Valerie Bertinelli Reflects on First Meeting with Eddie Van Halen and His Battle with Cancer

"We had amazing, good times and really tragic, scary, hard times," Bertinelli said of their relationship

NEED TO KNOW

• Valerie Bertinelli recalled meeting Eddie Van Halen backstage at a Van Halen concert when she was 20
• The couple married eight months after meeting and later welcomed their son Wolfgang Van Halen in 1991
• Bertinelli reflected on their struggles with addiction and trauma and Eddie’s long battle with cancer

Valerie Bertinelli is looking back on the first time she met Eddie Halen.

The former Food Network star, 65, opened up about their relationship during an appearance on the Wednesday, May 6 episode of Ted Danson’s Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast.

Bertinelli was married to the Van Halen frontman from 1981 until 2007. Eddie died from cancer at age 65 in October 2020.

She said she went to one of the band’s shows in Shreveport, La., while visiting her parents and brother.

Her brother gave her an eight-track cassette, so she could check out the group’s members.

“I had never heard of Van Halen,” Bertinelli admits. “I was into Elton John and Linda Ronstadt. So I look at it and I'm like, ‘That's a really, that guitar player's really f—ing cute.’”

The two siblings went backstage and met Eddie, who Bertinelli said was “the epitome of shy.”

“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 recalled.

“I was crushing on this guy big time,” she continued. “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.”

When the band had to get back on the tour bus, Eddie said he would call her at her parents’ number in Shreveport.

“He didn't call for three days,” she said. “And I was getting really anxious.”

When the musician finally called, she went out to see him

“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. “And eight months later we were married.”

A decade later, they welcomed their son, Wolfgang Van Halen.

“In between all of that, we had amazing, good times and really tragic, scary, hard times because we were both drinking, using drugs in the '80s, and then I stopped, and he didn't,” Bertinelli said. “And neither one of us was taking care of our childhood trauma.” 

“We went to therapy,” she went on. “We loved each other dearly, but it just, at a certain point, after Wolfie got to a certain age, I thought, ‘I can't do this anymore.’”

Bertinelli said Van Halen then “tried for 20 years to beat cancer,” which prompted Danson to observe that it was hard for her to watch Eddie smoke.

“Oh, I was so angry with him,” she said. “At one point, we were still together, and he had surgery to cut off part of his tongue. And the doctor said, ‘You know this is because you smoke, right?’ And I was like, ‘Ed, God, you better stop smoking.’”

“It was hard for him,” she added. “He used a lot of different tools that were soothing but harmful for his body. A lot of us use different tools in our toolbox for trauma that numb ignore any kind of feelings we don't wanna feel.”

Last week, Bertinelli and her musician son appeared together on The Drew Barrymore Show, where she said she could tell even at a young age that Wolfgang, now 35, inherited his father’s talent.

When Bertinelli admitted she worried about her son entering the music business, which she said “tried to destroy his father,” host Barrymore suggested that he’s stayed grounded because he has “a good mom looking out for him.”

“I like to say that Wolfie is the man he is in spite of me and Ed,” Bertinelli said. “We made a lot of mistakes, but in the end he always had unconditional love.”

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