Valerie Bertinelli Says the Best Advice She’s Ever Received Was from Betty White

Valerie Bertinelli is opening up about a memorable lesson Betty White taught her.

The celebrity chef answered audience questions in a clip The Drew Barrymore Show shared on Monday, Aug. 4. One fan wanted to know the best advice Bertinelli has ever received.

“The best piece of advice is from Betty White,” Bertinelli, 65, said of her late Hot in Cleveland costar. “She really taught me about gratitude. I thought I was grateful. She was just living, breathing gratitude, every second of her life, every moment I was around her.”

White died at the age of 99 on Dec. 31, 2021, less than a month before what would have been her 100th birthday.

Bertinelli went on, “She was grateful for the good, the bad, the ugly, all of it. And I have learned through going through really challenging things of the past five years, I’m grateful for the hard stuff. It’s sucked, and I wish I didn’t have to go through it, but there was no other way for me to learn a better way. And I think mistakes are there purposefully to help us learn what not to do.”

The One Day at a Time star concluded, “So, gratitude for sure. Every moment, I’m grateful for. Even the hard stuff. Especially the hard stuff. That’s Betty White.”

The celebrity chef, who shared screen time with White on the TV Land sitcom Hot in Cleveland from 2010 to 2015, also reminisced about the television icon during an appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show in June.

“She was magical. You know, there are people that when they walk into a room, they kind of glow,” Bertinelli said.

“Betty had this aura about her of just pure grace and kindness and humor,” she continued. “I was so lucky, I got to work with her for five years. It was the best job. It was amazing. I learned so much.”

Bertinelli also recounted an anecdote about a surprise she helped plan for White’s 90th birthday in 2012.

“We would never know what to get Betty,” she recalled of the Golden Girls star, who was known for her love of animals. “We named an elephant after her. We named wolves after her. We did all this kind of stuff. And one year — this was her 90th birthday — someone on Hot in Cleveland said, ‘We need to get Betty a box of puppies just for the day,’ because she couldn’t get any new dogs. Her dog Pontiac was ill.”

Barrymore noted that White was “the big” animal advocate, as Bertinelli agreed.

“In fact, she named my dog and she named my first cat. She named Luna and Nelson, my first cat, because she always wanted a cat named Nelson Eddy, so she gave that to me for Nelson,” Bertinelli said.

“So we just had a box of puppies, a big pen of puppies, the entire day when we were working,” Bertinelli added. “And she was in heaven.”