PASADENA, Calif. — The Jazz may sometimes have trouble getting stars to come to Utah and play for their team but not so "Touched by an Angel." The state's home-team TV series didn't have to sell Valerie Bertinelli on the merits of joining its ranks.
"I love it so much up there that this is my excuse for moving there," Bertinelli said during the recent Television Critics Association press tour. "I'm actually quite excited about it."
She sounds like a spokeswoman for the Utah Travel Council.
"I love it up there. I wouldn't have bought a house up there if I didn't love it," she said. "Of course, I do live in the Sodom and Gomorrah of Utah."
As a matter of fact, Bertinelli and her husband, rocker Eddie Van Halen, bought a house in Park City a couple of years ago — long before she knew she would be joining the "Touched" cast. One of her brothers, a professional photographer, also lives in Park City.
"My brother lives up there and his wife. He has lived there for 10 years. So I also have family up there," Bertinelli said. "It feels like going home. It feels like an extension (of home) for me."
Not that it will be an easy transition. Van Halen will remain based in Los Angeles, where their 10-year-old son, Wolfgang (better known as Wolfie), goes to school. They'll all be doing a good deal of traveling back-and-forth between L.A. and SLC, but Bertinelli said she has less-than-great memories of changing schools when she was a child and that she didn't want her son to go through the same thing.
"I haven't had time to really look at the schools up there. And he would kill me if I took him out of school here," she said. "He's going into the fifth grade. Do you know how difficult that is? I can't do that to him.
"And I keep him with me," she said, showing off her belt-buckle with the word "WOLFIE" on it in large, gold letters.
"The nice thing about ('Touched' executive producer) Martha (Williamson) and the reason I took this job is I said that whenever I need to go home for Wolfie, like the first day of school, we have to make accommodations. And when he plays in the school orchestra and when he does his school play, things like that, I really have to be home."
And Wolfie apparently wasn't much surprised at the thought of his mother playing an angel.
"Well, he already loves me unconditionally, and he thinks I'm an angel," Bertinelli said with a smile. "So it's not much of a stretch for him.
"He was very excited for me. He's not real crazy about me working because he likes me being his mom 24-7. But knowing that he's going to be able to come visit me where Uncle David and Aunt Rachel live, he's excited about that."
She does admit she's "really worried" about spending time apart from her son. And that was a conscious decision she made about her career the last time she worked in Utah, where she filmed the 1996 miniseries "Night Sins."
"As soon as he started kindergarten, that's when I did the miniseries. And I realized right then and there that this isn't going to work because he's in school and he can't be with me," she said. "And that's why I took, basically, the last four years off, just doing very small things."
But now she's back on weekly TV, joining Roma Downey, Della Reese and John Dye as a regular on "Touched by an Angel." Introduced at the end of last season, she's playing a newly minted angel named Gloria.
"Basically, I know she's an angel in training. And as it goes further, it will, I think, gradually go through the year when she learns how to be an angel," Bertinelli said.
"She is essentially a brand-new, created being," said "Touched" executive producer Martha Williamson. "She knows nothing about human beings. She has a computerlike brain. We call (her) an angel for the 21st century. She's hard-wired — seriously hard-wired. But she doesn't know how to absorb what she's learning. She can learn in an instant, but she doesn't know how to use her heart. And Monica (played by Downey), who is all heart, is going to spend the year teaching her how to do it."
Bertinelli said she jumped at the chance to join the show because she's a longtime fan.
Just the night before, she had been watching an old episode of the show on Pax Net. "It blew me away. It was so wonderful," she said. "I loved the show."
And, after watching another episode, she said she cried so much "I woke up the next morning and looked like I had been beaten up, my face was so puffy."
She said her husband is also a fan of the show. "Oh, he sobs, too," Bertinelli said, adding that Van Halen is not the hard-living, hard rocker some people believe. "Oh, he's so not that. He's a very sensitive, sweet, loving human being."
And there's good news about Van Halen, who has been battling cancer.
"He's doing very well," Bertinelli said. "It's been a very difficult year-and-a-half, and there's a lot of different emotions that people go through when they have cancer, and we've been going through all of them. We have our rough times, and we have our good times and, hopefully, the good times will come more often than the rough.
"It goes up and down. I don't know what it would be like to have to go through what he's going through right now. And I just have to be as patient as possible."
In a way, "Touched by an Angel" came along for her at the perfect time.
"You know, I think that once you get into your late 30s and early 40s, you start re-examining your life anyway. And that's what I've been doing a lot lately," Bertinelli said. "This part came at a really good time in my life for me to be able to really remind myself every day that God is there and God does love me. He loves all of us. And we forget that so often in this crowded, noisy world, and it centers me a bit more playing this part."
Even if she has to move to Utah to do the show — something she reminded reporters again and again was not exactly a huge hardship, even though some members of the press corps seemed to think that moving to the state is something akin to moving to outer Mongolia.
"We're talking like I'm going to a third-world country. I'm just going up to Park City!" she said.
E-MAIL: pierce@desnews.com