Valerie Bertinelli: Taking Life One Dish at a Time
by David Lefkowitz
(Note: This article was first published in Long Island Woman, March 2017)
Rocco DiSpirito. Giada De Laurentiis. Rachael Ray. Valerie Bertinelli. One of these names may seem out of place in the annals of Italian cooking, but if you’ve been watching the Food Network the last year or so, you know that last name is as prominent as the first three. Bertinelli, the spunky teen-turned-poster girl-turned-rock star’s wife-turned-veteran comedy actress is now well into her fifth season hosting Valerie’s Home Cooking, a celebration of comfort food with a Neapolitan bent.
The show’s theme and workable schedule make a fine fit for the Hot in Cleveland star, 57, who lives in the Hollywood Hills with her second husband, financial planner Tom Vitale. Though a far cry from her tumultuous years with Eddie Van Halen, Bertinelli’s on good terms with her ex. In fact, she has to be: their son, Wolfgang, has been touring with the Van Halen band since 2006 and is set to release his first solo record this year. Still, the ever-youthful actress, who attained instant stardom at age 15 when Norman Lear chose her to play Ann Romano’s good-girl daughter Barbara on One Day at a Time, is most content at home, enjoying her life, husband, creative pursuits, and, of course, cuisine.
Are you really five years in on Valerie’s Home Cooking already? It seems like it just started.
Each season is 10-13 episodes, so they go quickly. We’ve done four seasons in a little over a year. Even in Hot in Cleveland, we did six seasons in four-and-a-half years. TV is so different from when I first started! In the summer, they’d show repeats, and then you’d come back on in September. It doesn’t work that way anymore, and I’m still trying to get used to it! (laughs)
So how is your show different from other cooking shows?
They’re all a little different because they’re personality-driven. For me, I’m bringing that Italian background: different things I’ve grown up with and the women who taught me how to cook. Also, my relationship with my husband and us cooking together, and how we make a date night. Plus the recipes that I’ve loved all through the years and recipes I come up with even today. Things I think people would love because I love them. It’s basically sharing my world with people who have known me for way too long to mention.
Did you become more Italian when you married again?
(laughs) It certainly feels that way! His love of cooking really inspired me, too. He does an amazing chicken paillard — a pounded chicken with breadcrumbs. And I’ll do the salad on top of it. He’s really got grilling, cooking, and pounding chicken down to a science. I still haven’t gotten that down, and I’ve been cooking longer than him!
So what’s your specialty?
My casseroles, my lasagna, my gumbo, my turkey chili, my meatloaf. Comfort foods, basically.
Those all sound like dishes with 15 ingredients you can throw together because, no matter what, they’ll all balance out.
(laughs) Kinda.
I mean, even I can make a decent meatloaf.
You don’t make it as good as mine, I’m sure.
Whoa! So what’s your secret ingredient then?
I actually add pancetta [cured pork] to my turkey meatloaf. You get all the fun and the fat and the flavor from the pancetta. But I like the taste of turkey more than beef.
I sometimes use ground lamb.
Oooh! Some people don’t like the taste of lamb; I happen to disagree with them. My lambchops are not to be beaten. Sorry, I sound like I’m being braggadocious!
Well, you have a cooking show. You should be making decent food . . .
I better, right? I mean, growing up, I had my mom and my grandmother. Then I came to find out that my great grandmother, Maria Mancha, was actually a cook in a summer home in Sanremo. She had a gelato cart so that she could save her money and come to America. Unfortunately, we never got to meet, but my grandmother, Maria’s daughter, taught me a lot of stuff. And then my mother, who is English-Irish, cooked Italian like nobody’s business. You’d think she was Italian.
Did you feel you had a normal childhood up till your middle teens?
I feel like I had a normal one after that, too. I had a weird job that a lot of people saw me do. But other than that, I had a really normal home life. My parents didn’t treat my job any differently than they treated the boys’ football games and practices, or piano lessons and accordion lessons. Everybody was equal in our home.
But during the day, were you being tutored rather than attending school with your peers?
The shooting season went only from August through February. So we had a tutor on the set half the time, and I would go to school the other half. I can’t remember completely; it was a very long time ago!
But you didn’t feel like a stranger disappearing and reappearing for months at a time?
It was definitely challenging. But I did have the same girlfriends who went to the same school, and they lived in the neighborhood, so we’d hang out. I had that consistency. They were good buffers for people who might have thought, “Oh, she must think she’s all that because she’s on TV.” Which was quite the opposite; I was an incredibly insecure young lady. Still, it all felt normal to me.
Any regrets about not going to college?
My son Wolfie’s kind of doing the same thing I did. He’s getting into the business right away and recording an album right now. So you know what? I believe in college. Higher education is always beneficial. And I still feel a little lacking even at this age because I didn’t have it. But the great thing about education is that it never stops. I read voraciously and love books. I’m always learning how to pronounce words because I feel like I’m never pronouncing them correctly. I’m always looking things up. That’s the great thing about this day and age; you really can look up anything on a computer and learn how you like to learn.
But as a teen, did you still feel normal when you were thrown into the guitar-god vortex?
That’s always a hard question for me because I always felt like me, and I don’t know what life would have been like any differently from the life that I led. Insecurity latches onto anybody. It’s all about mind over matter and not buying into the negative voices in your head. I’m still working on that at 57! I don’t think that’s ever over. But believing in yourself is really strong because no one else can believe in you until you do. That’s what I keep trying to remember.
So how has co-parenting been with Eddie Van Halen?
Well, Wolfie’s 25, so we don’t co-parent. Sometimes we’ll all go to dinner together, and Janie and Ed send us a Christmas card. Unfortunately, I don’t send out Christmas cards. I probably should. But yeah, I mean, we live only a couple of miles apart. We don’t make an effort to see each other, but we don’t make an effort to not see each other. You know what I mean? We usually get together for Wolfie’s birthday.
I admit to being shocked when I read that at the height of those crazy years, you did cocaine along with your husband, Eddie Van Halen. Honestly, I figured your seeing firsthand what was happening to [One Day at a Time co-star] Mackenzie Phillips would’ve scared you straight.
It’s just the nature of human beings that they want to experiment. Luckily, it wasn’t something that I wanted to continue on in my life. But experimentation is part of it, and I think that’s why we have to be careful with our children and make sure they don’t have the crutch of leaning on drugs or alcohol or anything else that takes them away from reality. But that’s just a fact of human nature, experimentation.
Did you ever become addicted?
No, I never had to have treatment. It’s just not part of my personality. I have this control issue; if I don’t feel I have control of a situation, it makes me uncomfortable, and I don’t do that anymore. Drugs always made me feel like I had no control over me or myself or the situation. I can’t tell you when, why, or how I stopped; it just didn’t feel good any longer. And if it doesn’t feel good to me, I don’t wanna do it.
Is food kind of an addiction?
Oh absolutely. The thing about food is that, unlike alcohol or drugs, you have to have food to survive. So now it’s just finding a place for food where it nourishes my body, and I enjoy it. And food is love for me; it’s been all through my family. It’s just finding an even keel through that ocean.
Although you’re no longer their spokesperson, are you still a Jenny Craig member?
That’s been over for quite a few years. Their food was very good, and they did help me very much with portion control and how much fruits and veggies to eat. If you don’t have a lot of time, Jenny Craig is super-super good and nutritious. But I enjoy cooking so much that I’m trying to incorporate the ideas myself. For example, I’ll make the Jenny Craig breakfast sandwich on my own with the ingredients that I know go in it. It takes a little more effort, but it tastes just as good.
Now, sometimes I will have a ribeye for dinner. Not very often. And then I’ll have just a big kale salad. It just depends on listening to your body and the vitamins your body knows it needs, because once you start denying yourself things, that’s what you start to crave. It’s the old saying: don’t think about the elephant in the room because then that’s all you think about. So I don’t want to ever deny myself anything, but also, nothing is ever as good as that first bite. So I’ve tried to teach myself to stop chasing that first bite.
And for you, the cooking is as important as the eating?
I just really like making my own. It’s therapy for me. It’s art for me. I come from a family of artists. My mother’s a painter, my brother’s a web designer, my other brother’s a photographer, and my other brother’s a carpenter. We have a very artistic bone in our family. I love to sketch and paint and do needlepoint, but my art is through my food.
But then does exercise come into play to balance the lifestyle?
Living in California, I’m super lucky because I have a dog, Luna, who has to go out and walk. We live in the Hills, so it’s literally 1.2 miles all around our block. And we have this beautiful Runyon Canyon and Fryman Canyon, so I can go hiking in their trails. Also, I have an elliptical at home that I really love. So I’ll get on that if it’s raining.
I’m trying to really be good, so when I get off the elliptical or get back from a hike, I’ll do a 15-minute stretch — my legs, especially, because I’ve noticed that the older I get, the body doesn’t move as freely as it used to. My Achilles tendons get tight, so I really have to stretch those. I then meditate for a few minutes after, and I just calm myself back down again. It really does help. And every so often, I’ll take a soul cycle class because they’re fun. I like working out with other people in a group.
So you don’t mind being recognized as a celebrity?
I’ve lived in this neighborhood for 14 years, so people here know me only as their neighbor. Not a lot of my friends are celebrities. And again, it goes back to this being the only life I’ve led.
As an actress, are you comfortable watching your work from years ago, or do you get self-conscious?
It can be hard, because we change and grow and become so many people during our lifetime. So we try to appreciate it for what it was rather than going, “Oh, why did I do that?” Instead it’s, “Oh, well. It’s just part of me.”
I can watch Hot in Cleveland and just hysterically crack up because I don’t even feel like I’m watching myself. I’m just watching four funny women. And when I watch my cooking show, it’s like, “Oh yeah, wow! I guess I do know how to do that!” (laughs)
How did you meet Tom Vitale?
He was friends with my brother in Arizona. We had gone to a wine dinner together, and we just got along famously. It was `04, when the Red Sox were winning the World Series. We kept leaving the table separately to go watch the game, and once we got up together, and he said, “Are you going to see the game, too?” “Yeah!” We kept getting up out of the ballroom to go to the bar next door and watch the game.
Had you ever thought you’d get married again after all you’d been through?
No. Not at all! I wasn’t even dating. I figured I’d be alone and have 40 cats. Now I have a dog and five cats and a husband! The pets are all shelter animals that I was fostering and I couldn’t find homes for — well, I didn’t try very hard. I found homes for about 15 cats, and four of them, I kept, on top of my 16-year-old, who has been around forever.
Speaking of aging, so many of your peers have gone the plastic surgery route. Assuming your baby face ever changes, would you go there?
I’m never gonna say “no,” but look, I broke my foot. And I was gonna have an operation for it, and it was so freakin’ scary to me. So to have someone cut into my face. . . More power to the people who can do it, but it makes me nervous.
Even small stuff like Botox?
Maybe I will. I dunno. I’m never gonna say never.
Since you’ve had two hit shows, viewers are naturally curious about your former co-stars. Any thoughts or anecdotes about, say, Betty White?
Are you kidding me? I love that woman! I would move into her house in a heartbeat; I just adore her. She’s a woman who lives her life in gratitude and patience and kindness. That’s Betty.
Any fun stories about her?
Well, a lot of the stuff is so personal, but I’ve got one. She helped me name my animals. For example, we were having trouble naming our dog, and she said, “What are you thinking of?” And we’re like, “We love the moon, and she’s so sweet.” And she says, “How about `Luna?’ `Mia luna’?” We’re Italian, so it was perfect. She named our first cat “Nelson” because she always wanted to name an animal after Nelson Eddy.
Your thoughts about your TV mom, Bonnie Franklin?
It was really hard being at her funeral. She taught me so much. Like how to use your voice and stand up for what you believe in, but with kindness.
Norman Lear?
Again, using your voice. Treating others the way we want to be treated. Norman’s a powerhouse.
Pat Harrington?
Pat Harrington made me laugh. He was the funniest man. He taught me timing. That’s the gift he gave me.
Last question: “Valerie’s Home Cooking” aside, what other projects are on the burners?
My cookbook is coming out in October 2017: “Valerie’s Home Cooking.” Otherwise, some things on Food Network, but nothing acting-wise yet. In fact, hmm . . . that’s getting a little like, “Hey, guys, I still act!”
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SMALL BITES
What’s the last concert you attended?
Other than seeing Wolfie whenever he plays, I don’t go to concerts much, but I did see Pink.
Favorite concert ever – not counting your son or your ex?
Elton John at Dodger Stadium.
What songs do you keep on your phone?
I listen to Pink, Adele, Lady Gaga. Mainly female artists. And as soon as I get Wolfie’s new album, that’s all I’m gonna play!
What do you enjoy on TV?
I was watching Stranger Things for awhile, but then it got so strange! I like Samantha Bee’s show a lot, Full Frontal. She just cracks me up and gets me fired up.
Favorite TV show of all time?
Friends. I think I’ve seen every episode. Phoebe was my favorite character because she said things that people don’t normally say. Ask her, “Can you help us with this?” And she’d say, “Oh yeah, I wish I could, but I don’t want to.” She was hysterical.
Favorite One Day at a Time episode?
Golly, that’s a hard one. When Barbara breaks her nose.
Favorite Hot in Cleveland episode?
All of them. Okay, it might be the one where Joy shoots her son. We all took on these English accents and could barely get through the scene for laughing.
Favorite vacation spot?
My home. When I just cook in my own kitchen and relax with my animals, that’s a vacation for me. Unless, of course, you want to send me to Italy. I’m good there, too.
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David Lefkowitz co-publishes Performing Arts Insider (TotalTheater.com) and hosts Dave’s Gone By (davesgoneby.com) on UNC Radio. His play, The Miracle of Long Johns, won the best non-fiction script award at the 2015 United Solo Festival.
The Collected Writings of... David Lefkowitz 