Matthew Perry, Valerie Bertinelli made out while Eddie Van Halen was passed out
Matthew Perry has revealed how he enjoyed a steamy make-out session with Valerie Bertinelli — while her husband Eddie Van Halen was passed out drunk beside them.
The “Friends” star — who goes into great detail about his decades of addiction in his new memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing” — played Bertinelli’s brother in the short-lived 1990 sitcom “Sydney,” in which she starred as a private eye.
“I fell madly in love with Valerie Bertinelli, who was clearly in a troubled marriage,” he writes. “My crush was crushing; not only was she way out of my league, but she was also married to one of the most famous rock stars on the planet, Eddie Van Halen.”
And while it was, at least at first, a one-sided thing, Perry adds: “It is important to point out here that my feelings for Valerie were real. I was completely captivated — I mean, I was obsessed with her and harbored elaborate fantasies about her leaving Eddie Van Halen and living out the rest of her days with me.”
Things finally came to a head “one night … I was over at Valerie and Eddie’s house, just hanging out and gazing at Valerie, trying to make her laugh. When you made her laugh, you felt ten feet tall.
“As the night progressed, it was clear that Eddie had enjoyed the fruits of the vine a little too hard, one more time, and eventually he just passed out, not ten feet away from us, but still,” Perry writes. “This was my chance! If you think I didn’t actually have a chance in hell you’d be wrong, dear reader — Valerie and I had a long, elaborate make-out session. It was happening — maybe she felt the same way I did.
Perry confessed his true feelings to Bertinelli. “I told her I had thought about doing that for a long time, and she had said it right back to me.”
The next day, he told his “Sydney” co-star and friend Craig Bierko about the make-out session, and Bierko told Perry to be careful.
Bertinelli, meanwhile, “made no mention of what had happened and was behaving — as she should have been — like this was just a normal day.
“I quickly got the hint and also played the role I was supposed to, but inside I was devastated.”
Perry writes that he had “many a tearful night” over it, but his misery ended soon enough. “The show did very badly, and I was so grateful that four weeks after that fateful night, ‘Sydney’ got canceled, and I didn’t have to see Valerie anymore.”
Perry adds that his heartbreak stemmed from his issues with his own mother, Suzanne.
“I have spent my life being attracted to unavailable women. It doesn’t take a psychology degree to figure out that this had something to do with my relationship with my mother.”
