source material: Huntington Hartford II

I happened to read this in a vanity fair article and thought it might interest fans of this movie to know that the Dimbleby character (only referenced briefly by Dern) is almost certainly based on the profligate heir to the A&P fortune. Here is an excerpt.

For years, Hartford had ignored his family’s investment advisers and spent his money on whatever he wanted, but by the early 1970s the cash was running out—although Hartford refused to accept the reality. Even as his paintings were being sold, Hartford remained convinced that his last big investment, Paradise Island, would turn everything around. Looking back, his purchase of the Bahamian island stands as the most farsighted of his business deals, but it would turn out to be his ruin. Hartford bought the nearly deserted island in 1959 for $11 million, because, he now says, he was overwhelmed by its beauty and his vision of a tropical resort that would stand as a monument to elegance and good taste. During the next three years, he created just that—building a lavish 52-room hotel which looked out on a terraced garden modeled on Versailles. He spent some $20 million on the surrounding resort, importing a 12th-century French cloister, constructing a golf course, and building the famed Café Martinique, whose bathroom fixtures were plated with gold.

The Ocean Club, as Hartford called his resort, was magnificent, but it lost money from the day it opened—and without a gambling license, which Hartford had neglected to negotiate when he purchased the island, it was doomed. For years Hartford would claim that the Mafia helped to orchestrate his undoing, and, indeed, evidence would later suggest that Meyer Lansky was indirectly involved in the deal that eventually destroyed Hartford. But, more than anything, it was Hartford’s own weakness as a businessman that caused him to lose what he had built. In the end, he was simply outsmarted by men who were tougher and more ruthless in business—the top executives of Resorts International, who, in a set of complex but quite legal transactions, snatched Paradise Island from Hartford, paying him $1 million for his $30 million investment.