Valerie Bertinelli admittedly will never forget visiting her late ex-husband, Eddie Van Halen, on tour.
“We were on hiatus [from One Day at a Time], and I was newly married at this time,” Bertinelli, 66, recalled on the Wednesday, May 6, episode of the “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” podcast. “They were going to South America, and I wanted to go.”
She continued, “It was the early ’80s. I don’t remember a lot about the ’80s, but I do remember this story.”
Bertinelli had arrived in Brazil to see Eddie, his brother Alex Van Halen and their bandmates in between concerts.
“Ed and Al, his brother, had gone downstairs [before] Al’s wife at the time had said, ‘Let’s go down and join them,’” the actress recalled on Wednesday. “We go down to join them, and then we’re at the bar, whatever. Then, the boys go back upstairs, and we said, ‘OK, we’ll join you later.’ We were having fun at the bar.”
Alex’s first wife, Valeri Kendall, and Bertinelli eventually tried to reunite with their spouses on the upper level.
“I go to the elevator to go up to the room and they’re like, ‘No, no,’” she said. “[I asked], ‘Why? What’s happening? Why can’t we go up?’ … They were trying to tell us that prostitutes aren’t allowed on the upper floors. I was like, ‘No, no, I have a wedding ring.’”
According to Bertinelli, the hotel employees “would not let [her] upstairs” again.
“I had to leave the elevator, get on the phone because there were no cell phones in the
early ’80s and call Ed in the room and said, ‘Can you come down and get me because they won’t let me up? They think Valeri and I are prostitutes,’” Bertinelli said. “So, I’ve been mistaken for a prostitute before, or to be polite, a sex worker.”
Bertinelli and Eddie were married from 1981 to 2001, welcoming son Wolfgang in 1991.
“I was 20 [when we met],” she recalled to podcast host Ted Danson of her introduction to the late rocker, who died in 2020 at age 65. “My brothers invited me to Shreveport where my parents lived ‘cause my dad worked for General Motors. [Eddie’s band] was playing at the local stadium there.”
Bertinelli’s siblings subsequently asked the Hot in Cleveland alum to “hand out M&Ms” to the band members in order to secure backstage passes.
“I had never heard of Van Halen,” she said, noting that she saw a picture of Eddie and thought he “was really f***ing cute” and she agreed to her brothers’ plans. “I really thought he had something magical happening, right? I’d never heard anything like that before.”
Bertinelli moved on with Tom Vitale, to whom she was married from 2011 to 2021. She later dated Mike Goodnough for less than a year in 2024.
