The role is consciously or unconsciously modelled on Marlon Brando, who made his name with southern roughnecks but also played upper-class southerners like the air force pilot in Sayonara and the repressed homosexual army officer in Reflections in a Golden Eye. There are also apparently a couple of real-life people Schrader had in mind while conceiving this character. While Carter is waiting in a car for one of his middle-class ladies, he reads Robert Graves's Penguin edition of Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars, one of Gore Vidal's favourite books and the subject of a major essay (the first he wrote) on power and corruption. Later, while Carter is packing his books to leave Washington, the camera alights on Party of the Century, Deborah Davis's account of that ultimate 'walker' in smart social circles, Truman Capote, and his fall from grace.