TEEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)

By: Carlo Rotella
April 17, 2023

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of heartthrobs from our adolescences). Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

VALERIE BERTINELLI

In the mid-1970s I knew — hazily, dreamily, without being able to articulate the conviction even to myself — that Valerie Bertinelli was a luminous being imprisoned in a multi-layer Russian-doll hell that paradoxically confirmed her exaltedness. The grace with which she transcended the endless train of indignities visited upon her transmuted them into clinching evidence of divinity.

The outer layer of hell was her role as Barbara Cooper on the sitcom One Day at a Time. In the beginning, before she became a star, she was the button-nosed little sister charged with dropping the occasional zinger. These were sometimes topical in the galumphing Norman Lear fashion (“The Pill sounds like really the pits!”) and never funny, and right before she delivered one she would smirk and make a champing motion with her mouth that offered an unwelcome foreshadowing of what she might be like someday as a mordant crone. It didn’t help that in the first season everybody on the show shouted their lines, as if they were all alumni of the Samuel L. Jackson School of Acting. The shouting eased off in later seasons, but she still couldn’t act (who were these monsters who made her act in front of millions when she didn’t know how?), and of course nothing could be done about the unspeakable Schneider.

She was 15 when the show first aired in 1975, and its makers initially tried to present her as a little girl, a scheme she foiled by speed-blossoming into one of the era’s leading beauty queens. The baroque excesses of hair, makeup, and wardrobe slathered upon her when she attained this status seemed to take her straight from adolescent to battle-hardened singles-bar veteran with time-lapse concision.

The persona of Valerie Bertinelli, TV star, formed the inner layer of the hell imprisoning the luminous being. I almost couldn’t bear to watch her soldier through her celebrity paces: braying her lines on the show; submitting to Howard Cosell’s dirty-uncle side-embrace when he interviewed her after her plucky triumph in the obstacle course on Battle of the Network Stars; falling for that nimble-fingered troglodyte Eddie Van Halen.

I started high school in 1978. Increasingly occupied in the evenings with homework or getting high, I eventually fell out of the habit of following TV shows. While it lasted, though, Valerie and I had a thing in the way that the divine Artemis and the doomed Actaeon, the hunter who accidentally glimpsed her bathing in a forest pool and got turned into a stag and torn apart by his own hounds, had a thing. Unable to save Valerie from her nested hell, I settled for dumbly watching her in there, even though it would have been wiser to look away.

But I came to half-understand that the very awfulness of the show and her acting and her celebrity was in fact the principal assurance of the luminous being’s perfection. Only a goddess could pass untainted through such a noisome vale of woe.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

TEEN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (6)

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