Let me try and untangle it for you, because it's a tad messy:
When Alan, Elizabeth, and Phillip were introduced by the Dobsons, Alan was from Chicago. They lived with Jackie while Alan kept pushing Elizabeth to find them a house. No mention of Alan having any previous connection to Springfield. He chose Springfield as a good place for business development (I think Jackie recommended it to him so she could be close to Phillip). He did this a lot. Elizabeth mentions they moved around many times for this reason since they were married.
When they found a house of their own, they ended up living next door to Ed and Rita. If you think about it, it was a little odd that Ed and Rita could afford to live next door to the Spaulding mansion. In the beginning it was just a big house in an upscale neighborhood. Making it more believable that Ed would end up living next door to the Spauldings.
Marland added a little bit to Alan's backstory when he came in. Marland made Henry Alan's business mentor when he was a young man--in Chicago. Henry also knew Lucille Wexler and knew Lucille had been Brandon's mistress. The implication was Alan spent much of his youth in Chicago, although Brandon had connections to people in SF.
Pam Long came in and once again retooled the Spaulding family history. She invented a never-before-mentioned sister, Alex. She wrote storylines (The Fishing Trip Mystery and The Barbados Storyline) that included backstory where the Spauldings were a prominent family in Springfield going back at first to the 1960s, and then back to the 1940s, with implications that the family history in SF went back even further. She created Founders Day. That was the day Alan was born--in Springfield, not Chicago. Alex and Alan talked about their childhood as if they had always lived in SF and the mansion. It was really Long who established the Spauldings as a family that had history in SF going back a few generations. From then on, that's how most of the subsequent writers treated them.
That's the evolution of the Spaulding family history on GL.
Was Alan a playboy? Well, no, at least not when we first meet him because he was already married, but he was a notorious womanizer. Elizabeth claimed he cheated on her during their honeymoon.
Did he have daddy issues? Oh, YEAH. The backstory goes that he took Spaulding away from Brandon in revenge because he was such a terrible father. Alan talks to Hope about this when they're on the island, saying he was determined to be a better father than Brandon was to him. He dumped Brandon in a nursing home and refused to see him, even when they told him he was probably dying. Long extrapolated on that, creating more specific details of how he treated his children horribly, i.e. he paid off Alex's lover to take their son away from her.
When I said he was like Jack, I don't mean specific relationships or story beats. But they had some similar qualities--both liked to chase women, both were manipulative and ambitious, both had complicated relationships with a sibling and with their father. As far as business, Alan resembled Victor Newman more than Jack, who was often on the losing end of business fights.
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DeeVee ·
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