Valerie Bertinelli still remembers the moment she first noticed the man she would eventually marry — long before she knew anything about his music.
“I look at it, and I’m like, ‘That guitar player’s really fucking cute,’” she recalled of seeing Eddie Van Halen before attending a 1980 concert in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Speaking on Ted Danson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast (via People), Bertinelli said she had never even heard of Van Halen at the time.
“I was into Elton John and Linda Ronstadt,” she said.
Her brother had tried to prepare her by giving her an eight-track tape of the band before the show — but it didn’t take.
By then, Van Halen had already released three albums and was becoming one of the biggest rock acts in the world, while Eddie was changing the game for electric guitarists. Bertinelli, meanwhile, was already a household name thanks to the hit TV sitcom One Day at a Time, which she joined in 1975 at age 15.
Still, nothing prepared her for meeting guitarist Eddie Van Halen backstage.
“He was the epitome of shy,” she said.
But onstage, the dynamic shifted quickly.
“I was invited to sit on the side of the stage, and Ed kept winking at me and making eyes at me,” she recalled. “He would go over and change his guitars, and we ended up going back to their hotel that night.”
What followed was an immediate, intense connection.
“I was crushing on this guy big time,” she said. “I was 20. He was 25. We went back to the hotel. We talked. We hung out by the outdoor pool.”
When the band left town, he promised to call her.
“He didn’t call for three days,” she said. “And I was getting really anxious.”
When he finally did, she didn’t hesitate.
“I said, ‘Why don’t you move in with me?’ And he moved in with me. And eight months later we were married.”
Their son, Wolfgang, would be born 10 years later. But by then, Bertinelli says, the relationship had already been shaped by a much darker undercurrent.
We loved each other dearly, but at a certain point, after Wolfie got to a certain age, I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”
— Valerie Bertinelli
“We had amazing, good times and really tragic, scary, hard times because we were both drinking, using drugs in the ’80s,” she said. “And then I stopped, and he didn’t.”
Despite therapy and efforts to stabilize their lives, the marriage eventually unraveled.
“We loved each other dearly, but at a certain point, after Wolfie got to a certain age, I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”
She also reflected on Van Halen’s long struggle with addiction and smoking — habits that would later contribute to his declining health.
“He used a lot of different tools that were soothing but harmful to his body,” she said. “A lot of us use different tools in our toolbox for trauma that numb feelings we don’t want to feel.”
In 2000, Eddie underwent surgery that removed part of his tongue as part of cancer treatment.
“The doctor said, ‘You know this is because you smoke, right?’” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Ed, God, you better stop smoking.’”
Eddie Van Halen died of throat cancer in October 2020.
But his influence — and the music he helped create — continues to resonate. His brother Alex is currently working on a new Van Halen project using recordings made before his death.
