra Streisand.
