Ladd had quite a bit in common with Gatsby. Remember the "beautiful shirts" scene in the novel?
...[Gatsby] opened for us two hulking patent cabinets which held his massed suits and dressing-gowns and ties, and his shirts, piled like bricks in stacks a dozen high.
“I’ve got a man in England who buys me clothes. He sends over a selection of things at the beginning of each season, spring and fall.”
He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.
“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.”
Ladd, in his personal enthusiasm for nice clothing, was a lot like that. He too had risen from the lower middle class to the point where he could open a walk-in closet to show a reporter a neat line of fifty suits and as many pairs of fine shoes. "Not bad for a kid from Arkansas, huh?" (I'm reciting this story from memory and forget where I originally read it, but I remember it vividly.)
