But plenty of weird things happened with Eddie. Like the time a woman filed a paternity suit against him. Eddie shrugged it off, insisting that their sexual relations all took place in his car on the Pacific Coast Highway and were strictly oral. “You know how I like a pretty face in my crotch,” he allegedly told Van Halen road manager Noel Monk, author of “Runnin’ With the Devil: A Backstage Pass to the Wild Times, Loud Rock, and the Down and Dirty Truth Behind the Making of Van Halen.” Even Eddie could not impregnate a woman via her mouth. The suit was tossed.
Hopefully, however, Eddie was driving somewhere close to the speed limit when the deeds went down. He and Hagar were both car fanatics and enjoyed racing their pricy Italian autos. Recalling what transpired after recording sessions, Hagar wrote about the bandmates blazing down LA roadways at speeds of 150 miles per hour.
Better, perhaps, with cars than with people, Eddie was not the easiest person in relationships. His bouts with former Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth were legendary. A vexed Eddie once whipped a glass bowl of guacamole at the head of Roth. And he didn’t exactly give Bertinelli the kid-glove treatment either. When she joined him on one of the band’s tours, Eddie reportedly had her sleep in an adjoining bedroom, so that he could stay up all night with his booze, cocaine and guitar.
According to Monk’s book, after the solo music-making, he’d settle in with the road manager, lay his head upon Monk’s shoulder, tell him how much he loved him and doze off like a baby with a bottle of vodka pressed up against his lips.
If Eddie was selfish with his time, the same could not be said for his drugs — “Ed likes me skinny,” Bertinelli reportedly told Monk’s fiancée to account for her dips into Eddie’s cocaine supply — and his body. In his book, Monk wrote that Eddie had been banging a smorgasbord of groupies every night prior to Bertinelli’s arrival on the tour.
But, of course, girls were easy to come by and often got treated disrespectfully. In his book, Monk recounted the night that Eddie and his bandmates had a willing fan lay naked in bed so that they could cover her in condiments — and they did.
But the wild lifestyle took its toll on the great guitarist. He wound up needing a hip replacement in 1999 and became alarmingly skinny following his diagnosis of throat cancer in 2000.
Hagar wrote about the six-string maestro being addicted to cigarettes and alcohol while battling the disease that landed in his throat and killed him. According to Hagar, in the early 2000s, many of Eddie’s teeth were missing and the ones that remained had turned black. Hagar attributes that to Eddie’s habit of drinking rotgut wine directly from the bottle.
When Hagar suggested that Van Halen use a glass, the guitarist hoisted his bottle and cheekily replied, “It’s in a glass.”
Portions of his tongue had been cut off, leaving Eddie speaking with a lisp. As Hagar wrote in his book, “He told me he cured himself [of cancer] by having pieces of his tongue liquefied and injected into his body. He also told me that when he had his hip replacement, he stayed awake through the operation and helped the doctor drill the hole. What a fruitcake.”
It’s tough to dispute the weirdness, wildness and extremeness of Eddie Van Halen — qualities that came through in his guitar virtuosity and in his lifestyle — but, today, it’s better to remember him by the memorial that Hagar posted to Twitter. Above a photo of the two, happily buddied up together on a jet, the vocalist wrote, “Heartbroken and speechless. My love to the family.”
