Matthew Perry’s kiss-and-tell about Valerie Bertinelli leaves her ‘mortified’

What’s that saying about how a true gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell?

It looks like that the adage doesn’t apply to Matthew Perry who has revealed in his new memoir that he had a serious crush on Valerie Bertinelli in the early 1990s and ended up making out with her as her husband, rocker Eddie Van Halen, lay passed out from drinking 10 feet away.

In his book, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” Perry said his assignation with the married Bertinelli took place while they worked together on the short-lived sitcom “Sydney” in 1990, Entertainment Weekly reported. 

“I fell madly in love with Valerie Bertinelli, who was clearly in a troubled marriage,” the former “Friends” star, 53, 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.”

One night, while at Bertinelli and Van Halen’s home, Perry wrotee that he decided to go for it with his costar.

“As the night progressed, it was clear that Eddie had enjoyed the fruits of the vine a little too hard …  and eventually he just passed out, not 10 feet away from us,” Perry writes. “This was my chance!”

Perry said that he and Bertinelli enjoyed “a long, elaborate make-out session” and that he had “elaborate fantasies about her leaving Eddie Van Halen and living out the rest of her days” with him instead.

A clearly embarrassed Bertinelli tried to respond with humor about being outed as straying from her marriage by posting a cheeky TIkTok video, Page Six reported. With Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero” playing in the background, the 62-year-old Emmy winner and one-time child star waved to the camera and smiled as the lyric, “Hi, it’s me” played.

“Anyone else misbehave in their 20’s and early 30’s?” she captioned the social media upload, in which she also made embarrassed facial expressions. “Are you mortified?”

After their make-out session, Perry recalled telling Bertinelli that he “had thought about doing that for a long time.” According to him, he she said been thinking the same thing.

However, when they returned to work the next day, Bertinelli “made no mention of what had happened,” which Perry said left him  “devastated.” Perry said he endured “tearful” nights and,  much to his relief, the show ultimately got canceled, “and I didn’t have to see Valerie anymore.”

Bertinell first gained fame in the 1970s, starring in the sitcom, “One Day at a Time.” She married Van Halen in 1981. Their son, Wolfgang, was born in 1991. The couple separated in 2001 and divorced on December 20, 2007, with Bertinelli revealing that the marriage was troubled by his cocaine addiction. Bertinelli went on to marry financial planner Tom Vitale in 2011, but they divorced in May.

Perry has won praise and press coverage for his memoir, in which he which offers a harrowing account of his struggles with addiction to alcohol and opioids. But as with any tell-all, Perry runs the risk of sharing private information about other people, which may not be fair to them.

Some of social media didn’t take kindly to Perry apparently making Bertinelli uncomfortable by revealing details about their brief, romantic dalliance.

“We do not need to know everything!!” one person wrote in response to an Entertainment Weekly tweet about Perry’s revelation. “Such an evil way to try to sell books. No respect but then again,” said another.