Tragic Details About Valerie Bertinelli And Eddie Van Halen's Relationship

They made an unexpected pair. When Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli met in 1980, it's arguable which of the two was more famous: the hard-partying, guitar virtuoso at the center of one of the 1980s' most successful rock bands, or the wholesome sitcom star who quite literally grew up in front of television cameras. The latter, of course, was burning up the music scene as lead guitarist with Van Halen, taking the band's name from the surname he shared with his brother, drummer Alex. Bertinelli was one of television's most beloved stars, having portrayed teenager Barbara Cooper on the hit TV comedy "One Day at a Time" since the series premiere in 1975 when she was just 15 years old.

Wed in 1981, the two remained spouses for a solid 20-year span, separating in 2001 and finally divorcing in 2007. Along the way, they became parents, welcoming future rock star Wolfgang Van Halen in 1991. Despite splitting up, their shared love of their son allowed the two exes to maintain a connection that lasted until Van Halen's death in 2020, succumbing to the cancer he'd seemingly beat nearly two decades earlier.

Over the course of their 40-year relationship — first as spouses, and then as exes — the two experienced equal parts joy and heartbreak. To find out more, read on for a look at some tragic details about Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen's relationship.

Valerie Bertinelli met Eddie Van Halen, appropriately enough, backstage at a Van Halen concert. The musician — who'd seen Bertinelli on TV and already had a crush on her — was smitten. "When she turned up I was amazed," Van Halen said of their first meeting in a 1981 interview with People. "I thought, 'There she is! I want it!' No, actually I was very nervous." Marrying Bertinelli, he said in that interview was the high point in his life. "Best thing I've ever done," he declared. 

Yet behind all that love and affection lurked the specter of drugs and alcohol, an omnipresent factor in both their respective spectrums of showbiz (Bertinelli was well aware of the tragic substance abuse struggles of her co-star, Mackenzie Phillips). Writing in her 2008 memoir "Losing It," Bertinelli recounted that each of them was using cocaine when they filled out questionnaires from the priest who'd marry them. "Now, if you ask me, those are not two people who should be making decisions about the rest of their lives," she wrote (via Oprah.com).

While Bertinelli, unlike her TV sister, never used drugs while working on the show, on the weekends, and during her time off, she made a valiant effort to keep up with her rock-star paramour. "The week off I would destroy my body trying to stay up with him," she recalled when interviewed by Oprah Winfrey. "It got to a point whenever I heard the birds chirp, it was, 'Oh, God, no.' It took me years after stopping the cocaine before I could enjoy a sunrise and enjoy the sound of birds."

Eddie Van Halen's party-animal reputation may have dovetailed with the image presented by his band, but some members of his team began worrying that he was overdoing it. According to Country Living, in his book, "Runnin' with the Devil: A Backstage Pass to the Wild Times, Loud Rock, and the Down and Dirty Truth Behind the Making of Van Halen," the band's former road manager, Noel E. Monk, cautioned the guitarist not to overdo it on his wedding day. Van Halen promised to behave but reneged. That became apparent when he walked in on Van Halen and bride-to-be Valerie Bertinelli ensconced in a bathroom, the groom hurling into the toilet while the bride held his hair back, tears moistening her cheeks.

Meanwhile, the newlyweds' wedding night was far less romantic than the public would have assumed. "I passed out on the bed in my gown, and Ed fell asleep in the bathroom," Bertinelli wrote in "Losing It," via Oprah.com.

According to Monk, Bertinelli's own cocaine use wasn't just to maintain the same pace as her husband but was also an effort to remain thin. "Ed likes me skinny," she once told Monk's fiancée, as recounted in Page Six. "I am a prude now, but I partaked [sic] as well for a few years there until I just couldn't take it anymore," she admitted while appearing on the "Literally with Rob Lowe" podcast, as reported by Today.com. "Cocaine was everywhere and easy to get."

There was no question that Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli were in love. However, there are a few key factors that worked against them from the get-go. One was the youth — Van Halen was 26, while Bertinelli was just 21. Another was the pressure that each faced, with Bertinelli focused on her acting career, starring in a network television series, while her husband was immersed in writing songs, recording albums, and going on tour. Then, of course, there was their respective abuse of drugs and alcohol.

All those elements combined, Bertinelli wrote in "Losing It," resulted in a scenario that she'd never envisioned — and certainly wouldn't have been imagined by anyone on the outside of their marriage, looking in. "I'm the wife of this amazing musician, and lots of girls want him, and I got him," she wrote, explaining how they weren't able to form a meaningful connection, despite their love for each other. "He had his responsibilities of what he had to do, and I had my responsibilities," she added. "And we thought if you just live in the same house there would be a connection, but no."

Eddie Van Halen's relationship with Valerie Bertinelli got off to a rocky start. As Noel Monk wrote in "Runnin' with the Devil" (via Country Living) just three months after they began dating, he was at the receiving end of a paternity suit, filed by a groupie who claimed he'd impregnated her. According to Monk, he encouraged the guitarist to take a paternity test, which thankfully confirmed that he wasn't the father. 

Eventually, Bertinelli came to learn that exchanging vows didn't quell her husband's amorous impulses on the road. "I heard him on the phone talking with [someone who], I assume, was a woman, and he was talking about how he just wanted out of the marriage. He was done," she recalled in "Losing It."

That wasn't the only time that she was forced to confront Van Halen's unfaithfulness. She also described receiving a phone call from a man she didn't know, expressing his fury that his wife had been cheating on him with her husband. "When I got off, I was crying but I was like, 'I can't believe I just had that conversation,'" she said. "Welcome to my life."

While Valerie Bertinelli endured the heartbreak of knowing that her husband Eddie Van Halen was cheating on her, she was also unfaithful. "Yes, I did, four years into our marriage, cheat," Bertinelli confessed during an appearance on NBC's "Today." "And it was a shame and it was a guilt that I carried with me for a very long time. And I don't like that, so I really wanted to get that out of me."

Bertinelli shared more details in her memoir, "Losing It." "I was infatuated with the drummer of this band [who] was friends of my brother," she wrote. "I just wanted somebody to touch me and love me. And I wasn't getting it at home. Now, that's not an excuse." According to Bertinelli, had she been wiser and more experienced, she would have dealt with those feelings by addressing the problems in her marriage, instead of acting on an impulse that brought her years of remorse and regret. "But it was a big, huge wrong choice," she added.

Interviewed on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," Bertinelli revealed that Van Halen had continually maintained that she was the first spouse to stray — although she wasn't so sure about that. "He claims to this day that I cheated first, but I don't know," she said, as reported by ABC News. "I don't know about the timing."

For decades, fans of The Beatles blamed Yoko Ono for the band's breakup, while the decades that have passed have brought plenty of evidence that there were far deeper rifts between the Fab Four beyond John Lennon's marriage to the avant-garde performance artist. Valerie Bertinelli found herself similarly scapegoated when Van Halen split with frontman David Lee Roth in 1985, at the height of the band's success.

"Well, I have been accused of that, even though Yoko didn't break up The Beatles, and I certainly didn't break up Van Halen," Bertinelli said during a 2022 episode of the "Literally with Rob Lowe" podcast via Today. However, did she confirm that she was never a favorite of Roth, admitting she's never really been quite sure why. "I got along great with [drummer] Al [Van Halen] and with [bassist] Mike [Anthony]. It was someone else I don't know why didn't like me, but what are you going to do?" she said. "I don't know why he didn't like me. I mean, I was always nice to him. I honestly don't know."

According to Bertinelli, she'd still like to get to the bottom of it, and hopes to one day determine what exactly Diamond Dave had against her. "One day I'd like to sit down with him and go, 'Dude, what did I do?'" she added.

Over the course of two decades, Valerie Bertinelli eventually came to the painful conclusion that her marriage to Eddie Van Halen had passed the point of no return, and was beyond saving. "You never go into marriage thinking you're going to get a divorce," Bertinelli noted while appearing on On NBC's "Today." "It sucks," she said, referencing her divorce. 

As she explained in "Losing It," a major motivator behind her decision to divorce Van Halen was her fear of the effect their deteriorating relationship would have on their son, Wolfgang. "One of the many reasons that Ed and I split up is to give Wolfie a better vision of what two people who are supposedly in love treat each other like," she wrote. "Ed and I weren't treating each other like two people that loved each other, and that's what Wolfie was seeing."

Bertinelli opened up even more when she appeared on "The View" (via Van Halen News Desk), explaining that she also wanted to protect their son from watching his father cope with the dissolution of their marriage with drugs and alcohol. "I wish I had been able to be more compassionate and be able to see the pain that he was going through as opposed to just the drugs and the alcohol," she said. "There was a reason — that was his only tool in his toolbox to deal with the pain just as food was mine."

Over the course of their 20 years as spouses, the marriage of Valerie Bertinelli and Eddie Van Halen deteriorated. When it finally ended, Bertinelli was understandably devastated. 

Writing in "Losing It," she recalled dealing with her pain by seeking comfort in food; jalepeño poppers, she explained, were a particular favorite. "They were my Prozac," she said while appearing on "The Oprah Winfrey Show," via Oprah.com. "Those were some of the darkest days of my life, and I was eating my way through them. I became a hermit."

All that comfort eating gradually had an impact, something that hit her like the proverbial ton of bricks when she watched herself onscreen in the Hallmark Channel movie "Claire." "I felt the urge to run into my room and cry," she said of being visually confronted with her post-divorce weight gain. "The sight of myself was too much for me to tolerate."

Cancer first entered the life of Eddie Van Halen in 2000, when he was diagnosed with throat cancer. After surgery to remove a substantial portion of his tongue, he believed that he'd beaten the disease. Tragically, the cancer returned, initially in his head and neck before spreading to his lungs. Diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, as well as a brain tumor, Van Halen died at age 65 in 2020. 

While the severity of the cancer wasn't publicly revealed, his ex-wife, Valerie Bertinelli, was among those who knew the end was near. As she wrote in her 2022 memoir, "Enough Already: Learning to Love the Way I Am Today," she was surprised by how saddened she was about the impending loss of the man she'd divorced 20 years earlier. "I loved Ed more than I know how to explain," she wrote, in an excerpt published by People. "I loved his soul."

She noted a particularly moving moment that took place in 2019, when Van Halen returned from Germany, where he'd been undergoing cancer treatment, and gave her a gold pendant. "I hope you don't think it's weird, you know, that I bought my ex-wife this gift and didn't get my wife anything. I just love you," he told her, as she recalled in the book. "He wants me to know he messed up [during our marriage]," she wrote of the meaning behind that gift. "I contributed to our troubles too and I am also sorry."

When Valerie Bertinelli tied the knot with Eddie Van Halen, she was convinced that she and the guitarist were soulmates — the word she used to describe him in her 2022 book, "Enough Already." It took her decades to realize that wasn't true. 

In May 2024, Bertinelli shared a video on Instagram (which she subsequently deleted), in which she shared her impressions of finally watching a Paramount+ presentation of "Behind the Music" focusing on their son, musician Wolfgang Van Halen. As she told her Instagram followers (as reported by USA Today), she'd tried to watch the episode many times before but hadn't been able to go through with it. "I'd stopped it many times because it was just too brutal to watch for many reasons," she admitted.

She went on to criticize her own culpability in depicting her relationship with Van Halen as "some sort of fantasy soulmate recreation of history." Getting candid, she added, "I fell in love with him when I was 20, and it rapidly declined into drugs and alcohol and infidelity. Nothing that makes you feel loved and wanted and cared for. Nothing that would scream soulmate, that's for sure."

When Valerie Bertinelli learned that her ex-husband's condition was rapidly deteriorating, she knew there would be little time left. In People's excerpt of her 2022 book, "Enough Already," she wrote about their final moments together. "Maybe next time. Maybe next time, we'll get it right," she told him, unable to stop the tears that flowed down her cheeks. "'I love you' are the last words Ed says to Wolfie and me," she continued, "and they are the last words we say to him before he stops breathing."

Following Eddie Van Halen's heartbreaking death, in a video she posted on Instagram and subsequently deleted, Bertinelli reflected on why she experienced so much grief over the death of a man whom she'd divorced years earlier. "But after Ed died, I was more than willing to put myself in the grieving widow category for a man that I hadn't lived with for 20 years," she mused, as reported by USA Today.

She ultimately came to realize that the deep feelings they still held for each other could be attributed to their son, Wolfgang. "What we had together was this beautiful son that we both unconditionally loved," she said. "That's what I got out of that marriage — was Wolfie, the best thing that ever happened to me. Not a soulmate."

As she pointed out, no one was more surprised by the depth of grief that Valerie Bertinelli experienced over Eddie Van Halen's death than Bertinelli herself. Of course, there were those who felt her feelings were worthy of criticism. Interviewed on "Today," she opened up about the unexpected experience of being "grief shamed" for her response to her ex-husband's death. 

"It's weird. Grief shame is something I never thought would happen to me," she said, as reported by Today.com. "I don't want to talk about it right now, but I knew the man for 40 years," she continued, unable to control her emotions as her eyes began filling with tears. "I was 20 when I met him. I still loved him. We spent a lot of time together. He's the father of my son. He's the father of the greatest gift in my life."

Bertinelli had a message for those grief-shaming online haters. "I miss him. And I'm allowed to miss him," she said, insisting her feelings shouldn't necessarily diminish simply because they'd divorced and then married other people (Van Halen wed Janie Liszewski in 2009, while Bertinelli married Tom Vitale in 2011; they divorced in 2022). "He was a huge part of my life," Bertinelli said of Van Halen. "Just because we loved each other didn't lessen the love that he had for Janie or me for Tom, so it's a different kind of love. I don't know how to explain it."