Englewood Cliffs - Mrs. Joe Grantson of New Street recently received a letter from a 9-year-old boy in Brazil.
"I would like to marry you when you grow up," the youngster wrote.
The letter was no surprise to the glamorous Mrs. Grantson, former child star Darla Hood. She knew the boy had been watching reruns of the Little Rascals on television.
"I guess I've gotten hundreds of such proposals," said the sweetheart of the Our Gang comedies during an interview.
When the comedies were sold to television, the name was switched to Little Rascals. They've been run and rerun on T. V. for some 20 years, in Europe, Asia, South America, and Canada, as well as in the United State.
Darla was signed to the Hal Roach Studios in Hollywood when she was 3 years old and during the ensuing 9 years she made 146 comedies with Alfalfa, Spanky, Porky, Buck-wheat, Scotty, Harold, and Pete the dog.
"Unfortunately, my parents signed a waiver to any additional rights at the time," Darla said. Today the residual rights on those films would have amounted to a large fortune.
In case you weren't aware of it, the beautiful and petite Darla is still entertaining children although they can't see her. She's the voice on those tiny records inside talking dolls produced by two major toy firms and the vocalist on many children's albums.
"Actually," said the 5-foot-1-inch brunette, "the Our Gang comedies were begun during the 1920s. My first appearance with the Gang was in the 'Our Gang Follies of 1936'."
Darla was the last to play the role of the sweet moppet with the heart-shaped lips. The Gang was disbanded near the end of World War II.
"There was some talk of a new series but we'd all grown too old for the parts, anyway," she said.
Darla's entry into television as an adult performer was a direct result of her marriage to music publisher Grantson 10 years ago. They have a son, Brett, who is 8, a daughter, Darla Joe, 6, and another daughter, Robin, 17, (born to Joe's first wife who died) and is now a senior at Fort Lee High School.
"I used to listen to Darla singing and telling bedtime stories to the kids," Joe said, "and I just felt she'd be wonderful doing T. V. commercials."
He made a test album of all her story-telling voices, sent it to a producer, and from that came a 4-year contract and $24,000 in residuals for a series of commercials selling tuna fish.
Later she became the voice selling breakfast cereals and was on camera as the housewife plugging toothpastes, detergents, autos, soups, household cleaners, chocolates, gasolines, and telephone service.
"I grew up in Hollywood," Darla said, "but the East has been lucky for me. I always loved New York and after 5 years in Englewood Cliffs I love Bergen County, too."
She recalled coming to New York after picking it as their honeymoon site.
"We went to a small restaurant in New York and a vice-president of A. B. C. Radio recognized me. He said he loved the little girl from the Our Gang comedies. The next thing we knew there was a 13-week contract for the Merv Griffin Show on radio at $1,000 a week."
Darla admits her most difficult period of adjustment came when she went to a public junior high school in Los Angeles.
"I grew up playing with the other kids on movie sets. We were treated like stars. I thought all kids grew up this way. I didn't know what a real neighborhood was like," she recalled. "I couldn't understand why the world no longer adored me when I was 12."
Although she's gotten thousands of letters over the years from mothers who borrowed her name for their own daughters, her parents gave her the name Dorla.
"When she got to the studio in 1936," her husband explained, "some one misspelled it and wrote Darla."
"And in the comedies," Darla added, "the kids were supposed to call me Cookie but they just couldn't remember it so it came out Darla in all the pictures."
Laurel and Hardy fans who watch their reruns on T. V. also will see Darla as a child in "Bohemian Girl" and at the Roach Studios and at Metro she also appeared with Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Nelson Eddy and Jeanette McDonald.
After high school Darla teamed with four boys to form a vocal group which sang background tunes for such movies as "Letter to Three Wives" and "Mother Was a Freshman," the latter starring Betty Grable.
Darla said: "It was then that Ken Murray discovered us and put the act into his 'Blackouts,' which ran for 8 years in Hollywood. Talk about your rock 'n' roll groups today. We were called Darla Hood and The Enchanters."
Following its West Coast run, Murray brought the famous revue to New York's Ziegfeld Theater and when the comic was given a series on C. B. S., Darla became his leading lady.
Our Gang fans have been recognizing Darla in such clubs as the Copacabana in New York, the Sands in Las Vegas, the Hotel Fairmont in San Francisco and on T. V. shows with Ed Sullivan, Jack Benny, Jackie Gleason and Johnny Carson.
"I'm not anxious to do a club act any more," Darla said. "It means being away from home and the children too much."
The 98-pound performer also writes songs and poetry and collects jewelry of all kinds - but only if it is heart-shaped in design.
"I don't know why," she said. "I just love it. It's the only kind I own."
Of the Little Rascals she worked with, Darla has only kept track of a few. Scotty Beckett and Jackie Cooper are still in Hollywood, Spanky is in Texas with an air-conditioning firm, and Alfalfa was killed several years ago.
"But Robert Blake, who played with the Gang during its last 4 years, has a featured role in Truman Capote's new film, 'In Cold Blood,' she said.
"Why," I asked, "do kids sit glued to the boob tube day after day watching the same reruns of the Little Rascals?"
Her hazel eyes sparkled as she said with a smile, "I think it's because there's an agelessness in them that helps children today identify with all the kids in the gang and the mischief they get into."
I was under strict orders from my own two boys not to end the interview without getting Darla Hood's autograph.
She wrote to each of them: "From one Little Rascal to another."
Pocketing the autographs I realized the world's most eminent child psychologist couldn't have described the age of boyhood more accurately.