Soon after Gloria Steinem co-founded New York Magazine, the pioneering feminist gained access to the floor of the 1968 Democratic National Convention by agreeing to go on a date with future Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein amid the political chaos of the historic event. After the two had a romantic fling, they remained friends and late-night phone pals for decades — but politics split them apart in 2016.

“I was the youngest delegate at the Democratic Convention in 1968,” Stein, 81, recalled to us after Ms. Magazine founder Steinem’s death at age 92 last week. “It was unbelievable,” he said of the infamously apocalyptic scene. “Tanks and tear gas and bayonets. You’d have to have been there to realize this was America.”

Amid all the tumult, “You couldn’t get on the [convention] floor unless you were a delegate because things were so crazy — no one [else] was allowed on the floor” at Chicago’s International Amphitheatre against the backdrop of civil unrest and the Vietnam war. That’s when, Stein recalled to us, “This beautiful woman comes up to me… and says, ‘Can I borrow your credentials for 20 mins to get on the floor?’ And I said, ‘No. But you can borrow them for the rest of the day if you have dinner with me tonight.’”

That’s when Steinem said, “‘OK, it’s a deal.”

(Steinem at the time also went on famed Chicago Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet’s “Kup’s Show,” after a violent riot outside the convention, and she “waded right in and quickly dispatched the city and police spokesmen with steely determination” as “one of the ablest and gutsiest reporters I had ever seen,” wrote a Chicago Tribune scribe.)

“We had dinner. We ended up having a little affair for three, four or five months,” recalled Stein, who also went on to become NYC city council president. “She lived at 118 East 73rd Street. She still lived there till she died.”

But politics consumed the romance. “We were both so into politics,” Stein said. “She got more liberal and I got more conservative. [We] gradually went to a friendship, but we would talk on the phone for decades late at night. We would talk, even after there was no romantic relationship.”

He said they’d last had dinner a decade ago, but, “the politics got too much.” Stein — who also ran for mayor of New York and for US Senate — later became an ally of Donald Trump.

“She was a sweet tender person, but she was a real liberal — the vibe, it divides you,” Stein said.

After Stein endorsed Trump in 2016 (with a an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, titled, “Party Loyalty Can’t Make Me Vote for Clinton”), Stein recalled of Steinem, “She called me and was furious, saying, ‘How can you support someone like that?’ And I said, ‘I think he’s a better president than Hillary.’ And that was the last time I spoke to her.”

“She was a sweetheart… I loved her. She was a wonderful woman,” Stein said of their bond, noting she once sent him chicken soup when he was under the weather.

He marveled of their meeting 58 years ago when Steinem first approached him, “I didn’t know who she was.” It was revolutionary hippie figure Abbie Hoffman who informed Stein when the radical learned of the date: “‘Dude, you just picked up Gloria Steinem!’” Stein says.