In a recent review of a book about racehorse Peter the Great, Dean A. Hoffman mentions an interesting biographical connection between Tarkington’s fictitious Amberson family and Indianapolis banker Stoughton Fletcher:

Stokes sold Peter The Great, then 21, to Stoughton Fletcher of Indianapolis for $50,000. It was an outrageous price for any horse at that time, but particularly for one of an advanced age.

But Fletcher, who was from a wealthy banking family, set up his new stallion at the Laurel Hall Farm, named after his mother. (The Laurel Hall mansion, built at a cost of $2 million in 1916, is still standing in Indianapolis, not far from the state fairgrounds.)

Fletcher was perhaps only a bit less flamboyant than Stokes, but his family is reportedly the model for Booth Tarkington’s famed novel The Magnificent Ambersons. I’ve read that Fletcher entertained guests at Laurel Hall Farm by having “breeding parties” in which Peter The Great performed on the lawn in front of the big house. Fletcher reportedly also used a cement mixer to make martinis at his parties. After all, it was the Roaring Twenties.

Is it a surprise to anyone that Fletcher managed to squander the family fortune in short time? By the time Peter The Great died in 1923, Fletcher was busted.

There were contributing factors to his financial downfall. His wife committed suicide by drinking acid and, when her own mother found her, she was so distraught that she drank the same poison and joined her daughter in death.

One of Stoughton Fletcher’s daughters died at age 24 and in 1941 a son committed suicide. Stoughton Fletcher, once the millionaire banker who owned the greatest trotting stallion in the world, lived in obscurity, supposedly working as an elevator operator until his death in 1957.

Maybe the Ambersons didn’t have it so bad after all, eh?

It’s interesting to note that Fletcher was on hand for Laurel Tarkington’s baptism in Rome in 1906. Tarkington biographer James Woodress cites Fletcher as an inspiration for the central character of The Plutocrat.

Fletcher was also the brother of Tarkington’s first wife, Louisa… Laurel’s mother. Laurel, it should be noted, also committed suicide.