A Real Mickey Mouse Operation

A big duck is watching me. The megalocephalic bird's head nods, nods; a rictus of Great Fun stuck across its beak. I'm on probation at Walt Disney World. A dreadful feeling, un-American: like getting drummed out of the cub scouts for self-abuse. Wherever I go they supervise me. Charlie Ridgway, the Disney public-relations man, measures his stride to mine. He comes on real cordial, a wrecked Bert Parks, but his smiles are an afterthought of policy. When we interview a Disney employee, Ridgway is there, covering the hard questions. And the employee's lips move, interrupted, relieved. Ventriloquized. Florida sun glints down, bland and cheerful as a publicity release. I see Cinderella's Castle. Its dozen stiff, circumcised towers look afflicted with a chronic priapism. I can't help it. Bawdry teases my mind. Overholy, pompous places have that (continued on page 322)mickey mouse(continued from page 199) effect. The thyroid duck shakes its head.

But the crowds are unsuspicious. They mean to have fun: soldiers with a three-day R and R in Hong Kong. I envy their innocence. One Disney flier notes that W. D. W. has a bigger annual draw than Mecca. Mecca's a lousy attraction, anyway: no rides, no ducks. Lines here, though. My God, you don't get such lines except maybe at Lenin's tomb. And this is an average day in the Magic Kingdom. Lines are bent into metal mazes; a 50-minute wait is camouflaged by right angles. "We're nuts," says one lady, wearing cameras cross-strapped like Pancho Villa's bandoleers. "In line for an hour to see something that takes maybe seven minutes. But it's great. I love it."

The crowds aren't crowds: They're audiences. And the lines aren't lines: queues. You'll have to learn the language. The Disney organization employs a fulltime staff of semanticists. The nomenclature department. Queues are roofed over. There's a rainy season in central Florida: It lasts all summer long. Terrific storms detonate over the Magic Kingdom. But the audience holds its ground. For most folks, the trip to W. D. W. represents a 12-month commitment of savings and anticipation. At those prices, you damn well better enjoy yourself. And people do. I don't question it.

W. D. W. is as clean as an intensive-care unit. The streets are washed more frequently than day-old kittens. If they were made of human skin, they'd be wrinkled. Drop a cigarette pack and men in white with whisk brooms converge, swans after a bread crust. Underneath Main Street, there's another Main Street. The Magic Kingdom is a duplex. Below, a fifth column of maintenance men and their facilities: unseen, magic. The Swedish AVAC garbage system guns trash through big tubes to a compacting station. Smoke is scrubbed smokeless. In the near future, sewage will be bowdlerized to drinking water. The waste heat from Disney's private electric generators is used to air-condition buildings. It works: It interlocks like Disney marketing. Every book, sweat shirt, record, film sells another book or sweat shirt or record or film.

Main Street, Frontierland, Adventure-land, Tomorrowland: It's all Nineteen Fiftiesland. The Disney kids are swell. Sideburns calipered to the odd half hair, my college service society at a crippled orphans' picnic. Polite, jolly, helpful; extrovert as hell. I ask around. They're happy working at W. D. W. They say "Walt" the way an evangelist minister says "Amen": frequently and with reverence. It's a wonderful name; fits to words like gosh and darn. "Gosh, Walt." Adolph Disney would have gone into another line of work. This unremitting good-naturedness is no meager achievement. I'm very favorably impressed. The Disney organization is our greatest trainer of people, our greatest manager of crowds--audiences. I notice there are no steps to speak of in the Magic Kingdom. It's emblematic. Mostly gentle ramps. Saves a mortality in ankles and moves the audience with a swift, easy grace.

No easy grace for me. I'm an outsider in the Magic Kingdom. It's like reaching puberty at the age of six: makes you different. Playboy is on the Disney Index. The corporate images, let us say, do not mesh. You can buy 100-proof Smirnoff's at the Disney hotel stores, but no centerfolds. And Playboy has committed a particular, recent indiscretion. The April issue, which hit the stands a day or two before I hit Florida, featured the pictorial Disney's Latest Hit--Dayle Haddon, a Disney studio starlet, naked as a newborn mouse. And better looking. We got calls from Ridgway and from Jim Stewart, a West Coast Disney public-relations honcho. Outrage. The pictorial is tasteless, negative. They will speak to us, but, as for a trip to California--where the big men are--my associate, Bernice Zimmerman, and I are on trial. Getting a moral short-arm inspection. Dayle Haddon, I figure, is finished in the Family Fun Film business. If she buys a Mickey Mouse watch, her wrist will turn black.

They'll speak to us. Just that: speak. A grudging, guarded, scared courtesy. For candid opinions, get Martha Mitchell. The Disney outlook is as flat and simple as Mickey's cartoon face: We have made the best of all possible corporate worlds. Negative words are sex-changed by the nomenclature department. This will be an article written by nameless people: Disney employees who were willing to talk frankly--off the record, for God's sake, I've got a wife and three kids. The Disney loyalty has become a joke. It's more an unhappy joint silence. Enforced. All is not Tinker Bell in Fantasyland.

But I grant them magic. They're entrepreneurs of disorientation. They blinker you, crowbar you away from the present, away from the Florida latitude and longitude. Only the audience jars. I wonder they don't hand out costumes at the gate. It's all stage sets, your vision is the camera; the motion-picture-art-director's approach. In five acres, say, they fabricate a Congo, suspending lianas, chimpanzees and disbelief. W. D. W. is themed with great accuracy; they'd edit a 747 out of the skies over Frontierland if they could manage it. Here's an example: From my hotel window, I see two huge blank dice lying corner up in the Seven Seas Lagoon. A clinker. I sense it. They happen to be ramps for the daily water-ski show. But a Polynesian lagoon doesn't have water-ski ramps. When an old-fashioned paddle-wheel steamer passes, they subvert the illusion. Later I'm told that a sunken ship will be fashioned around the ramps. I knew it. The ramps were uncostumed. I'm starting to think Disney. The audience is grateful. They want to be somewhere else. And there have been better times than America circa 1973.

No rides at W. D. W.: The term is attractions. Ride is a carny word; it suggests pitchmen and geeks and the top of an old ice-cream cup stuck to your sole. Walt loathed dirty, sucker-a-minute amusement parks. Still, by any other name, there are rides in the Magic Kingdom. With this difference: They impose a persona on you--Peter Pan or Mr. Toad or Captain Nemo. They cast you momentarily in a role. The Haunted Mansion doesn't supply a new identity, but it is incredibly sophisticated, decades of light-years beyond the Coney Island spook ride, where a few dangling strings and a lot of darkness are the best effects. The Haunted Mansion illusions bewilder me. Foot-high ghosts, real as Johnny Carson on my 24-inch black and white, but standing free. Three-dimensional. Alive. The literature mentions lasers. I don't want to know the logistics of it. I want to be astonished. I am: a half-dozen times.

Success is contagious. It may be inconvenient to stand in line, yet the inconvenience is also compelling and exclusive. The longest line marks the most popular play, movie, attraction. More bon ton, more fun to watch the New York Giants play with 62,000 fans--though you can't park and sitting in traffic boils your radiator over. Some weeks back I stood with a group of 50 people staring across 42nd Street in New York. I stood for three minutes; I saw nothing. Behind me, the crowd increased. I left, frustrated. Down the block a cop told me, "Oh, we picked up a shoplifter twenty minutes ago." Yet the rubbernecking persisted, a ghost of the event, long after. No one wants to miss out.

At W. D. W. you also hear people say, "God, how much they must have spent on all this." Great cash outlays impress. The Pyramids have a similar effect: You think in terms of size, of unreimbursed man-hours, not of art. This--and cleanliness and politeness--accounts in great measure, I think, for the Disney triumph and the collapse of Palisades Park, now converted to unamusing high-rises.

Frankly, W. D. W. disappointed me. Except for the Haunted Mansion, the Country Bear Jamboree--perhaps one other "big" attraction--the Disney rides are rides, they belong to a century-old amusement-park tradition. The carrousel is there. W. D. W.'s Mad Tea Party disguises the Coney Island whip. Dumbo, the Flying Elephant, appears, in one incarnation or another, at every county fair. The Small World water ride is your tunnel of love, made endless and saccharine-boring, without even the promise of a kiss. There are twice as many attractions per acre at W. D. W. They are larger, more carefully machined, more expensive. They use the Disney characters. But they cannot, in any sense, be called original. Yet, when asked, I had to profess amazement. W. D. W. is not a place for cynicism nor even an ordinarily critical eye. It would be cruel and cheap. People are enjoying themselves. You don't tell Polish jokes at the Pulaski Day parade. The emperor may have been naked--or semi-dressed--but I wasn't going to blow the whistle. I'm not that kind of guy. And I don't think this assessment is unfair. I remember the same disappointment, at the age of 15, visiting Disneyland.

W. D. W. merchandises education and vicarious travel. Few people really want to see Africa--tsetse flies, you know, and cholera shots and, God, Africans--but the Jungle Cruise provides a bugless, nativeless simulacrum. And the presumption is: Your children will learn. The Flight to the Moon, the Hall of Presidents are instructive, though 20-minute, simplistic contractions of U. S. history or space science are antieducational, like one-record courses in French. Yet we want this: We want to learn easily, without application. It's the Sesame Street mentality. The old amusement park never pretended to teach; W. D. W. gives the sensation of healthful mind improvement. The reaction is awe that it can be done at all--create moon shots in a building--let alone with such technical skill and illusion. The deft doing, rather than what is done, impresses.

Transportation is entertainment. Walt's lone frivolity was a back-yard steam railway. W. D. W. provides canoes, a sky ride, keelboats, horsecars, you name it. And the monorail, which has been described as a "futuristic device whose time has passed." Disney releases call it a "high-speed" monorail: 45 miles per hour. High speed for my 1962 Oldsmobile. But it looks futuristic, streamlined, and it disposes crowds efficiently. Motion is crucial to the W. D. W. strategy. It controls illusions. Easier to move people through things than to move things past people. In fact, the Disney attractions are an exact analogue of film. Movement gives life or the impression of life: motion pictures. Each car, each boat in an attraction is one frame of a film passing through action. But the process is reversed. The camera moves. The set is a stationary series of images.

And so audio-animatronics: another elaboration of film technique. Richard Schickel is scared by audio-animatronics. In The Disney Version, he writes, "Here is the dehumanization of art ... at this point the Magic Kingdom becomes a dark land, the innocent dream becomes a nightmare." Nonsense. I'm not scared. When Walt started in animation, he used the most primitive method: dolls that could be articulated joint by joint, then filmed painstakingly frame by frame. Audio-animatronics is no more than a logical extension of that process: three-dimensional cartooning. Sure, to the oversensitive, there's a kind of vulgarity in hooking an outboard motor to Abraham Lincoln. But it's essentially innocuous. To be fair, of course, an audio-animatronic Walt should appear in the Walt Disney Story attraction on Main Street. However, my saint is my saint and your saint is an electric Barbie doll.

I distrust audio-animatronics for quite another reason. It seems a dead-end technique with endless limitations. One shrug of a human shoulder, one human kneecap flexing lazily embarrasses a figure computerized for 10,000 tics and gestures. Abe Lincoln's mouth will always look like Sophia Loren's, dubbed into English by someone from the Andy Granatelli school of elocution. It's an irony that several commentators have noted: Disney, the fantasist, was hung up on realism. His cartoons, with the multiplane camera, with National Geographic reproductions of animal life, were bogged in a stupid literalism--and shortchanged the superreal possibilities of the medium. For my taste, audio-animatronic Presidents rank with hardware salesmen's conventions for tedium: It's a gimmick worth five minutes' attention at most. The Mickey Mouse Revue gets one and a half yawns on the excitement meter. No figure can ambulate and who knows how a duck forms its glottal stops or pops its Ps, anyway? Just so many complicated metronomes for a mélange of Disney theme songs.

There is an exception of sorts: the Country Bear Jamboree. If God ever made an audio-animatronic figure, it was the bear. Bear faces are semihuman (indeed, the show is a cruel yet humorous parody of Appalachian types). You accept their grimaces: not human enough to seem inaccurate, not animal enough to be irrelevant. It's in the middle ground--the missing linkage between man and animal--that audio-animatronics can function with some flexibility. Some. Yet the Disney organization is top-heavily committed to this process. It's convenient for them. Audio-animatronic figures can't use a cost-of-living raise and their hair styles are precisely the correct length.

From time to time rumors, savagely denied, hint that Walt isn't dead at all. He's been frozen, they say, waiting for the kiss of a cryogenic Prince Charming. Probably untrue, but the story has a nice aptness. Walt adored technology, gimmicks. It was his faith. In 1901, the year of Walt's birth, machines still surprised, still seemed positive and American. His father was a farmer-handy man who moved with small success from one Midwestern Main Street to another. Young Walt took with him to Hollywood a fine distrust of banks and debt: independent, ornery from the first. The Disney genius was a compound: toughness, appreciation of technology, great money sense (partly brother Roy's contribution) and a sweet ear for the nation's simple yearnings. Walt was never an avuncular, mouse-loving pushover. He came on hard as new boils. For instance, through a family firm called Retlaw, Walt licensed his name back to Walt Disney Productions. Like superstitious natives who secrete nail parings and odd locks of hair to protect identity from evil magic, Walt stayed aloof, private. The face, the name, the easy drawl were marketable assets: Even his own corporation had to pay for them.

Walt didn't invent things. He was an entrepreneur of entertainment, a user. He never could draw a respectable Mickey Mouse; he couldn't even manage that spidery signature with the fat dot on the I: His autographs were suspected of forgery. Steamboat Willie was a breakthrough for Disney: the first sound cartoon. He guessed the possibilities--animation and sound--but he didn't create a technique. There is a much-quoted story. Young child asks, "But what do you do, Mr. Disney?" As Schickel has it, Walt ponders, "Well, sometimes I think of myself as a little bee. I go from one area of the studio to another and gather pollen and sort of stimulate everybody." Accurate enough--down to the stinger.

Walt attracted creative people--notably, the man with the gargled name: Ub Iwerks. Iwerks first drew Mickey. He developed the multiplane camera, which permits three-dimensional effects in animation. Walt the bee added great energy, coordination and his excellent sense of what middle America wanted: animals; good craftsmanship; pratfall jokes; clean, cute, uncontroversial story lines. He took a chance on Snow White, the first feature-length cartoon. A dangerous financial risk; it worked. But, easily most significant, Walt inspired an ambience of imagination, open-mindedness and perfection at Disney Studios--not to mention loyalty, family spirit and a willingness to work for almost nothing. In 1941, when the spirit curdled and family animators went on strike, Walt felt sharp betrayal. Camelot showed hairline cracks. How could they? He was such a swell guy.

Walt approached "art" with ice tongs and rubber gloves. Not his line of work. There was something corrupt and European about it. When he made what finally became a cult film, Fantasia, the result was quite unintentional. Schickel quotes Walt as saying in 1961, "Oh, Fantasia! Well, we made it and I don't regret it. But if we had to do it over again, I don't think we'd do it." There are fine moments in Fantasia--the Sorcerer's Apprentice and A Night on Bald Mountain sequences--but most of the film, particularly the Ave Maria and the Pastoral Symphony, is cloying, near repulsive. The concept intrigues; a synaesthetic melding of vision and sound. Schickel: "Disney enjoyed working on the sequence [Bach's Toccata], perhaps, because its basic concept was his: 'I said, "All I can see is violin tips and bow tips--like when you're half asleep at a concert." ' He thought they were abstractions, but they were not, of course. They were merely a form of iteralism different from any he had attempted before." After seeing the Pastoral Symphony segment, Walt--who remembered being half asleep at concerts--said, "Gee, this'll make Beethoven." At first, Fantasia was a four-star box-office flop. Walt never forgave the film that. He judged his children as a Calvinist minister would have; the elect were the prosperous.

And cost accounting affected the film philosophy. Soon Walt Disney Productions was tiptoeing out of the animation business. Too expensive. Walt had caught on: Straight pap films were more profitable--The Love Bug, Son of Flubber, Lt. Robin Crusoe, U. S. N., dozens like them. These films are empty and workmanlike and they never require parental guidance. The ratio of animated to live films has been roughly one to ten. Even in the middle Fifties, Walt was making cartoons with great reluctance, only because they refurbished the corporate image: perhaps one every three years.

But Walt's sweet ear was pressed to the ground. Novel ideas, innovations never fazed him. Against the smart-money advice, he backed a young couple who were nature photographers. According to Schickel, when Seal Island won an Academy Award, "He trotted around to his brother's office, opened the door and flung the Oscar at the wall above his head." Television gave Hollywood a case of nervous colitis. Not Walt. He used it. The Mickey Mouse Club and the hour-long Sunday show became wonderful free advertisements for the Disney product. And then--with great insight and guts--Walt sensed that a clean, polite, educational, fun amusement park, a place that would please adults as well as children, that would showcase Disney characters for generation after generation, would be titillation for America's pleasure zone. No one agreed with him. The corporation was without amusement-park experience. Walt had to hock his own life insurance for capital. But he was right. Again. And Walt Disney Productions was bullied into an era of big business and spectacular success.

Times have changed. Walt is dead. Roy is dead. There are new ears and they have shown a disturbing tone deafness. Oddly, as Walt aged and as the day-to-day cash-flow pressures diminished, his entrepreneurial imagination opened out. He got better as he went along. For a legacy, he left dreams of an extraordinary magnitude. But, as we shall see, Walt's dreaming has confounded the corporate dwarfs who inherited his sorcerer's robes. The guts, the confidence are gone. Walt must be turning over in his grave. Or, if the rumors are true, in his freezer unit.

The operative word is show. As in showbiz. Remember it. One Disney employee told me, "I can hand them a fifty-page report and they don't understand it unless they see a show. Everything has to be translated. They're like kids--but they aren't fools. It better be a damn good show." Even the annual stockholders' meeting ends with a Disney flick. Ridgway lets us see the tunnels, the computers, the wardrobe rooms. He's game enough, but uncomfortable: a five-foot politician caught without his elevator shoes. I'm awed by the hardware. This is America. W.D.W.'s digestive tract thrums in busy peristalsis around me. The mirror streets beneath are veined for garbage and water and electricity and compressed air. Ridgway deprecates. It's backstage; it's negative. True. The underground streets are ghost-town empty. The computer room is like other computer rooms. Now and then, a technician will bicycle past, going to fix some refractory audio-animatronic figures, chain drive echoing against concrete walls. Or, paradoxically, a sweating employee, mouse head under his arm, will pass beneath the logical, neat plumbing. Antiseptic. They axed a U. S. Steel commercial on W. D. W. because it pictured the maintenance areas. "We like to emphasize what's up front." The man inside the mouse suit doesn't exist.

And you aren't hired at W. D. W.; you're cast. The job interview is an audition. There are several dozen cameo parts, but the big role is cheery, kempt, American kid. All ingénues; all romantic leads. Archie and Veronica. Our Town done by De Mille, with a cast of 10,000 or 12,000. Like the Lord Jehovah, they mark the sparrow's fall and verily, brother, every hair on your face is numbered. No beards, no mustaches: Walt, they tell you, wouldn't have hired himself. W. D. W. is 27,000 acres of depilatory. And when they aren't shaving hairs, they split them. Note these picky standards for women. "The only hair accessory will be a plain barrette either silver, gold or tortoise shell. If a hair ribbon is worn it should compliment [sic] the costume and be no wider than one half inch or longer than four inches when tied. Hair ribbons are for the express purpose of holding the hair away from the face, not as a decorative addition to the costume." Cynthia, you can pick up your pay check. That's a decorative hair ribbon. "Fingernail tips must not exceed one fourth of an inch. Perfume or sented [sic] powders should not be used excessively." Barbara, punch out on the clock. Your deodorant just registered as an odorant. The cast can't be radically fat or short or tall, either. Costumes come in a middle-American range of sizes. Prince Disney eliminating the nation's ugly stepsisters by their foot width.

They aren't joking. A lady called Greta Groom, the last puritan, spies on employees. Pokes under fingernails; shadows the eye shadowers. One warning, maybe two: The Magic Kingdom says Tilt and you're gone. But, in general, the staff doesn't resist. They measure hair ribbons amenably. The screening process has rooted out troublemakers. I ask W. D. W.'s personnel director, Pat Vaughn, what happens when the A.C.L.U. comes down; when it rules you can't refuse employment to Tiny Tim. He's hurt, surprised. How could that be? We cast, we don't employ. Right on, but the grooming standards apply even to a hotel bartender. Correction: W. D. W. doesn't have bartenders. Bartender isn't a family word. The nomenclature department has renamed them: Beverage Hosts. Beverage Host is a role, like Spear Carrier. Yes. All the Walt Disney World's a stage. Still, I suspect the A.C.L.U. will arrive in Florida someday. And it'll be fun to watch.

That's not all: They'll even try rebaptizing you. We get a guided tour. Our Disney hostess is lovely; right out of some archetypal Orange Bowl half-time show. Born with a silver baton between her teeth. From Florida: Disney employs a whole carillon of Southern belles. It strikes me that the guided-tour accent is the Southern accent. The same lazy, long vowels for stress, gratuitous diphthonging. "On yo le-eft, Fahantasyland." Our guide's name is Honey; the nomenclature people didn't like her name. I mean, what if some good family man said, "Hi, Honey"? Masher. "They're very strict. I had a hard time. I had to bring my birth certificate." But Honey approves of W. D. W. and its standards. I ask her about the A.C.L.U. She's hurt, surprised. "They wouldn't do that, would they? Gosh. It'd spoil evahthing."

No question: This is the very best aspect of W. D. W., of Disneyland. Each kid gets a one-day indoctrination in the Disney "philosophy" at the Disney "university." Philosophy is a bit much: It's nothing more than people-handling techniques. We visit a classroom wallpapered with flash cards: Working together; every guest is a VIP; the magic mirror of your smile; accept people as they are. The university's dean, Bill Hoelscher, is pleasant, avuncular, so soft-spoken he could do Preparation H commercials. The kids get Disney dust sprinkled on them, holy water from an aspergillum. They sit in director's chairs: Walter Pidgeon, Phil Silvers, Vera Miles. They're shown a film about Disney Studios. Hollywood. Glamor. Audience. They're meant to think--like the man who pushed a broom behind the circus elephants--that, bang, they're in showbiz. I read one card aloud. "Accept people as they are." I add: "But you don't accept people as they are." The dean smiles.

Ridgway doesn't smile. "No, we don't. We use this kind of employee because we find it works for us." Business--as usual. The Disney philosophy is a marketing device, soap-flake boxes, S&H Green Stamps. But cynicism hasn't filtered down. The kids are enthusiastic and damned nice. They make W. D. W.

In a few months during 1971, the university trained 10,000 people. They use young kids: A front-line company on the Somme had about the same attrition rate. It's an extraordinary accomplishment. The methods are sophisticated. In each employment area there's a lead, responsible for efficiency and morale. The lead gets 20 cents an hour extra but has no authority to fire or assign work. He operates on charisma and push, nothing much else. This is the kindergarten for middle management. The Disney organization is as inbred as Egyptian royal families once were. A high percentage of top management has worked for no other firm. And top management's roster lists very few Jews, very few Catholics. No blacks. No women. There's the obligatory black in charge of minority affairs: That's it. Disney hiring practices are impeccable, of course; they're too street wise to be caught on that one. A Disney employee told me, "They're not prejudiced. They have Walt Disney's Midwest approach. I remember hitchhiking through Iowa with a Jewish friend when I was a kid. We stopped at a small-town store. Just in passing I mentioned that my friend was Jewish. The store owner, an old guy, stepped back and said, 'Excuse me, sir. Mind if I look at you? Never saw a Jewish person before.' That's the way it is at Disney. Not prejudice. Ignorance. Blindness. Let's say they're not too aware of things. Their sense of history doesn't extend much beyond Pearl Harbor in either direction."

Show is the word. But there's another word. Control. Understand these two words and you pretty much understand Disney. In the Fifties, when TV mugged box office after box office, Walt refused to sell his film library for quick cash. The other studios panicked, capitulated to TV. Now Disney Productions can re-release films every four or five years with handsome profit and negligible overhead: Snow White looks good as Garbo the fifth time around. Control. When Walt decided, against the world's advice, to build Disneyland, he ignored the expert but impure carny men. He ordered cartoon animators to shift from two dimensions to three and to design a revolutionary amusement park. You can't trust outsiders. Control. He got away with it--largely because of another Walt Disney maxim: Spend, spend big for quality; make mistakes, but get it right. Walt could afford this wise extravagance, because a Disneyland attraction or film costing several million dollars can pay back with relative swiftness. But ground rules are changing and the Disney organization has lost its great reflexes. The legs are gone. There is confusion. The formula for success, taken externally, may well be a prescription for trouble. Financial pressures have compelled Disney to move beyond show. The experience so far has been unpleasant. They're not comfortable. And no new methods have been developed.

The Contemporary Resort is impolite: Florida's largest uncovered yawn. An A frame, it looks like your old pop-up toaster. The monorail passes right through it. In fact, the Contemporary seems to exist just so the monorail can pass through it. Inside, baby, it's the Big House: tier after tier of prison cells reaching up. Emptiness architectured. The place is massive and unattractive and superbly inefficient. U. S. Steel owned the hotels and constructed the rooms for Disney on site in a Disney-built factory. Each modular room was trucked to the steel-and-concrete croquet wicket, then was slid into place, a bureau drawer. Estimates vary: anywhere from $60,000 to $100,000 per module. A terrific cost overrun: Spend for quality. The Contemporary (and its sister hotel, the Polynesian) operates at 98-percent occupancy; even so, it'll be two weeks after Armageddon before the Contemporary cracks its financial nut. U. S. Steel was appalled, annoyed. Roy Disney wanted to placate U. S. Steel if it was the last thing he did. It was. He arranged purchase of the hotels and died some few hours later. The Disney organization had control. And it was in a new business. And it wasn't show.

For a while, very reluctantly, they hired an outside hotel specialist. It didn't work. He wasn't to the manner trained. A Disney man told me, "They want top management to be right in the store, on the scene, not sitting behind a desk somewhere. That's the Disney success story. Vice-presidents right at ground level." Bob Allen, a veteran Disney man with no hotel experience, was brought in. But the Contemporary remained a $40-per-day disaster area. At one New York Society of Security Analysts meeting, a Disney spokesman had the nerve to say, "Bob has done an outstanding job in hotels, because it isn't that complicated. It's a matter of giving people service, of getting them in orderly, getting them out orderly, and so on." Bull. Hotel management is a deep art.

Audiences will queue up to see the Haunted Mansion. They're somewhat less willing to stand in line for breakfast. That's not much of an attraction, after all. Fred Ferretti, a New York Times reporter, cooled his family's heels for 90 minutes while a room was being made up. Everything is computerized, even the incompetence: Mickey Mouse as Sorcerer's Apprentice. And in the Contemporary Hotel, Disney has made an uncharacteristic mistake. It can't be cast or costumed. Shows at W. D. W. are either past or future or geographically dislocated. But contemporary? How do you play that charade? Hell, I'm contemporary. Who isn't? Disney doesn't act out the present very well. Its Polynesian Hotel, smaller and themed, apparently plays better. The staff, in ersatz Oriental dress, like Warner Oland doing Charlie Chan, has some morale. The Contemporary staff acts trapped: stowaways on the Titanic. And the place is as homey as an airplane hangar: You expect your voice to come echoing back from the far prison tiers, worn out even at the speed of sound. There is one futuristic item: room service. It's about four hours in the future. I rang up at ten p.m. and asked for scrambled eggs at seven the next morning. Well ... they had an opening for me just after 11. If I didn't mind. I did.

I dwell on the Contemporary because it's symptomatic: suggests a limit to the film-art-director approach. The Contemporary was designed in part by W. E. D., the "imagineering" arm at Disney (which takes its name from Walter Elias Disney's initials). Previous experience: the Jungle Cruise and Cinderella's Castle. But the imagineer is boss. The engineer has to go along, sink or swim. Spend big for quality. Bill Hoelscher says, "W. E. D. wanted the monorail. It's the way we design things. Then we get right down to where's the kitchen and you wind up with a very tiny kitchen. We've got to get a bigger kitchen." Hotels aren't all monorails and show and 1000 admissions per hour. Moreover, the university can't train a 19-year-old kid, say, to be a talented waiter overnight. Serving is another deep art--deeper than the magic mirror of anyone's smile. We chatted with the hotel restaurant staff. Demoralization, off the record. "Everyone's left. They managed to keep the chef, but that's about all." It's a very competitive job market in central Florida.

Later we had dinner at a hotel far from the Magic Kingdom. Our excellent waiter said, "Why should I work for Disney? They don't know how to run a restaurant. Anyway, I don't want to shave off my mustache." I order veal Oscar. The waiter shakes his head. "No, sir. No. The veal Oscar isn't very good." What a pleasure. At Disney restaurants, friend, the veal Oscar is always good. Always. No negative thoughts. And the hair in your soup is exactly two inches long.

• • •

From square one, the Disney organization has been a first-name autocracy. It's typical of the most cagey modern dictators, the Uncle Joe Stalins, that they relinquish titles for power. Walt Disney, Walt to you, was a superstar tyrant; but he was also a genius of several sorts. For years Walt didn't even have an official position on the company letterhead, yet nothing--repeat, nothing--came out of W. E. D., out of the studios, without his personal U. S. Prime stamp. Production was celled--as it is in subversive organizations. Each employee made tab A or slot B; few knew how to fit them together. Over-all concepts were understood by perhaps half a dozen men. Then Walt died. His brother Roy--a financial fairy godfather and a somewhat more benevolent, low-key ruler--slipped on the equipment of absolutism. Then Roy died. There was a vacuum, which the Disney firm abhors. With no history of self-government, it gravitated to dictatorship, as serfs might to some new fiefdom. It needed, probably craved, a tyrant. After just months, it got one--E. Cardon Walker. Card to you, buddy.

Roy had groomed two men for leadership: Donn Tatum and Card. The poop on Tatum is uniformly flattering. "A top-notch financial man." "A man of honor." "A great gentleman." Tatum remains chairman of the board. But Card Walker, who started with the Disney firm in 1938 as a traffic man, makes all the ex-cathedra decisions. He claims to be a sacred repository of Walt's ideas and dreams. Nuts. At best, Card Walker knows what Walt wouldn't have wanted: X-rated films, long fingernails, brummagem Mickey Mouse watches. Walt's vision changed year to year. Only another Walt could, for instance, have dared to make the dangerous and brilliant leap from films to amusement parks. Walt left a ten-or-15-year master plan: This has temporarily protected the mediocre leadership from its own mediocrity. But the master plan has been just as often an embarrassment as a support. You see, Walt didn't explain it all clearly enough.

A Disney employee told me, "Card has his own staff of enforcers and spies. We call them the Southern California Mafia." Mostly youngish, physically trim and tough, they enforce Card's negative vision. The most notorious is Dick Nunis, vice-president of operations for Disneyland and W. D. W. Nunis and Sandy Quinn and Ron Miller all came out of USC. Nunis, with his third-degree crewcut, made it by running Disneyland as a noncom runs a platoon: that is, not from behind a desk. Nunis was on the spot, brother, when trouble happened. The above-quoted employee said, "You can't talk to Dick. Either he's lecturing you or he's figuring out how he can fire you. He terrifies me." Miller, who has a second-degree crewcut, is a special person. He's married to one of Walt's two daughters. Miller is executive producer for Disney Studios. He has two big advantages: nepotism and a strategic position. Card pampers Ron. The Walker faction--despite a corporate poker face of unity--doesn't get along at all well with the Disney family and those who have been loyal to Walt and Roy. Relations with the relations are strained, to say the least. Miller is a Disney at one remove. He's also Card's personal stockholder: Through his wife, Ron controls a fair number of shares. Roy's son, Roy, Jr., avoids company politics, wears a beard. He makes some films and enjoys his wealth. Enough for any man.

Disney employees outside the Walker faction have an uninsurable corporate life. I get these phone responses: Talk to Playboy? Even off the record? "If they found out, I'd be up to my you know what in hot water." "Are you kidding? I've got three kids." This state of siege doesn't nourish creativity. The films are squalid pap, (A) because no one at Disney will approach social issues with a ten-foot magic wand and (B) because they refuse to lay out decent sums for decent material. I'm not offended by the Walker tyranny: Tyranny is more or less standard in American businesses. But unimaginative tyranny is inexcusable and, from all reports, Walker is a vacillating tyrant, the worst kind. "Card has great enthusiasms. He'll get all hot for something. Then he'll change his mind. It's hard on his yes men. They don't know when to say yes--he might want something different tomorrow." W. E. D. will continue to design interesting attractions for the two theme parks. The technology is there. But the Walker ambience isn't conducive to risk, to a major breakthrough. A major breakthrough would embarrass management. The Disney organization has abdicated as an innovative factor in American life. It will do only what it knows how to do: nothing much else. And it's a damned shame.

Our Florida probation lasted four days and three nights. On Saturday we ask Charlie Ridgway: What about California? Will Nunis and Walker see us? Ridgway is noncommittal, nervous. "It depends on Sandy Quinn." For this, read: "I just work here. A Walker man will have to check you out." We have a pleasant Polynesian dinner with Quinn: sweet-and-sour pork, conversation. He's at ease. Strawberry blond, affable, handsome, in fine shape: good for 50 pushups. I notice he chews a lot, even when there's nothing in his mouth--gives him time to think out the answers. Quinn asks: Will the article be negative? I'm not that stupid, nor entirely hypocritical. I do some chewing myself: Well, we can't judge until we look at the California operation. I have my tape recorder on. I get an hour plus of my own voice. On the defensive. But it's not good enough. Our rabbit test comes up negative, or positive: Depends on how you look at it. Jim Stewart calls from the Coast a few days later. Nunis and Walker haven't yet gotten over the shock of seeing Dayle Haddon nude. May never get over it: a four-alarm trauma. They won't talk to us.

Then, by chance, Bernice comes across a Playboy memo. "Can you please make sure I get the [photo] rejects returned to me after the feature has been laid out and approved. Disney wants them back." Disney wants them back? Call to Playboy's West Coast Photo Department. Yes, the Disney people were delighted with our pictorial. Yes, one Disney promotion man lent us transparencies from Dayle's film. I call Stewart, let him in on the good news. Heavy breathing at the other end. He would like to know the man's name, Goddamn right he would. "OK--be glad to tell Mr. Nunis when I see him. In California." I have no compunctions. This guy's publicity angles are obviously too--ah--stark for Disney; he's in the twilight of a short career, anyway. Stewart says, "I'll call you back." Call back: Nunis and Walker will see us, after all. I pack for the other Magic Kingdom. Call back a few days later. Nunis and Walker have decided not to see us, after all. Guess they found the poor bastard without me.

By now you've caught on: The ruling Disney junta isn't a team of Tinker Bells. When you're a smart, virile young jock in the business of marketing deer and crickets and Peter Pan, you compensate but good with toughness. Nobody's gonna say you believe in fairies. Disney Productions, wheeler-dealering from the strength of its powerful image, comes on like a covey of Scrooge McDucks. The stinginess and arrogance are legendary. Lonnie Burr, an ex-Mouseketeer, capsulized it for the Chicago Reader. "Disney was the cheapest major studio I ever worked for in my life. I mean, we couldn't even keep the [Mickey Mouse] ears after three years, because they cost twenty-five dollars." Do business with Disney, man, and you're lucky to keep your own ears.

Down in W. D. W. they refer to "American Industry" as if it were a subsidiary of the Disney organization. And at the two theme parks, that assumption is accurate enough. The capitalist biters are bit. To get your soda or your film on Main Street, you pay through the corporate nose. It's a great location. Ten million plus people pass annually, twice: going in, coming out. Disney calls these firms "participants." A rabbit participates in Hasenpfeffer. One participant told my associate--off the record--"They're very difficult people to deal with. They have a fine product and they want to ring a dollar out of every single thing they can. The world owes them a living because they're Disney and they do nothing to help promote the participating companies." Control. The man who sells you a Coke or an Oscar Mayer wiener at W. D. W. is a Disney employee. Any participant commercial or promotion that mentions W. D. W. is scrutinized by Disney with a jeweler's loupe. Still the participants line up. There is no firm in America that could command such respect from its peers--or serve up such frank abuse--and get away with it.

GAF laid out a hot $1,000,000 to become the official film at W. D. W. for three years. Sandy Quinn insisted that no participant has paid royalties to use a Disney character. I guess the nomenclature department covered for him on that one. Probably there's another word for royalty: duck rent, perhaps. But be sure, it's cheaper to hire a $100-an-hour callgirl as your live-in baby sitter than it is to get Goofy on your box top. Business Week contradicts Quinn: "A participating company ... pays an annual fee that can run from $75,000 to $200,000 for use of the names and characters. In addition: It pays perhaps $40,000 a year to lease space in which to sell its wares or promote its corporate identity." And "They are told point-blank that the money taken in across the counters will not pay for their investment at Disney World." The Pope sold indulgences with a similar come-on: supernatural good will. Still, they line up. You don't find such headlong willingness under "Masochists" in the classified section of Screw.

And, like it or lump it, Disney has turned the sovereign state of Florida into another subsidiary. When Walt planned Disneyland, he underestimated by about ten square miles. A roadside ghetto of motels and quick-stops sprung up around it. Walt was indignant: a gross cancer on his magic body. It wasn't clean. He couldn't control it. Also, the clang of strange cash registers kept him awake at night. No miscalculation in Florida. W. D. W. is nearly 100 times the size of Disneyland, twice the size of Manhattan Island. Only alligators around the second Magic Kingdom: poor competition. The property was assembled with brilliant sleight of hand--dummy front firms, superb discretion. The Disney organization paid an average of $167 per acre. Since W. D. W. opened, at least one prime acre site outside the complex has gone for $500,000.

Florida sold its birthright for a mess of tourists. I have the "Disney Bill" in my lap--with indexes, it runs over 200 pages--the fattest piece of enabling legislation ever passed in Florida. And, friend, it enables. It enables Disney to do damn all. I doubt if there has been anything comparable in the nation's legal history. W. D. W. is a government: a good-sized principality. With the restraint due embarrassment, the text never once mentions Disney. Yet the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the cities of Reedy Creek and Bay Lake, are Disney, nothing but Disney. The most monstrous company towns ever conceived.

The Reedy Creek Improvement District has every governmental perquisite except police power. And the two cities can have even that. "Each municipal judge shall have the power ... to have brought before him any person charged with violation of city ordinances and to conduct all proceedings of a criminal nature." Got that? The city council appoints judges and the city council, though elected at large, is an instrument of the district. Of Disney, that is. "The legislature hereby finds ... that it is essential for the welfare of the residents and property owners of the city and for the harmonious development of the city and of the R.C.I.D.... that the exercise of the powers and duties vested in the city ... be coordinated with the exercise by the board of supervisors of the R.C.I.D.... and conform to plan, programs, resolutions and other actions adopted or undertaken by the board of supervisors for the district." And the board? "All of the members of the board shall be owners of the land within the district." And who owns the district, all 27,000 acres? Right.

Extraordinary. Florida has even ceded its right of condemnation. No elected government in the country can be as sure of its constituency. W. D. W. is an Animal Farm democracy. Who's afraid of the big, bad wolf? You better be if you live in a Disney city. When we bring up the enabling legislation at W. D. W., Ridgway or Quinn or vice-president General William Potter tend to talk building codes. You see, Disney construction methods are so new, so complex that they could never have built Cinderella's Castle under existing Florida codes. Yes. City powers shall include "the right to license, regulate, restrict and control the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages ... to own, acquire, operate and maintain cemeteries and crematories and otherwise provide for the burial of the dead." Building codes. Cinderella's Castle is half womb, half tomb. And, according to Ridgway, Disney has done local Florida governments a big favor: After all, W. D. W. doesn't need fire protection, sewage, etc. But the local governments, ungrateful, don't consider themselves quite so favored.

W. D. W. was subtracted from two Florida counties--Orange and Osceola. Paul Pickett talked to me: He's one of five Orange County commissioners and he has been in office since well before Walt went South with his Mary Poppins carpetbag. Pickett is a wiry, intense man: His severe crewcut would probably give Greta Groom palpitations. Pickett indicts the Disney organization for arrogance and tactlessness. Take the story of 535--an 18-foot-wide country road: It winds amiably through orange groves. Disney selected 535 as the employee-access road. Pickett: "We told them that there is no way you can have an entrance for 10,000 or 12,000 employees on that little road. If you do, you're going to have the damnedest traffic jam. And one of the Disney representatives looked at me and said, 'Fella, that's your problem. When they leave our property, they're your problem. You go build the road.'" Tinker Bell. Bambi. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down. Mind you, the state had already spent $6,250,000 constructing a major highway to serve W. D. W. Pickett got tough: The enabling legislation had been jammed down Orange County's throat. He wasn't about to swallow. "We're not going to interrupt our planned expansion to run down there with a bunch of money." Understandable, I think. Huh, fella?

Disney went ahead. They sited the employee entrance on 535. And they crow-barred at Pickett's will with some hot-shot marketing techniques. "They got a group of employees to write a song called Can You Arrive Alive on 535? They published this song in a very professional manner. They put thousands of bumper strips on automobiles that said Arrive Alive on 535? They put large bill-boards on their property, Congratulations, you've arrived alive after driving 535." Jiminy Cricket. Peter Pan. Snow White. Pickett held firm, though the county did put clay shoulders on the road.

But things weren't happening fast enough. The Papal State of Fun isn't used to procrastination. So Dick Nunis, the enforcer, decided to shoot him some trouble. He got on the spot. One Disney employee told me, "Back then W. D. W. and the local government were on a honeymoon. But that didn't last long. Nunis killed it before the marriage was consummated."

Pickett: "The problems we had with Mr. Nunis were a result of his coming in and sitting down and telling us exactly what he needed to be done and what time tomorrow are you going to start doing it? Mr. Nunis is a very domineering personality."

W. D. W. has one obligation to Orange County: It pays $2,000,000 in taxes annually. But the Orange County sheriff's budget alone went up 30 percent--went up $2,250,000 in one year. The county has gotten nine months pregnant almost overnight and Disney ignores the paternity suit. Pickett: "Only the warm-body people profit." Newspapers, insurance salesmen, merchants. From December 1971 to December 1972, Orange County gained 42,012 new residents: a one-year increase greater than the populations of 43 Florida counties. Hotel rooms have proliferated like Watergate indictments: from fewer than 6000 to 24,000, with 4200 under construction and another 5000-10,000 proposed. According to the Orange County Extension Service, each 1000 new inhabitants means 27 blind people, 45 aged people, 37 juvenile delinquents and no fewer than 85 alcoholics (making alcoholism the largest voting bloc in the nation). Services: jails, courts, hospitals, schools, drying-out facilities.

Osceola County has counterattacked. In 1972, it assessed W. D. W.'s real-estate tax on the cash value of surrounding property, sent along a bill for $15,000,000. The dispute is being adjudicated. If Osceola County wins, it'll be a terrific blow, compounding financial pressures on the Walker faction. Pickett defends Disney here. He feels that undeveloped land, including 7500 acres at W. D. W. set aside for conservation, should not be assessed at the going rate for an acre's worth of gas pumps.

Employee housing is a serious problem now in Orange County. There are 10,000 Disney kids, pulling down maybe $2.35 an hour. The Papal State washed its hands of responsibility. Land values doubled, tripled; doubled the tripling: Local contractors were reluctant to undertake low-income housing. Then, abruptly, goosed by money considerations, Disney decided to go into the real-estate business. And big. Pickett: "They announced that they were going to build twenty-two thousand units on nine hundred acres." For 10,000 employees, most of whom can afford to live only two or three per apartment? "Obviously, the whole concept was to go into the real-estate land-development business with apartments." Pickett came down hard. Twenty-two thousand units meant at least that many residents and another couple thousand alcoholics. The Disney organization backed off, became flustered. Pickett was told, "News to us: The announcement came out of California." Ridgway said it came out of Florida and, gosh, he didn't know who'd thought up that crazy 22,000 figure. Pickett: "The Disney organization vacillates between confusion and chaos. It never gets better than confusion and never gets worse than chaos." The domineering posture, though, remains pretty consistent.

Comparisons are odious: nonetheless, I illustrate with one. The Martin Marietta firm arrived in central Florida in the late Fifties with 12,000 employees. It donated the land for one entrance road, donated the land and paid for construction of a second road. Employees need services: Martin Marietta gave 400 acres for school and public purposes. Orange County had no sewage plant. Pickett says, "They came to us and said, 'We'll give you the money and the land to build a sewage plant and you pay us back sometime in the future, just give us a discount or something through the years until you pay us back.' Disney hasn't given land to anyone for any purpose."

I confront Charlie Ridgway. He's indignant. "Martin Marietta has Federal subsidies." And, anyway, "We take care of our own sewage." True. This is called negative public relations. I'll flush my john, you flush yours.

While we're on the subject of flushing.... Orange County has a special concern: It's the water-recharge area of all central Florida. The county is zoned for orange trees, one-acre housing and tourist facilities (the latter don't require secondary services: schools, hospitals, paving). Pickett: "Disney's real big on planting trees on their own property. But I sincerely believe they don't give a damn about what happens outside the perimeter of their property." W. D. W.'s on-site environmental efforts are admirable. For instance, treated sewage is shot by cannons over a tree farm: The rich water improves growth remarkably. (In future, W. D. W. hopes to supply its own paper needs: ecological pragmatism.) But Orange County has lost 5000 acres of citrus in two years. Orange County, California (Disneyland), lost 50 percent of its citrus acreage in ten years. Land values make agriculture unprofitable. Pave enough orange groves and rain water can't percolate through to the Florida aquifer, an underground formation that supplies every well from Orlando to Cape Kennedy. The sudden announcement of 22,000 apartment units indicates rather succinctly Disney's concern for the quality of life beyond the magic pale.

What can the county governments do? Not much. Pickett says, "We can't stop them by exercising a county regulation, but picture yourself hypothetically as starting a business someplace ... all based on a special law you got passed that gives you the power of God. Now, can you picture what might happen if the government suddenly decided your whole damn law was illegal and unconstitutional? We're convinced it is and the next time we bump heads, we're going to take it to court and prove it." Maybe Pickett is bluffing. I can't judge. The Disney Bill was declared constitutional by the Florida supreme court. And the Disney legal department seems to have anticipated a Pickett or several Picketts:

"If any section, clause, sentence or provision of this act ... shall be held inoperative, invalid or unconstitutional ... it shall not be deemed to affect the validity or constitutionality of any of the remaining parts of the act."

Even so, says Pickett, "At the moment, the one thing they can't stand is a court test. Do you know what would happen on the stock market?" I don't know. But I do know that Nunis and Company has alienated the two local governments that W. D. W. will have to work with most intimately.

The warm-body people aren't alienated. They circle overhead. W. D. W. has been playing Rosalind to Orlando and it's just as they like it. Once a sleepy retirement town, Orlando has been renamed by its own nomenclature department: "The Action Center of Florida." New attractions have been yanked into Disney's orbit: Circus World, Sea World; Cypress Gardens and Silver Springs are expanding to catch the overflow. Anybody with a two-headed chicken or a four-foot-deep sinkhole is printing up tickets. Spokesmen for Orlando's chamber of commerce face to the east when they mention W. D. W. Sure, some fixed-income people have had to get out because of increased real-estate taxes. Sure, there are hookers, pushers and apprentice big-city criminals now. It's the price of growth.

Even the Salvation Army is a Babbittish Disney booster. I interviewed Brigadier Richard Bergren. During W. D. W.'s first eight months, his Salvation Army facilities were S.R.O. Indigents, drifters, runaway teens answered the siren whistle of warm weather and jobs. Early newspaper articles had pictured Bergren as being deeply worried. But Bergren doesn't seem worried at all. The salvation business is just another numbers game. Bergren sits back, grandfatherly and complacent, in his deep rugged office; there is the gloss of dark, sturdy woods around us. "The people here gave one half million dollars to build a welfare building, entirely private means. It'll be ready this time next year. There's prosperity here beyond the imagination ... with this, you always bring in the undesirables. I don't condemn W. D. W. because they've made my work harder; that's what I'm here for." And Bergren has a swell new facility. Warm bodies. Warm souls.

Warm labor relations. W. D. W. gave unions a foothold. Florida has been stuck in the Cro-Magnon age of labor organization. As W. D. W. goes, so central Florida goes. (Right now, it goes at a 1.8 percent unemployment rate: only mule skinners and dumb-waiter makers out of work.) The building trades eagerly negotiated a no-strike, no-stoppage contract. W. D. W. opened on time to the minute: an Augean effort for any project of that magnitude. Disney also agreed to accept the service trade union that could organize 50 percent of the kids. No single union had a chance. So six unions blurred their jurisdictions, formed a Service Trades Council. With considerable difficulty, it managed to recruit a majority. Though salaries were lower at W. D. W., the council signed a contract. It balked only once--when Disney suggested the council monitor bralessness. "We passed on that," says Paul McCastland, council chairman. "Disney is the fairest group I've negotiated with in Florida in the past twenty years. It's mostly top-down decision making. Everything is 'I'll call you back.' The organization leans toward summit meetings. Card Walker has the yes or no on everything now." Or the maybe. Disneyland has experienced minor stoppages: California is more labor wise. In Florida, unions can't afford to kill the duck that laid them a golden nest egg.

A strike in Florida, where the organization has concentrated its assets, would be calamitous. In fact, the Walker management is under significant financial stress. Disney Productions has been a glamor issue for some time now. New York securities mavens want a solid return on investment, never mind family fun, never mind innovations. One Disney officer told me, "The Walker faction doesn't know how to handle New York. They think you give a show." Headlines after a weak first quarter indicate the p.s.i. of investment pressure. "Disney stock magic wanes." "Irrational mood: over-reaction to Disney Quarterly." A six-percent profit dip initiated flurries of selling. On one full day's volume, Disney Productions took a nose dive steeper than the Matterhorn ride: down nearly ten points. Walt would have had a terse reaction. With help, perhaps, from his nomenclature department, he would have said, "Shove it." His business. His money. But to finance W. D. W., Roy engineered a massive new sale of stock. Family holdings have been diluted. The Walker faction hornpipes to a New York tune. Walt borrowed against his own life insurance when he started Disneyland. But the time of risk is past. Adventure-land exists only as a theme kingdom. Size and respectability have made Disney Productions arteriosclerotic.

New York pressure accounts for the premature announcement of 22,000 apartment units. The 27,000-acre site--most of it a condominium for alligators and possums--has become somewhat burdensome: somewhat more burdensome should Osceola County score with its $15,000,000 assessment. At present, Disney is building Lake Buena Vista (originally Reedy Creek), one of the two cities provided for by its enabling legislation. A community of town houses and single-family dwellings: second homes. They are leased to corporations at a high price, $8000 or $10,000 per year. We visited several of these houses. Southern California architecture grafted forcibly onto central Florida: pleasant enough, conservative. But Lake Buena Vista is a balance-sheet success. An insurance firm, say, will lease one home and send agents down for three-day vacations as an incentive. More and more, the Papal enclave is focusing on real estate. It needs a fast cash turnover. The dreams are gone.

And Walt bequeathed dreams. His ten-year plan, as suggested before, has saved the nickel-and-dime leadership from its characteristic befuddlement. But the biggest, the best of Walt's dreams has proved discomfiting. EPCOT is the biggest, the best: an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. Without exaggeration, EPCOT represents the most farsighted and important concept ever proposed by an American corporation. Before his death, Walt earmarked a good portion of W. D. W. for his second city: a city that could test and develop advanced urban technologies. EPCOT would be 25 years ahead of its time; it would change continually. Mass transportation, sewage, energy, building methods, whatever: EPCOT would have 20,000 residents life-testing the newest R and D of American industry.

Yet EPCOT would also have been a show, the quintessential Tomorrowland. Admissions, queues, cash: Walt could have made it profitable. Certainly, EPCOT was an influential selling tool when Walt peddled W. D. W. to the Florida legislature. Potentially, EPCOT could have changed America. When Walt arrived in Florida, he was ready to go. The Magic Kingdom, more or less a first-cousin Disneyland, the hotels, the golf courses probably bored him. As General William Potter, a Disney vice-president, says, "Walt wasn't a repeater." No. But that's all the present management is: repeaters. Pickett told me--and his opinion was seconded by every Disney employee or Disney watcher we talked to--"EPCOT died about three minutes after Walt stopped breathing."

Dead. But kept around as Walt's relic: a piece of the true cross. Walker and Nunis and Potter realize the public-relations value of EPCOT. It's the only coming attraction that isn't Son of Disneyland--or sheer commercialism. But not a thing has been done. No Disney spokesman could remember a single item--conceptual or real--that might someday implement EPCOT. And Quinn had the gall to suggest that Disney's 22,000 apartment units were EPCOT. "After all, people have to live there." Balls. At that rate, Levittown is EPCOT.

There are two sorts of reasons: financial and psychological. At the New York Society of Securities Analysts meeting, Walker was asked about EPCOT. He waffled for three transcript pages about sewers and tree farms, then came out with it: "I'll be very honest to say that we don't have any definitive plan for EPCOT, nor did Walt." Walt died seven years ago; what's Walker's excuse? Maybe he's waiting to arrange a séance.

I questioned a securities analyst: What would happen if Disney announced that it was shelving EPCOT? "The stock would probably go up." With $400,000,000 sunk in W. D. W., the organization hesitates to undertake another multimillion-dollar project: It couldn't stand the New York heat.

Moreover, EPCOT would require the close cooperation of Disney's branch office--American Industry. And American Industry has evidenced typical shortsightedness: It isn't much interested in EPCOT. General Potter administers EPCOT: a beautiful sinecure, something like fireman on a diesel locomotive. Potter resembles George Gobel in death. Imitating Walt, he smokes heavily; for his better ideas, Potter has a copy of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations on the desk. Potter: "Walt told me, get on your horse and see what American industry has on its drawing boards." When questioned, though, the plans on those drawing boards had slipped his mind.

"Sure," one Disney employee told me, "American industry is working on new things: new ways to sell cars and light bulbs." Anyhow, American industry has caught on to Disney. The "participant" experience is well known: Working with Disney is working for Disney.

We talked to half a dozen firms that had been hired as Disney consultants. "Unless we scream, they won't even put our name on the project. It's as if we didn't exist." Well, it may be worth while to introduce a new soda in the Magic Kingdom. But to invest millions, say, to develop a new communications system for Walt Disney's Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow at Walt Disney World, run by Walt Disney kids? Once bitten, twice nuts.

The psychological reasons are perhaps more compelling. I give you a for instance: Friend of mine tried to visit Disneyland. His belt buckle--get this--had a bronze representation of a marijuana leaf on it. The Disneyland security hosts suggested he remove the belt. Then it was not a suggestion. My friend had to rent a locker for his belt and spend the afternoon thumb-hooking his pants up. EPCOT would be a real city, with real people--not an artificial second-home community for middle-class salesmen like Lake Buena Vista. One Disney employee said, "We're terrified of social issues. EPCOT would have high schools. OK: We'd develop great audio-visual equipment. But what would we teach? The Walker people don't want to think about epistemology. They don't even know what the word means. And suppose the high school kids decided to burn an American flag?" Just suppose. Real people; real marijuana leaves. The Disney organization understands technological gimmicks and show--not life. If an urban problem can't be computerized or shot through a tube, it makes them irritable.

Walt's dream was a dirty trick. And he had another dream: It turned out to be another dirty trick. Walt envisaged a community of young creative people: all the arts in a synaesthetic fraternity. Walt left a great deal of cash to found his university, California Institute of the Arts, but it has been an ongoing nightmare for the Disney organization. Social issues. Sexual issues. Drug issues. Just imagine talented young artists gang-banging Greta Groom. Political views somewhat to the left of Hubert Humphrey.

Students and faculty went at the Disney administration: It was like the battle between scorpion and tarantula in The Vanishing Desert. One teacher, unhappy, stripped nude at a faculty meeting. Herbert Gold tells the story delightfully in The Atlantic. He quotes one ex-dean: "Last year we had a little group that wanted to slash tires and chant 'Om' with their eyes rolled up, and others who just wanted to play the violin nine hours a day.... Roy Disney was always telling us: Don't deface the $26,000,000 white walls." And then there was "Womanhouse, with its nude closet, its monster garden, its menstruation bathroom ... the kitchen covered with plastic fried eggs-flapjacks-breasts and the torn and suffering ... crocheted cloth ... afterbirth womb room." Can you imagine? Dick Nunis' private hell. Lately, under Bill Lund, a Disney son-in-law, genuine efforts have been made to give Walt's dream artificial respiration. But Cal Arts reinforced the Disney paranoia. Avoid social issues. Do only the things you know how to do.

What's new at Disney Productions? Not very much. W. D. W. is Disneyland but bigger: with golf courses and real-estate developments and governmental prerogatives to embarrass a fascist. And this article has been written without once mentioning the terrific environmental resistance Disney has met at Mineral King, its proposed California winter-sports complex. Admirable restraint, I think. Bill Schwartz, a stock analyst for Drexel, Burnham Co. predicts that a new W. D. W. will be constructed in southern Europe, perhaps Spain, ten years from now. I'm not so sure. I doubt if Walker is ready to deal with people who don't speak English, people who have a history of chronic anti-Americanism. And how could he be sure of control?

It's frankly tragic. This isn't the story of just another business grown too fat, too unwieldy and cautious, for innovation. In a time when American industry is subjected to knee-jerk abuse, Disney retains a fine reputation and the good will of nearly all the nation's people. In this sense, Disney is our most powerful corporation. It has resources and prestige and opportunity. EPCOT--or at least a viable, smaller version--could improve the quality of American life. But time is against Disney. The incumbent leadership is young. It has let financial considerations and a myopic social outlook ruin what could have been positive forces of unguessed influence. Walt's eccentric, brave and always profitable dreams hang lifeless--fetuses floating in formaldehyde. From California to Florida, Card Walker and his men have been scattering Mouse-nots across the land.