alerie Bertinelli strides
purposefully toward the front desk of a
Los Angeles hotel, where she’s scheduled to
speak at a fashion show the following morning.
Her long auburn hair is feathered in a sassy
shag, and she’s wearing a short-sleeved, black
mock turtleneck, formfitting flared jeans,
and a pair of sky-high heels. She checks in,
then says cheerfully, “I had a massage sched-
uled this evening, but I need to cancel
it. I have to work out instead.… Oh,
and which way is the restaurant?
I’m starving!”
On this particular day Bertinelli
is a month away from turning
50, and the view from behind her
tortoiseshell reading glasses is none
too shabby. The actress—still best known as
Bonnie Franklin’s TV daughter Barbara in
the 1970s sitcom One Day at a Time—has just
returned from ten days in Italy, where, on a
romantic night in Florence, her boyfriend of
nearly six years, businessman Tom Vitale,
surprised her by proposing marriage.
“We’d talked about getting mar-
ried,” Bertinelli says, “but I was still
shocked. It was sweet when he asked
me, because he was so scared. I was
like, ‘Are you kidding me?’”
Bertinelli met Vitale, who runs a
private equity fund, in 2004, when she
was carrying 162 pounds on her petite,
five-foot-four frame. In early 2007,
after she’d ballooned to 172 pounds,
she launched a very public weight-loss
campaign with the Jenny Craig com-
pany, dropping more than 40 pounds.
Not only has she kept the weight off,
but her zest for exercise has led her
to set increasingly challenging fitness
goals. She completed the 26.2-mile
Boston Marathon in April in 5 hours,
14 minutes, and she’s planning to
