Alan first appeared in Springfield in 1977 with his wife Elizabeth with dreams of emulating the success of his father. Despite a continual string of affairs on both sides of the marriage, they adopted Phillip when she couldn't have children. Seeking independence and a career, she alienated Alan, who clung increasingly to their son. They soon struggled for custody after a divorce while Alan, ironically, married Jackie Marler, with no hint that she was Phillip's biological mother. Like most of his relationships, this was doomed to fail and he quickly got caught up in the plots of his underling Roger Thorpe.

In a fluke accident, he crashed on a desert island with Hope Bauer and they began an affair which quickly became marriage when they returned to shore. About that time, his father died and the struggle over his estate began. It was then that Alan discovered that he had a half-sister he never knew, Amanda, who happened to be the heir to the estate. While fighting for his position and warding off blackmailers, he finally had a son of his own, Alan-Michael. Things came to a head when Alan was gripped in a violent confrontation over Roger's misdeeds that left several dead. Although Alan was innocent of murder, he was sentenced to prison for his part and confined for several years.

On release, he took control of Spaulding and began an affair with Trish Lewis. This led to him losing Alan-Michael along with Hope, while Alan tried to save Spaulding through a hostile takeover of Lewis Oil. Things got worse for him when his sister returned to wreak revenge on him for destroying her relationship with her son. At the same time, life with favorite son Phillip was strained by his affair with Beth and plotting with Alexandra.

Things peaked when Alan was turned over to the FBI by his sister for his role in manufacturing biological weapons. To escape, he faked his death and hid in Europe with India, embezzling, stealing art treasures and using Reva as his spy on Springfield. He would return, seducing Vanessa Chamberlin and then casting her aside to marry a comatose Reva after having her children's paternity test faked. Alex and Phillip subverted his return and threw him out of the company. He and Reva left for Mexico before he sent his lover Blake to Phillip to spy on him. Reva discovered his affair and left him, but not before her run-ins with Josh's wife Sonni left Alan shot and paralyzed. He recovered quickly, but didn't let on until the return of Roger Thorpe prompted it. With new crimes exposed, Alan was sent back to prison.

Soon released, he made another attempt to take over Spaulding, this time with the help of new lover Tangie, who ended up shooting him before he vanished to the country. There, he discovered an amnesiac Reva and tried to marry her, but she married Buzz instead so he set out to destroy their lives. This was boring and he was soon crippled again when he saved Shayne Lewis' life on a construction site. Discovering that Roger returned to Spaulding, he learned to walk again to seek revenge.

His revenge plans extended to Josh and Reva and involved one of his perfect mates, Annie Dutton. While Annie became increasingly unhinged, Alan did his best to protect her. This ended when she tried to kidnap Lizzie. He had a heart attack soon after and decided to spend more time with his family, particularly Lizzie who he helped through her leukemia. His obsessions with destroying Lewis and saving the family name have reached new extremes recently. Sometimes his plots combine, as when he married Olivia, who he was using to scam Lewis. With her, he found someone almost as devious as himself and would have succeeded in his takeover had Josh not blackmailed him with his father's past as a Nazi sympathizer.

To keep Olivia from going to Phillip, he faked a heart attack, but was found out. He and his son fought over her until Alan resorted to replacing her birth control with placebos. She began to take her revenge and Alan began to lose his memory, suffer hallucinations and panic attacks. He realized that he was being drugged and manipulated by his sister and fought back when he discovered that she was Reva's stalker. He then found out that Gus Aitoro was his son and, since Phillip had proven troublesome, took him under his wing. His disturbed relationship with Phillip has haunted him for most of their lives together as they traded women and business schemes in a continuous dance of self-destruction. As Phillip went mad and was 'murdered' (Alan actually helped him fake his death) Gus became his prime tool, a strategy which ultimately backfired when Gus sided with Harley and Alexandra after discovering his secret.

Things have been worse for Alan lately, as disastrous schemes between he and his sister and the rest of the family have threatened to destroy it. He lost control of Spaulding to Alan-Michael and, in desperation, married Beth, his lost son Philip's wife. Since then, he has spent most of his energy trying to take control of his granddaughter's life and preserve the family line by any means possible. Things got severely out of hand and, sadly, left Tammy Winslow dead when he tried to take out Jonathan Randall. Subsequently, Jonathan and Alan's granddaughter were believed dead in a car accident (it was a fake). Now a suspect in Tammy's death, Alan agreed to DA Doris Wolfe's blackmail of a marriage proposal. The wedding came fast and left Alan with a bullet in his guts. He kept silent for some time before revealing that Doris' daughter, Ashlee, had shot him. He used this to get out of the marriage and then began to clean house. He engineered Alan-Michael's fall from power and then sent him away in disgrace. After spending a few months in power, Beth left him before they could reunite. He turned to concentrating on his family, most notably Gus and his new found son.

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