NEW YORK - Darla Hood, sweetheart in the old "Our Gang" movies and now a lovely actress-singer-comedienne, wonders whether her home town of Leedey, Okla., still exists.
"The last I heard, a tornado came down the middle of the street and blew everything away. There were only 500 people when I lived there (the atlas corrects this to 558), so I doubt if anyone's there now."
(Her uncle, Dr. F. Redding Hood, of Oklahoma City, is one of the leading heart specialists in the country.)
Darla left Oklahoma early - when she was 2½. On a vacation to New York with a family friend, Katharine Duffy, she was discovered one night playfully leading a band in the Hotel Edison. Joe Rivkin, a Hal Roach scout, signed her, and what followed from 1936-1944 was 150 "Our Gangs" - and a flock of namesakes.
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"My mother wanted an original name, so she chose 'Darla.' Since then I've received about 350 letters from mothers who've named their children after me. I keep in touch with all of them - we send birthday cards to each other every year."
Darla says she was able to outlast many of the other kids in "Our Gang" because she scarcely grew an inch.
"I got my release," said the still-petite actress, "when I was 12 - and at the same time I got another year. I thought I was just 11, but they told me they'd cut a year when I first started. I was happy to leave, because I wanted to go to public school and have some girl friends. I was the only girl in our class at the studio."
She did know several of the girls on the MGM lot, however, including Elizabeth Taylor, Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien.
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"Liz loved fairy tales. Every story I told her had to end 'and they lived happily after ' or she wouldn't listen. Most kids loved stories with a monster and a gory ending, but she'd turn her back on those."
The thing that startled Darla most as a child was kids asking her for her autograph.
"I guess if I'd started out in the business at 10 or 12 and had a chance to become a fan myself I would have understood. But I thought my mother drove me to the studio every day so I could play. We had the jungle on the Tarzan set and played 'Doctor' on the Dr. Kildare set (Lew Ayres version).
"I never thought I was acting or that it meant anything. But one day my uncle said to me, 'Don't you get scared that one day you're going to muff a line and cost all those people thousands of dollars?' After that," she smiled, "I began to fluff lines left and right."
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Darla makes a lot of money these days making commercials ("My son Brett, who's 4, goes to the mailbox and says, 'Ziduals are here'"), and she gets a big kick out of the present-day conversation of show biz children, who're often used.
"You hear these 12 and 13-year-old kids talking, like 'My agent just signed me for a 13-week cycle' . . . 'Yeah? My agent would never accept that kind of deal' . . . 'Are you local or national?'"
Darla's also done a lot of tv, dating back to Ken Murray and on up to guest shots with Jack Benny, Ed Sullivan, Jackie Gleason and Groucho Marx.
"I always knew where the red light on the camera was," she says. "No one was ever able to catch me in profile - as soon as I saw the red light I'd face the camera. The tv director of 'The Ken Murray Show' said I was the only girl in the world who could walk down the street and when the light turned red, face around and smile up at it."