Spanky McFarland of Fort Worth. Let that soak in. Yes, the standout player of Old Hollywood’s “Our Gang” comedy franchise, also known as “The Little Rascals” series. George “Spanky” McFarland — accept no substitutes — settled in Grapevine and Fort Worth for much of his life. And he spent much of the 1980s–1990s hanging out at my newsroom office.
I was astonished to find McFarland receptive to my out-of-the-blue request in 1984 for a career interview. I had dedicated my movie-review desk at the Star-Telegram to the rediscovery of bygone film stars of local origin. But the request also coincided with McFarland’s brief return from actorly retirement in a made-in-Waxahachie picture, “The Aurora Encounter” — an offbeat science-fiction Western. (“Aurora” went unreleased until 1986.)
Now, McFarland (1928–1993) had developed a reputation as a recluse, known for pursuing resentful litigation against any business that dared to use the trademark-identity of Spanky to adorn a barroom or a rock ’n’ roll band. But he answered his own telephone, cordially, without any firewall of agents or secretaries, and he kept himself on view as a pitchman for Fort Worth’s Justin Boot Co. He proved ready and willing, as forward-looking as he was nostalgically inclined.
My newspaper coverage and National Public Radio commentaries of 1984 fetched an enthusiastic popular response — and one unexpected inquiry from the managers of a hitmaking rock-and-soul star who considered Spanky McFarland an idol. I had theorized that the TV revival of “The Little Rascals” comedies must have persuaded many schoolchildren of the 1950s–1960s to make their own entertainment, just like Spanky and his chums. Michael Jackson, progressive spawn of the Motown music-making conglomerate, would fit that description.
“Funny thing you should mention that,” McFarland told me one afternoon in 1988. “You remember, a few years ago, when you brought Michael Jackson out to meet me, here, in Grapevine?”
Well, sure, I remembered. Arrangements for that 1984 meeting — during Jackson’s post-Thriller concert tour — had been a tangle of logistics and armed security. The visit had come together with rewarding results, though, as Jackson fulfilled an ambition to commune with a childhood hero. (Jackson’s stage-costumes included a button bearing Spanky’s likeness.) McFarland seemed pleased with the attention.
McFarland continued, there in the newsroom in 1988: “Well, y’know, what Michael Jackson went yammering on and on about, was how I’d ‘inspired’ him, or so he said,” McFarland told me in 1988. “Said he’d watch us ‘Our Gang’ kids on television, actin’ like the whole world was our stage, and got the performing bug. I guess it helped him to have a musically inclined family. And that noise they call rock ’n’ roll was about all there was to play, I guess, by the time he’d’ve been comin’ up.
“So anyhow,” said McFarland, “I guess I’d never’ve thought of our pictures as being any kind of an influence on this rock ’n’ roll business.”
“Yeah, well,” I replied, “so where do you think the Young Rascals [a blue-eyed soul band of the 1960s] came up with their name or their early image? And how about that other band that called itself Spanky & Our Gang?”
McFarland said: “I never listened to any Young Rascals recordings — I prefer Glenn Miller … As for Spanky & Our Gang — well, I guess that was meant as some kind of a tribute. But I sure as hell sued their management for infringement, all the same.”
The spectacle of Spanky McFarland, cussing and boasting of lawsuits, took some getting accustomed to. Even though he was 59 at the time and by turns businesslike, gruff, and ebullient, McFarland was still recognizably the chubby little kid who had joined the “Our Gang” ensemble in 1931 and stuck with it into the 1940s.
“It was a lark when I was really little,” McFarland said of his early stardom, “but once the Spanky identity caught on permanently and my kid-comedian career was assured — most kid actors tended to get forcibly retired at around age 7 — then my folks just took it for granted that I was their cash cow. When I’d exhibit any sign of wantin’ to quit or broaden my prospects, my old man’d tell me, ‘Why, you can’t! You’re all we’ve got sustaining us!’ Manipulative hogwash like that.
“Which is why, if you look at those later ‘Our Gangs’ after Mr. Hal Roach [the producer] had sold the trademark, you can see me lookin’ not altogether pleased. I was bustin’ at the seams, and I don’t just mean the seams of that damned little fat-boy wardrobe they made me keep wearin’.”
By this time, the Dallas-born McFarland had settled into Fort Worth as a businessman — “but once a ham, always a ham,” he would say — indulging a lingering interest in show business with the advertising sideline for Justin Boots. He had been, variously, a military aviator, a chauffeur, a soft-drink deliveryman, a television host in Oklahoma, and a salesman for Magic Chef kitchen appliances. He never quit using the nickname of Spanky, though mingled emotions persisted.
As a young adult, McFarland found that Hollywood “just couldn’t see me as anything but Spanky — opened ab-so-damned-lutely no doors … Nowadays, I guess the identity opens more doors than it seals shut.”
Hal Roach, a comedy specialist since the 1920s, had launched the “Our Gang” franchise late in the silent-screen age, inspired by a bunch of neighborhood children whose antics he observed in the distance of his office window.
George McFarland, already an advertising model in Texas by age 3, was presented for a 10-minute screen test at Roach Studios in 1931, improvising a nursery tale before the cameras. Roach signed the boy that November. “And the rest is histrionics,” as the adult Spanky was fond of saying, relishing the wordplay.
In 1992, while working with the USA Film Festival at Dallas, I arranged a meeting between McFarland and Roach when that eminénce grisé of Old Hollywood visited for an event to mark his 100th birthday. The encounter proved cordial, if stilted. Although both men remembered one another fondly, they hardly had been chums, back in the day.
“Kind of a token summit meeting,” McFarland reflected. “Mr. Roach always had been kind of a distant figure of authority… But it was nice to see him again for that one last time.”
Roach died not long after that century-mark. Spanky McFarland died, unexpectedly, the following year.
“George was predisposed to apoplexy,” as a lawyer who had handled McFarland’s outbursts of brand-name litigation wrote to me after I had published a memorial column. “Always looking to get all bent out of shape about some hapless entrepreneur trying to cash in on the name of Spanky. A delightful fellow, in so many ways — but haunted.”
That litigious legacy reasserted itself one last time in 1994 when corporate Hollywood mounted a postmodern “Little Rascals” film. No sooner had the movie appeared, than McFarland’s widow, Doris Taulman McFarland, announced a lawsuit on a complaint of misappropriation of the Spanky monicker. The action proved ineffectual, although its last hurrah for George McFarland’s pastime of litigation-with-indignation may have been an end in itself.
Nor did the new film or its Spanky-surrogate, a vaguely look-alike kid from Rockwall, Texas, named Travis Tedford, do anything to diminish the overriding and age-defiant appeal of the genuine article.
