Carl Hiaasen (3 page)

Beyond the rare movie flop, Disney is unaccustomed to failure. It prizes its reputation for profitability almost as much as its reputation for wholesome entertainment. No other company so zealously endeavors to live up to its own hype—and manages to come so close. Success after success has turned Team Rodent into a ravenous, fearless beast, and that’s why many of us now cheer those infrequent occasions when it is rebuffed, humbled, or gored.

D
ATELINE: HAYMARKET, VIRGINIA
, November 1993.

For many months the Walt Disney Company has been anonymously snapping up property in the Piedmont, just as it did many years ago outside Orlando. This time, though, Disney’s got something different in mind: a 150-acre amusement park with a history theme, to attract day-tripping tourists from Washington, D.C. Also in the works are a campground, a golf course and resort, twenty-five hundred new residential homes, and a boggling two million square feet of office and commercial space. The three-thousand-acre, $650 million development is announced with fanfare and the promise of many new jobs—and within
months comes under blistering attack from all over the country.

The outcome proved genuinely historic, though not in the way CEO Eisner foresaw. At issue was the proposed theme park’s proximity to the Manassas National Battlefield, scene of the battles of Bull Run. Although the nucleus of Disney’s “America Project” was to be six miles from the Civil War memorial, many Virginians felt it was close enough to be a desecration. This time it wasn’t Nature but American history that Disney sought to polish up and market as a fun ride. Opponents said Manassas was no place for a massive theme park/golf resort/subdivision, and predicted the surrounding hillsides would be ruined by the same type of tacky runaway sprawl that had surrounded Walt Disney World. The rape of Orlando was invoked constantly as a battle cry.

Another sore point was money, specifically taxpayers’ money. Disney attorneys had nonchalantly demanded more than $200 million in state funds for new roads and highway improvements around the park and office complex. Meanwhile the residents of Prince William County would be expected to contribute another $75 million for water, sewage, landscaping, and other necessities. “It was not a request, it was not respectful and it
was confidently stated,” recalled Prince William County executive Jim Mullen, writing in
Public Management
magazine.

He and other planners visited their Florida counterparts to quiz them about how Team Rodent operates. “Arrogant, demanding, aloof, confident, efficient, powerful, successful and profitable were the words used to describe Disney,” Mullen reported. But in Orange County, as in Prince William, the prevailing view was that government was wise to make Disney comfortable, even if groveling was required; anything less could jeopardize an economic windfall for the community. So Mullen and his colleagues began working nonstop to improve Disney’s master plan in ways that all sides might find acceptable. The task would prove impossible in the face of a growing outcry from environmentalists, Civil War historians, and nearby landowners, some of whom had influential political connections.

Despite the resistance, in March 1994 the Virginia General Assembly approved $163.2 million in benefits for Disney. Almost immediately a citizens’ group filed two lawsuits in an effort to halt the America Project. Eisner assured the
Washington Post
that the Walt Disney Company was solidly committed to its northern Virginia theme park:
“If the people think we will back off, they are mistaken.”

They weren’t mistaken. Three months after Eisner’s vow, Disney backed off. The company was taking a publicity beating worldwide and could not overcome the perception that Mickey and Minnie soon would be dancing on the graves of Civil War heroes. So, only days after $130 million in road-building funds had been authorized for the America Project, Disney decided to retreat from Prince William County.

Today Virginians still argue about whether the megadevelopment would have been a blessing or a debacle. It’s undeniably true that some folks would have gotten rich, because that’s what happens when Mickey comes to town. It’s also true that lots of folks soon would have found their town unrecognizable: congested, noisy, tackified, and tourist-trammeled. As for the Manassas battlefield memorial, the six-mile distance would have provided no buffer whatsoever from the Disney outfall.
One hundred miles
is too close, if the desired atmosphere is a dignified quiet.

Good for all those people who fought back against Team Rodent. It was about time somebody did.

Enough Orlandos, already.

I
N THE MID
-1960s farmers, ranchers, and other rural land holders in central Florida began receiving inquiries from prospective buyers. The offers were fair, though not high enough to attract suspicion. Even at $200 an acre, most owners were happy to sell. The transactions seemed routine, and it was a while before folks realized what was happening.

By then, roughly twenty-four thousand acres had been acquired in methodical quilt-patch purchases by Walt Disney Productions. Realizing that the price of land would have shot up if his involvement were known, Walt Disney had kept his role a strictly guarded secret. The payoff was an incredible real-estate coup that eventually would transform forty-three square miles of pastures,
woods, and swamps into the world’s most popular tourist destination.

Walt died five years before Disney World opened, but its future was secure. That’s because Florida’s legislators blitheringly agreed to give the company virtually whatever it wanted, and the main thing it wanted was autonomy: a private government for constructing and managing an amusement park. Thus was born the Reedy Creek Improvement District, an innocuous-sounding title that belies unheard-of powers. “The Vatican with mouse ears,” says Richard Foglesong, a Rollins College professor and longtime Disney watcher.

Reedy Creek takes in all the land purchased by Walt’s secret agents in the 1960s. The district is “governed” by a supervisory board elected by the landowners, meaning the Walt Disney Company. Its borders contain two shell municipalities, Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake, which have a combined permanent population of fewer than fifty souls, mostly company executives and their families. Everybody in Orlando knows that Reedy Creek is Disney and Disney is Reedy Creek, although for legal reasons both claim to be separate. That’s because Florida requires municipal governments to conduct their business in public,
and for competitive reasons Team Rodent would rather not.

Never before or since has such outlandish dominion been given to a private corporation. Disney runs its own utilities. It administers its own planning and zoning. It composes its own building codes and employs its own inspectors. It maintains its own fire department. It even has the authority to levy taxes.

Florida’s starstruck lawmakers didn’t stop there. They also gave Disney’s puppet government the authority to build its own international airport and even a nuclear power plant—neither of which the company has needed … yet. Reedy Creek is further empowered to have cemeteries, schools, a police department, and a criminal justice system—services that Disney has so far chosen not to assume.

Reedy Creek does, however, “contract” with Disney for an eight-hundred-member security force that patrols Epcot, the Magic Kingdom, hotels, shops, restaurants, and roads—everywhere on company property. The “hosts” and “hostesses” wear blue uniforms and carry badges, just like real cops. Legally they’re not, although they sometimes forget.

Two friends of mine, Charlie and Cheryl
Freeman, once took their son and daughter to Church Night at Disney World. They went on a bus with seventeen other children and several parents. Charlie drove.

Outside Tomorrowland, the Freemans had a run-in with another group of youngsters on an escalator. The kids were swearing loudly. When Charlie asked them to stop, one of them swung a leg and caught Cheryl in the ribs. Charlie thought it was an accident until the kid got in his face and said, “What’s your problem, you fucking geek!”

That’s when Charlie “grabbed him by the breastbone and pushed him back.” Moments later Charlie found himself in the custody of Disney security guards. The kid said Charlie had tried to choke him. Charlie denied it. “I was wrong to touch him,” he said, “but he kicked my wife.” And there were witnesses.

It didn’t matter. The guards took Charlie to a small room, where he was interviewed and photographed with a Polaroid camera. Then he was escorted out the front gate and informed he was banned from Disney World for twelve months. His picture would be posted, the guards warned, and he would be arrested for trespassing if he was spotted anywhere at the park.

On the long drive back to Jacksonville, Charlie
kept saying, “I got thrown out of Disney World on
Church Night!”
He was so angry that he phoned the newspaper when he got home. Columnist Robert Blade wrote about the incident in the
Florida Times-Union
. Readers clipped the article and mailed protests to Disney. Soon afterward Charlie received a letter from the company’s chief of security: “This is to notify you that, effective immediately, the trespass warning against you for Walt Disney World Resort Complex has been lifted.”

Officially Disney says its security forces work closely with local police. A sheriff’s deputy is assigned to the grounds to make arrests or otherwise assist the guards, if needed. All crimes in the Reedy Creek Improvement District are supposed to be reported promptly to law enforcement authorities. That doesn’t always happen, due to Disney’s fanatical obsession with secrecy.

In 1991 the company learned that one of its wardrobe assistants was spying on female performers at Cinderella’s Castle. The young man would masturbate while surreptitiously videotaping the women as they changed costumes.

One phone call to the local sheriff’s office could have ended the peep show, but Disney security officers chose to conduct their own
surveillance, which went on for three months. According to court records, the company deliberately didn’t inform the women at the castle about the investigation, and in fact permitted the secret taping to continue. Eventually Disney’s security guards photographed the wanker in the act, confronted him, and got a confession. He later was arrested by a sheriff’s deputy, who’d allegedly overheard employees talking about the illegal videos in the coffee room of the Disney security office.

Six female dancers from the Kids of the Kingdom chorus later sued, demanding $37.5 million in damages. They asserted that the dressing areas in Cinderella’s Castle had been plagued by Peeping Toms who carved small eyeholes in the walls, and that Disney had known about the problem.

As for the sting operation, in which the company used its own video camera, the dancers charged that on January 8, 1992, Disney security allowed the suspect “to remain in this hidden place, masturbating, observing and videotaping the female Kids of the Kingdom cast in states of partial or total nudity for over one hour and 15 minutes and did not apprehend [him] until the female performers left for their 11 o’clock performance.”

Disney acknowledged it didn’t tell the performers they were being spied upon, but the company said it acted properly. Moreover, the company preposterously claimed the dancers had no cause to sue, because they had “a diminished expectation of privacy in their particular job requirements and … therefore knowingly assumed the risk of the matters alleged.”

In refusing to dismiss the lawsuit, the judge said ordinary citizens would find the company’s conduct “outrageous.” On the eve of trial, Disney’s attorneys settled the case with the Kids of the Kingdom for an undisclosed sum.

Litigation and rotten publicity often go hand in hand, and Team Rodent is ever-wary of both. Several employees caught exposing themselves to tourists have been quietly fired but not turned over to the police. Yet even in such a rigidly monitored setting, events sometimes occur that can’t be covered up.