Slipping out from her black bra and panties in Working Girl, she made love handles voluptuous again.

'Don who?" Melanie Griffith asks, hoping against hope to avoid the obvious question. Alas, it's unavoidable, and seconds later a bubbly and amazingly seductive Griffith is fighting tears over the collapse of her second marriage to Don Johnson.

"I love my husband more than anything in the world," she explains, pulling herself together intermittently. "But we can't do anything without everybody knowing about it. . . . The press has been very kind to me and rough on Don, and that's not fair."

This was supposed to be a conversation about Melanie's new film, Milk Money, in which she plays the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold. Hired by a schoolboy and his friends paying to see their first-ever pair of tits, she ends up with his dad—Pretty Woman meets Home Alone, as she describes it. But as with all of Melanie's interviews, we get sidetracked by the tabloids.

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Since Griffith and Johnson separated she has moved back to Aspen with her two children. "It is hard for me to imagine life without him," Melanie says. "But we are changing in different ways. I am working on my own strength and convictions and taking care of our children and trying to trust my own stuff. Don is working on his stuff." Was it a problem for the marriage that she was becoming such a big star, following Working Girl, just as Johnson, post-Miami Vice, was being treated by the press as last year's model? "I know what it's like when your career is not as great as you would like it to be. And when you're a man, it's really hard. It's that male essence that is so beautiful and is also so self-loathing."

Speaking of male essences, does Melanie believe the allegations that Johnson recently fathered a child by another woman while making a film in Canada? "No, I don't believe them," she insists, more than rising to the occasion. Anyway, she rolls on, "there are so many other important things in this fucking world. I mean Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa yesterday. Why is this so fucking important?" Point, game, match, Griffith. We change the subject.

Griffith has a surprisingly sharp mind, given her sex-kitten delivery. Her face, recently chosen for a new Revlon campaign, is also pretty close to an A+—although she says it does tend to get mixed up with that of Meg Ryan, whom she admires. Still, it was her "bod for sin" that first made people crazy. Pre-Griffith, most people associated baby fat with Winston Churchill. Slipping out from above her black bra and panties in Working Girl, she made love handles voluptuous again.

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Griffith says that the handles departed with her drinking, but she doesn't apologize for the years when she began her days with vodka and ended them with coke. "I didn't get something that I needed when I was little. I was never loved unconditionally. Coke, booze, give you a feeling, a physical sensation ... a buzz inside your body that takes the place of something you should have had when you were a child." A self-described recovering alcoholic, she now prefers to get (metaphorically) high hiking in the Rockies with her cook, Richie.

Griffith's career has survived the catastrophic Bonfire of the Vanities and a profoundly misguided remake of Born Yesterday quite nicely. While she says she would like to go back to college, and maybe even to law school, there is no shortage of directors willing to prove that they can make better use of her talents. "Among the many astounding qualities Melanie has," explains Robert Benton, who directed her and Paul Newman in the forthcoming Nobody's Fool, "is the ability to hold the screen with her face. She can do absolutely nothing and make it dramatic." "You can see Melanie's heart on the screen," adds Richard Benjamin, director of Milk Money, "and it comes wrapped in an incredibly sexy package. That is what you call a movie star."

"The press has been very kind to me and rough on Don, and that's not fair."