Ford shares the time in 1980 that she and Van Halen were drinking vodka and trying on each other’s clothes in her living room. Ford had a T-shirt that read, in part, “Beat me. Bite me. Whip me. F–k me,” among other such sentiments. They were fooling around on the floor when she felt someone kicking her ankle, and found Mark, a large man she had recently broken up with, staring down at them. He had “climbed up the balconies and came through the sliding-glass door.”
Eddie Van HalenPhoto: Getty Images
Van Halen, drunk, freaked out. He “backed his way toward the bathroom and said, ‘Well, if you’re going to kill me, just bury me with my guitar.’ Then he slammed shut the bathroom door and locked it.”
Ford got Mark to leave, but when she checked the bathroom, Van Halen was gone, despite the only exit being one “tiny, tiny window” over the shower.
He had, in fact, “managed to squeeze his body through that window, scraping up his entire stomach, [and] dropped down four stories.”
At the height of his fame, he had to borrow a dime from a kid on the street — while wearing Ford’s T-shirt — to call 911.