The Courtship of Eddie

The chatter in the gossip really got noisy when Valerie feel head over heels in love in real life. Valerie says one of her brothers, either Patrick or David, called Valeire and they said Van Halen is coming to town, and this radio station guy was going to give you M and M's to go backstage where, you fly out, you're not working or anything (there was an actors strike going on at the time) and Valerie said maybe, and David said he had left his 8-track cassette of a Van Halen album in the back of Valerie's corvette, so Valerie had looked at it, and there was this picture of "Women and Children First" and there was this guy in this picture that was so adorable and she thought he was so cute and he had a guitar around him so she figured he must be the guitar player so Valerie listened to it and she thought this guy is really talented and he was cute. She told her brothers that she'll come out to see Van Halen.

NO!!! She wasn't talking about David Lee Roth! It was Eddie Van Halen!

From time immemorial, young girls have fantasized about catching the eye of a sexy musician. But when it happened to 20-year-old Valerie Bertinelli, five years into her stint as a wholesome Everyteen on TV's 'One Day At A Time', it took even her by surprise.

On August 29, 1980, Bertinelli's brother Patrick dragged his reluctant sister Valerie to see a heavy metal band play near his home in Shreveport, La. The Place: Hirsch Memorial Coliseum.

Eddie Van Halen says he remembers sitting up in his tuneup room as he always does doing warm-up for the show, and everybody was running around going "Hey, Valerie Bertinelli's here!"

Back in the 1970's, Valerie preferred the music of Elton John and Linda Ronstadt, but when she ran into Van Halen tuning his guitar backstage before the show, Valerie felt cupid's arrows catch her right in her heart as love came walking in. "I looked at him and he looked at me---and that was it," she has said, adding that they were both too shy to say much. "My heart melted."

After the concert, they talked for hours about Van Halen's youth in Holland, their strict Catholic upbringings, and the trials of show business.

Valerie says she was sitting onstage and every time the band would come back to tune his guitar he would try to say something to Val, but he didn't know what to say, and they would like go back out on stage, and Ed finally came back and they were talking and Val gave Ed her phone number and he didn't call Valerie for three days! Three whole days Valerie was waiting for Ed to call her on the phone, and he finally called Val and he was playing in Oklahoma and Val said she would fly out.

Ed says Valerie was a little freaked because he didn't call her for three whole days or something like that, and he was too nervous to call her, he didn't know what to say (hey, what man never had this problem before?), and Ed was never good at picking up chicks so to speak, he doesn't have a rap.

Valerie says it was love at first sight. Eddie Van Halen, the object of her intense affections, says he also felt exactly the same way.

Their romance sparked a tabloid news feast, linking her to the world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The headline shouted it was like LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD DATING THE BIG BAD WOLF. Nancy thought it was ok, what else was she going to say, but she had confidence that there had to be good qualities about Edward or she wouldn't be seeing him. Some family member thought rock and rollers had this reputation and he figured she had fallen into the wrong crowd, but, turned out that wasn't the case. Eddie came to the Bertinelli house, and he took Andy to his office, and said he wanted to marry Valerie and he would make her a good husband.