Carl Hiaasen (5 page)

As cynically as one might appraise Eisner’s cornball letter to Disney stockholders, no evidence suggests he was unmoved by later news reports about all the homeless and neglected puppies generated by
101 Dalmatians
. Even before the film opened, the company publicly had tried to warn people against impulsively rushing out to a pet shop.

It was money that would have been more wisely spent on a fluffy toy dalmatian at a Disney Store, not that Insane Clown Michael was thinking along such mercenary lines. In fairness, he didn’t invent Disney’s overpowering brand of make-believe. He simply took it worldwide.

I
N A FEW MONTHS
, an eighty-five-thousand-ton ocean liner will be launched from a shipyard in Marghera, Italy. The ship is decorated like no other of its kind. Etched into the steep prow is a portrait of that renowned mariner, Mickey Mouse. At the other end: a fifteen-foot likeness of Goofy, swinging from a boatswain’s chair while pretending to paint the stern. The ship’s horn is specially tuned to play “When You Wish upon a Star.”

The name of this extraordinary vessel is
Disney Magic
, Team Rodent’s maiden venture into the lucrative cruise-line trade. Carrying twenty-four hundred passengers (most of whom have spent the preceding days at Disney World), the ship will serve as both a floating extension of the Orlando
theme park and a marketing barge. Nightclubs, theaters, swimming pools, and spas will offer no refuge from Magic Kingdom characters; in one restaurant, “live” walls will display Disney art evolving from sketch to full animation.

Even the lifeboats will be tricked out—painted bright yellow and styled to match the old vessels depicted in
Steamboat Willie
. Undoubtedly the workmanship will be top-notch and authentic-looking, but imagine yourself far out at sea aboard a sinking ocean liner. Would your first choice of a rescue vessel be a lifeboat whose design was inspired by a 1928 cartoon?

The
Disney Magic
will leave Port Canaveral for three-or four-day excursions to Nassau and Castaway Cay, billed as the company’s “private Bahamian island.” Here passengers will debark and frolic in a manicured tropical setting, with separate beaches provided for kids, families, and adults (Disney is hoping for a big newlywed trade).

While other cruise lines have purchased small Bahamian islands as quickie stopovers, not many can boast the lively history of Disney’s—a history the company is unlikely to share with its seagoing passengers. “Castaway Cay” is the newly Imagineered name for the island, but locals know it as Gorda Cay. It was a very busy place in the 1970s
and 1980s, the main draw being a secluded and unpatrolled airfield, upon which many tons of marijuana, Quaaludes, and cocaine were landed en route to the U.S. mainland.

During that era Gorda Cay fell under the control of an American smuggler named Frank Barber, who ferried the dope up from Colombia and used the island for storage and refueling. Later the stuff was flown to small landing strips in south Florida, a nocturnal enterprise that owed much of its success to Barber’s recruitment and bribery of a U.S. drug enforcement agent named Jeffrey Scharlatt. Both men wound up in prison. Shortly after their operation was exposed, a Commission of Inquiry convened in Nassau to investigate drug smuggling and corruption throughout the commonwealth; Gorda Cay was listed as one of the favorite stopovers for international dope runners.

The island’s notoriety presented no serious public-relations hurdle for Disney, which merely changed the name after buying the place. It’s a small illustration of how Team Rodent untarnishes reality, acquiring and recasting to its own designs. Be certain that the company’s security forces scoured Gorda Cay and left no coconut unturned, in case Mr. Barber and his colleagues had stashed some goodies prior to their departure.
Beachcombing tourists in Fort Lauderdale are excited to stumble across the occasional scuttled bale, but in a Disney biosphere there’s no place for such surprises. I’ll bet a new past is being ghostwritten for “Castaway Cay”—a past richly populated with conquistadors or perhaps shipwrecked pirates, whom Disney copywriters would regard as more colorful and less menacing than modern smugglers of cocaine and bootleg methaqualone.

Escape is what most ordinary folks want and deserve—escape from the threat of dope, guns, crime, poverty, pollution, random violence, urban unrest. So why not a carefree Castaway Cay? What’s the harm? Maybe none. Be assured that the flora and fauna of the former Gorda Cay never received such tender loving care as they do now under Disney.

Still, there’s something offensive to the spirit about taking a perfectly interesting little island and giving it a movie-style makeover to amuse the visiting sightseers. Trim the trees, groom the beaches, add a fleet of Jet Skis and a row of “massage cabanas”—hey, mon, you be jammin’! Commercializing paradise is a tradition nearly as old as the tropics, but Disney has pushed it into an insidious new realm. At least in Nassau or Kingston or even Key West you can poke around and find back
streets and alleys that aren’t on the tour, real neighborhoods with real people instead of “cast members.” But on a Disney island you get only Disney adventure; everything you see and do is part of the show. So on Castaway Cay there’s no chance of coming across a native fisherman mending his nets and cussing up a storm. On the other hand, there’s also no chance of getting nicked by a pickpocket or groped by a hooker.

That trade-off is acceptable to millions of vacationers who don’t mind the fake, as long as it’s fun and safe. And nobody provides a safer, more closely supervised brand of carefree than Team Rodent. Whether you’re on a Disney ocean liner or a Disney log flume or the eighteenth fairway of a Disney golf course, you can be pretty sure nobody’s going to sneak up and stick a real .45 in your back. That’s not just a perception, it’s a fact—and one reason that Disney’s image as a benign enchanter-protector is now embedded in the collective parental psyche. It also helps explain why anyone would sign up for a
lottery
to purchase a house in a Disney-designed subdivision: They probably remember how happy and secure they feel inside the Magic Kingdom.

O
NE OF WALT DISNEY’S
unfulfilled dreams was a model city of the future, which he called Epcot (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). It would be home to twenty thousand residents and offer never-before-seen technology for ultramodern family living. After Walt’s death, the company scrapped the original idea for Epcot. Only the name was saved, given to a futuristic-looking wing of the Orlando theme park, where the attractions are sponsored by General Motors, AT&T, and other major U.S. corporations.

A few years ago Disney dusted off the concept of a functioning tomorrowland and called it Celebration. (The name, it’s not surprising to learn, was selected by Michael Eisner and his wife.) Walt
might recognize the place, though not as his futuristic bubble of a community. With its neat, narrow streets and neotraditional architecture, Celebration invokes nothing so much as a small-town neighborhood of the 1950s, remembered overfondly. The houses, which feature wooden shutters and open porches, could have been lifted off the lot of TV’s
Leave It to Beaver
. Celebration boasts a school, a town hall, a library, parks, even a “downtown” within walking distance of most of the homes. Yet by no means is it a self-contained cell. All serious shopping is done in distant malls, and most folks who live in Celebration make the grinding daily commute to jobs in Orlando. There are no monorails or bullet trains or electric cars—just ordinary gas-slurping sport-utility vehicles and sedans.

The most ultramodern thing about Celebration is the price: from $200,000 to more than $1 million for a house, and as much as $80,000 for an undeveloped quarter-acre lot. That’s a load of money for what is basically just another snugly platted wedge of suburbia—except it was designed, built, and marketed by Disney. Consequently, families who’d never otherwise dream of moving into a Florida subdivision are snapping up homes in Celebration, paying from 25 to 40 percent
more than their neighbors in comparable projects along State Road 192.

It’s a striking testament to the allure of the Disney name, and also to the childlike trust it elicits in boomer-era consumers. About five thousand people competed in a lottery for the first 350 homes to be built at Celebration. The company is counting on such exuberant fealty to grow its microplanned development to a buildout population of twenty thousand. Located five miles from Disney World, the new housing subdivision has gotten such a buzz that it actually draws tourists, who may purchase a Celebration wristwatch for $63 or a keepsake pen for half as much. Amazingly, some do.

Prospective settlers aren’t wrong to believe that because it’s a Disney enterprise, Celebration will be different from other Sunbelt suburbs. It surely is. New residents receive a book of detailed rules governing many aspects of life, from the color of one’s house to the pattern of one’s shrubbery to acceptable parking practices. There’s a homeowners association with an elected board, but all decisions are subject to veto by Disney (presumably in the event the town is someday infiltrated by political hotheads). Most residents don’t seem to mind the fussy rules or the company’s
large role in their lives; after all, order, neatness, and safety are precisely what they were shopping for in a neighborhood. And most of them plainly trust Disney to do the right thing. It’s a recurring theme in published interviews with new Celebrationites: They grew up with Disney. Disney stands for quality. When Disney does something, it does it right. Disney would never screw them over.

Of course, nothing in Disney lore points to a special expertise in residential home construction, yet fifteen hundred people have so far entrusted the roofs over their heads to a company best known for thrill rides and cartoon movies. It isn’t the first time.

In the 1980s Disney involved itself in another planned community, with calamitous results. The place was called Country Walk, a subdivision of gabled upscale houses and condominiums in southern Dade County. The development was built by the Arvida Corp., which was owned by Disney until 1987, when it sold its holdings, including 322 homes, condos, and lots.

Five years later Hurricane Andrew smashed into south Florida, and Country Walk was blown to pieces. Hundreds of residents were left homeless and shell-shocked. Many of the wood-frame
houses that disintegrated during the storm had been built during Disney’s corporate stewardship. In the debris, experts found ample evidence of sloppy construction practices. The bracing on some houses was so inadequate that the gables had been literally sucked off the roofs by high winds. Engineers discovered rows and rows of nails that were purely decorative, having cleanly missed the trusses they were supposed to secure.

Homeowners began filing lawsuits against Disney and Arvida, and prosecutors opened a criminal investigation. Although Disney asserted it had done nothing wrong, it eventually settled a class-action lawsuit out of court. Since most of the homes had been fully insured against storm damage, the owners agreed to accept $7,500 each from Arvida and Disney—pocket change for the mammoth entertainment conglomerate, and a smart way to put an end to the nasty headlines.

But not everyone in Country Walk went along with the deal. Alex and Helen Major, whose four-bedroom home was ripped apart by the hurricane, wanted a jury to hear their case. They withdrew from the class-action suit and pressed ahead on their own.

In the fall of 1996, with the trial date
approaching, something strange happened. Disney’s attorneys succeeded in convincing Dade County Circuit Judge Celeste Muir to leave the company’s name out of the case—not the company, just the name. Jurors would never hear the word
Disney
mentioned in open court.

Alex Major was miffed. Before he’d decided to purchase his house, Country Walk salesmen had juiced up their pitch by invoking the magical Disney reputation. “They told me Disney was the owner of Arvida,” Major recalled to the
Miami Herald
. “You trust people when they tell you how good they are. I’ve been going to Disney since I was a little kid.”