Valerie Bertinelli, the 22-year-old star of CBS’ long-running hit One Day At A Time, doesn’t lose her temper over many things. Rather, conversation with the vivacious brunette is commonly riddled with laughter, teenage-like giggles, statements revealing awe about the show business industry, and endless platitudes for her rock-star husband, Edward Van Halen. You hear these things most of the time, that is. For if there is anything that doesn’t settle well with the 10-year veteran of television, it’s bad press; particularly press that is slightly skew from fact.

     Enter the most controversial of the supermarket tabloids, The National Enquirer. It is this vehicle of checkout-stand journalism that has been the sand in the craw of many noteworthys, including Valerie. Past Enquirer reports have found Valerie allegedly bickering with co-star Bonnie Franklin, and worried about losing "the limelight" to newcomer to the show, Boyd Gaines. But the accounts, says Valerie rather sternly, are false. And her worry is that those who read of proported in-house backbiting, believe it.

     "I just want people to know that they shouldn’t believe everything they read. I’m talking about the rag magazines. I just wish they wouldn’t believe everything stupid little thing they read.

     "When the Enquirer hit with the story about Bonnie and me, we got so many letters saying, ‘Oh please. Now girls, you’ve been together for so long. Be more grown up than that.’ You just want to say, ‘Damn it, why do they hate us so much to want us to come off so badly in the public’s eye,’ especially when Bonnie and I get along so well. I mean, we’re like sisters, or mother and daughter, or both. This business is hard enough, and why they want to screw our brains up a little bit more is beyond me."

     Valerie’s shrill voice and italicized language when speaking on the topic reflects the heightened distaste among the Hollywood fraternity for the Enquirer’s brand of journalism. It is a disdain born from the paper’s treatment of highly respected personalities such as Carol Burnett, and the disdain that finds the Enquirer hip deep in multi-million dollar law suits.

     Valerie makes no bones about her feelings for the guess-who-did-what? Type of journalism. She calls it, "tacky, just tacky," and her anger is magnified to a degree, perhaps, because of the shots she has taken from the tabloid.

     "I’m taking it very personally because they have done some things to me that I don’t understand. There was one story where it said Boyd, the new character on our show, was hired only because I didn’t want a big name to take away the limelight from me, which is ridiculous. We saw almost every actor in the business and Boyd was the most qualified. Anyway, I didn’t have the last say.

     "There was another story about Eddie and I that said I took him away from his 10-year girlfriend. It was ridiculous. He was broken up from her 3 months before he even met me. And it wasn’t 10 years, they went out for 3 years."

     Valerie footnotes the conversation by lamenting, "I just don’t understand why they would want to hurt people."

     At 22, and after 10 years in front of the camera, Valerie is beginning to shed the milk-bred image that grew on her as she grew up as Barbara Cooper on the set of One Day. Her press agent says Valerie is becoming a "sophisticated woman," although Valerie confesses, "I really don’t know what my image is. I’m not really a sex symbol because that’s really not what I am." In fact, if she had her druthers, Valerie would have no image at all. "I’m just a normal, everyday type person."

     If Valerie is indeed tailoring a new image, if she is growing to be that "sophisticated woman," maybe that change is reflected in her recent marriage to rock star Edward Van Halen. For who would have guessed that "America’s teenager" would fall in love with and marry the leader of a heavy-metal rock group? The irony is too large to fathom only until Valerie explains that there is no irony. For it isn’t that she compromised her "wholesomeness" to marry a rocker, it’s just that Edward comes from a mold you would expect to find in the closet of a librarian, not from the stereotyped mold found in the trunk of a Stratocaster expert.

     If there is any irony, then it is in how Valerie describes Edward, as a man that really came from the same mold she did: painfully shy, insecure and in awe of the vastness of the world. She was attracted to him because he was so much like her.

     "The same feelings of shyness and insecurity I had when I was younger he went through because he moved here when he was 8 years old from Holland, and he could only speak three words: hello, motorcycle and accident. He couldn’t speak very good English, so people made fun of him. He wasn’t a part of everybody, so he’s always been a shy person, and he still is. But he tries to overcome it like I do by joking around and acting like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m cool.’ Inside, we both really clicked because we both put up that guard of ‘Yeah, I’m cool and everything’s wonderful.’ But as soon as we got alone together and started talking, it was like, ‘Oh my God, you do that, too? You’re not really that way?’ That’s how we really clicked together.

     "The first night I met Edward, I sketched him. When I came home, I just couldn’t’ get the night off my mind. I thought, ‘This guy is just phenomenal.’ He’s hit me like no other man has hit me in my life. He’s just so sensitive.

Through her conversation about Edward, Valerie reveals the shyness and insecurities that took root during her childhood, a childhood that saw her shuffled from city to city because of her father’s occupation as a General Motors executive. And although she says she doesn’t feel cheated by the nomadic life because, "I got to meet all kinds of people," she does admit that making friends was mighty difficult.

     "It always took me at least a year to really get a good relationship going with a girlfriend or something. Then, after two years we’d move again. That’s what was rough about it. It’s rough like that when you’re a kid. But I’ve been very lucky."

     Valerie has been lucky in a much larger sense. For a girl of 15 brimming with shyness and insecurity upon entering show business is faced with the awesome task of handling publicity and stardom, a situation that might lead one to become, as Valerie puts it, "stuck up."

     Ironically, however, even though Valerie considers herself a success at remaining down to earth, she did — during her inaugural days of high school and the taping of One Day — have to contend with her classmates’ perception of possessing a head just big enough to keep her from getting through the doorway. As she tells it, it’s not that she was ego involved, it’s just that her shyness prevented her from a normal relationship with other students, and so she fell prey to whispered innuendo.

     "Like I said before, it took a year before I would develop a really good relationship. So being that way, people always thought I was stuck up because I wouldn’t even talk to people. It’s just that I was shy and insecure. I would sit around school and watch all the people talking and laughing, and it was just like ‘God, I wish I could be a part of it.’ I could never do it because I was in school only half the year."

     Valerie credits the few "close friends that I have" with helping her through the difficult time: there was her best friend who stood up for Valerie when she wasn’t in school, and there were her parents who would say, ‘Come on, Val. Don’t be like that. You’re not like that,’ whenever she became the slightest bit impressed with herself. The fact she is "normal" — whatever that may be — is, according to Valerie, the strongest point of her character.

     "I would like to say my normalness is my strongest point, to be in the business for 10 years and to still be very normal, I think, for what I do. I don’t think I’ve ever really gone through any egoed-out phase, because once I would even start an inkling of it, either my father or Marci (her best friend) or my mother was there. I had all these people surrounding me who weren’t in the business and who didn’t give a damn about the business. There was never really a chance for me to get all egoed out."

     Although Valerie doesn’t perceive herself as a "star," she is, nonetheless, very recognizable. That recognizability, you sense, is an appendage Valerie didn’t really count on when all of 15 and standing on the set of One Day for the first time. But now that it is upon her, she talks about it like a child would about his first trip to Disneyland. She finds it exhilarating, and at times taxing.

     "I get so blown away when I get letters from people asking for my picture and an autograph on it. I think, ‘Why?’ I find it funny because Eddie and I will be shopping in a mall and people run up and go, ‘Oh my God.’ We’ll walk down the street and hear someone say, ‘Do you know who that was?’ and I go, ‘Yeah, who?’ I think it’s funny because I’m star struck, too. I saw Marlon Brando in the car next o me, and I almost didn’t stop for the light. It’s such a high for people to come up to you, it’s really nice to know that people think of you as someone special."

     But, Valerie laments, the ever-present possibility of being stopped whenever in public can be hard, too.

     "There are times when you go out and you don’t have any make-up on and you’re feeling crappy, you’re having one of your down biorhythm days, and you don’t want to see anybody. There is a wonderful Carol Burnett story where she was at a function and she went to the bathroom, sat down and closed the door. All of a sudden she hears this (Valerie slaps her hands on her legs to simulate footsteps) and she sees this little head under the thing going, ‘Are you Carol Burnett?’ I hate when people recognize me in the bathroom."

After 7 years as One Day’s Barbara Cooper, there is the impression when listening to Valerie speak, that the enormity of what she does is catching up with her. She recalls how enamored she was at 15 when her then manager told her she would be commanding $4000 a show at the outset of One Day’s seventh season. Says Valerie: "I thought, ‘My God, I can’t imagine making that much money. Seven years will never come.’"

     But seven years did come, and Valerie’s reported salary is five times that $4000-a-show figure. The enormous surpassing of what Valerie was originally told just "blows me away," as she ably puts it. And because of the nature of the business — expectations can materialize as much larger or smaller than anticipated — Valerie hesitates to map out any long-term goals.

     "As far as professional goals are concerned, it’s just moving along taking it one step at a time. I lvoe the way my career has gone, because I didn’t come out and all of a sudden I was a "star." And I’m still not a "star," says Valerie somewhat modestly. "It’s like I’m slowly climbing the ladder."

     Valerie’s assessment of her career as a slow climb up the ladder belies her ambition, however; an ambition that hits you with such a fervor as to surmise a climb that would be anything but slow, and is counter to her unwillingness to predict her professional future. While the realism of Valerie holds her back from thinking of future projects, her ambition does just the opposite. For when she speaks with that ambitious tone in her voice, she doesn’t gaze hesitantly into the future when considering the projects she will do when One Day is no longer in production. Rather, her plans picture a furious scurry up that ladder, then stopping to savor that final rung.

     As soon as the show is over I want to do a feature, and I want to do a feature that’s great. I want to be wonderful in it, I want to get rave reviews, and I want to get an Academy Award nomination."

     But Valerie’s mad climb up the ladder would end there. She says: "I don’t want to win. It’s true. I want to do everything, and yet I don’t want to win yet because I’m only 22, and I want to keep going until the time I fee like I want to leave the business for awhile."

     If and when Valerie leaves "the business for awhile," then it would be, according to her, to start a family. "I’m married and I’m thinking about having children. Eddie and I are making personal long-term goals and thinking when we’re going to have children and how we’re going to work it out in our lives.

     For now, however, Valerie is content with working on One Day and improving her acting, although she proudly reports she ahs improved her craft greatly already.

     "Earlier, when I first started doing the show, I would say, ‘Oh God, my acting is so bad.’ Then I started taking acting classes, and I think I’ve improved. You can always improve, but I have improved a lot since I first started doing the show. There’s always room for improvement, though I don’t know where. I mean, I’m not saying that in a vane way, I just can’t articulate where I need it. But I know I do.

     The overall perception of Valerie is that she is riding the fence as far as her career is concerned. She testifies her love for the work on One Day while speaking with indisguisable excitement about her future work and family. At the same time, the personality Valerie exudes is changing; she is growing up if you will — becoming the "sophisticated woman." She is in love and — it would be safe to say — relatively secure financially. At 22, you would think it might all be as easy to handle as a greased pig in the tundra of Alaska.

     Yet, Valerie is handling it all very well, thank you. As she puts it, she’s taking things "One day at a time."