Valerie Bertinelli on Eddie Van Halen: From “Crushing Big Time” to Drugs and Infidelity – VIDEO

In a recent conversation on Ted Danson’s podcast Where Everybody Knows Your Name, Valerie Bertinelli described the first time she met Eddie Van Halen backstage at a Van Halen show in August 1980. Her brother had given her a cassette so she could hear the band beforehand, but she admitted, “I had never heard of Van Halen. I was into Elton John and Linda Ronstadt.” What grabbed her was the cover photo. She remembered thinking, “That guitar player’s really cute.”

When she finally met him, the future guitar hero was nothing like the wild rock‑god image she expected. Backstage, she found Eddie “the epitome of shy,” quiet and reserved in a way that immediately charmed her. That shyness vanished once he hit the stage. “I was invited to sit on the side of the stage, and Ed kept winking at me and making eyes at me, and he would go over and change his guitars, and we ended up going back to their hotel that night,” she said.

Bertinelli said she fell hard, fast. “I was crushing on this guy big time,” she recalled. “Yeah, crushing big time. And I was 20. He was 25. All the libido stuff was happening, all that stuff. Yeah. And we went back to the hotel. We talked. We hung out by the outdoor pool.”

Even with the instant connection, Van Halen did not immediately leap into a relationship. After that first night, Bertinelli said, “He didn’t call for three days. And I was getting really anxious.” When they finally reconnected, things escalated quickly. “By that time, I was just gaga, and I said, ‘Why don’t you move in with me?’ He moved in with me,” she said, noting that he was still living with his parents at the time because the band was constantly touring.

The couple married eight months later. In her memoir Losing It and Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time, Bertinelli wrote about the stress leading up to the wedding: “We slogged through all the issues that make you wonder if elopement isn’t a better idea. By the end of the evening, there was no doubt that every one of the thirty‑five thousand dollars we spent on the festivities had been put to good use.”

She also described their wedding night in candid detail. “Ed and I finished the night with champagne at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where we eventually stumbled into a private bungalow,” she wrote. “Our wedding night wasn’t the best, but it was typical. I passed out on the bed in my gown, and Ed fell asleep in the bathroom.”

In later interviews and books, Bertinelli has been honest about how quickly their marriage turned from fairy tale to something far more difficult. Looking back on that period, she has said, “I fell in love with him when I was 20, and it rapidly declined into drugs and alcohol and infidelity.” She has described that combination as “nothing that makes you feel loved and wanted and cared for… nothing that would scream soulmate, that’s for sure.”

In her 2022 memoir Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today, Bertinelli wrote, “I loved Ed more than I can express. I loved his soul.” At the same time, she admitted, “I despised the drugs and the alcohol, but I never hated him. I saw his pain.” She has explained that both of them were using cocaine even as they were planning their wedding, something she later pointed to as a warning sign they did not recognize at the time.

Bertinelli and Van Halen married in 1981, welcomed their son Wolfgang in 1991, separated in 2001, and finalized their divorce in 2007. Despite everything, she has repeatedly said she does not see the marriage as a failure. In interviews about Enough Already, she said, “We grew apart, but I don’t see it as a failure because we had many happy years together. And I got Wolfie, the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Even after their split and through other relationships and marriages, their connection remained: “Even in our moments of anger, we remained loving. It transformed, evolved, and returned different but stronger than it was at the start of our relationship. It healed us.” She has also pushed back on the idea that Eddie was her soulmate, saying that while she loved him deeply and grieved him after his 2020 death, what truly bound them was their son.

Bertinelli has summed up that balance in simple terms. “I hated the drugs and the alcohol, but I never hated him,” she wrote. “I saw his pain.”

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