Queen of Sweeps

In Olympics terms, NBC is banking on Bertinelli to win the Sunday gold. But at her home on a balmy Southern California afternoon three weeks before air date, Bertinelli is far less interested in TV ratings or the sociological impact of the miniseries as a barometer of our national consciousness than she is in her nanny search. Her small, round, smiling, dark-haired son, Wolfgang (who, she says, was named partly for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and partly for the awesome sound of Wolfgang Van Halen) is 11 months old and on the teetery verge of walking. And Bertinelli can call upon her daytime housekeeper and on her mother, Nancy, only so much to look after Wolfie if she has something else to do. Like an interview.

''Ma? Ma!'' Valerie shouts into the upper reaches of the house she and Ed moved into just a year ago. Her voice echoes in the vaulted foyer; the place still has the spare, unscuffed feeling of newness, of objects dwarfed by the vast dimensions of the place. It's a Disney fantasy of a house on a Hollywood hill — French Normandy meets Family Circle, with a pool table and a jukebox and a grand piano and a minisize Les Paul guitar sitting around waiting for Wolfgang's tiny, chubby fingers. Wolfie wobbles happily around the family room, a cozily carpeted place with a fire graciously blazing in the fireplace even though it's 70 degrees outside.

''Ma, can you watch Wolfie for a sec?'' Bertinelli scoops up her son in a gale of giggles — she's truly, clearly nuts about the boy, happy in motherhood, and talking of having a second child — and delivers him upstairs to his grandmother. Valerie was born in Delaware, but grew up, the second of four children, in Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Michigan before her dad, a former GM exec, settled the brood in California. The Bertinelli seniors usually live at the Bertinelli-Van Halen beach house in Malibu. But that place is in the process of being renovated and besides, Andy Bertinelli has been spending a lot of time in Europe working as a materials supervisor on the tunnel connecting England and France. So Nancy Bertinelli has been staying with her only daughter while Ed is with his band, Van Halen, on tour for their album, For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (get it?). It'll be a couple of weeks before Valerie and Ed and Wolfie will be reunited — this time in Chicago, where mother and son will fly to meet Rock Daddy.

Child-free, she plops down on a big, loungy, L-shaped banquette. Then leaps up to get some water. Then plops again, then leaps. Jumpy. Bouncy. With an inhaler for asthma never far out of reach. On TV, Bertinelli often plays plucky, as in Rockabye, or feisty, as in Child's Name. She's been teary-pious in Shattered Vowsand attempted funny in the short-lived 1990 CBS sitcom Sydney, in which she played a private detective. She's even been rich-bitchy, as in her eight-hour marathon as Maxi Amberville in Judith Krantz's I'll Take Manhattan in 1987.

But in her jumbo den, surrounded by a gallery of framed family photos, Valerie Bertinelli is...insecure. Remarkably, insistently, determinedly, touchingly insecure. About her looks (''I feel ugly!''). About her weight (''I've got to lose 10 pounds before I have another baby!''). About her profession and her good fortune and her place in the universe.

''The first year of (doing One Day at a Time), '' she says, ''I didn't know what the heck I was doing. I mean, I didn't even know why I was doing what I was doing. I had no idea why I got into this business, but I'm still in it. And I still don't know why. I never pictured my life the way it is. And yet, I can't picture it differently.''

This comes out slowly: At first she describes herself as ''perky. I guess I just try to find the humor and the good in everything, even when I'm feeling like crap and feeling like the world's against me.''

Who's against her? ''Oh, there are people out there.''

Then this comes out: ''I have such guilt about being lucky that it's ridiculous. I always hate complaining about anything because if you look at this life I have, anybody else would want it. But the other day I was just sitting in a chair crying hysterically because I just felt so ugly and I didn't have a nanny and my whole life was, like, this stupid thing and I felt like nothing.''