Stanky McFutt

You would tend to think, from his demeanor and appearance, his mash jug and his long rifle, that Stanky McFutt was a near relative of those feuding Hatfields and McCoys of the Kentucky-Virginia border.

And you would be wrong, for Stanky McFutt is actually an original Beverly Hillbilly (or, should I say, an original Holmby Hillbilly, since he resides in the Holmby Hills, that hyper-affluent stretch of western Los Angeles adjacent to Beverly Hills).

Stanky McFutt was born Jerome Gildenstein in Montauk Point, Long Island. As a young man, he traveled west to seek his fortune in films. It was his minor role as a crowd extra in that 1967 cinematic classic of Depression-era Bluegrass country, Bring Me the Head of Orris Finbyne!, that gave him his Stanky McFutt persona. Legally changing his name to Stanky the following year, Jerome invested his residuals in the former home of Walt Disney and became a Holmby Hills celebrity. To this day, he appears in public as well as in private in the full guise of the Stanky McFutt character. (For example, he bathes very infrequently, and consumes 5 to 6 liters of home-distilled corn mash daily.)

In a rather ironic (some would say cinematic) twist, Stanky McFutt is currently in character, conducting a long-running feud with nearby Beverly Hills resident Warren Beatty, over a perceived slight in the casting of Beatty’s film Bulworth.