by Neal Gabler
But it wasn’t only the exhibits that Walt was taking from the fair. At the end of the first season he had invited Major General William E. “Joe” Potter, the fair’s executive vice president, to the studio to discuss the possibility of his joining the company in a special and highly secret capacity, and Potter had agreed to do so. Potter’s role was to head a new project—Project Future, the Disneys initially labeled it—for which the fair had been what Card Walker called a “testing ground.” Now, with Potter aboard, the test was over, and the next phase, the “little thing” that would keep him from obsessing over how to top Mary Poppins, was about to begin—except it wasn’t little. It was large—large beyond belief.
V
Almost as soon as Disneyland opened, Walt had been peppered with questions about whether he would build another theme park. In fact, though Walt always disavowed plans to erect a new park, claiming that Disneyland was unique and that he couldn’t imagine having a park that wasn’t close enough for him to supervise, in 1958 he and NBC, apparently realizing that it had missed out on Disneyland, jointly commissioned SRI to do a feasibility study for a park off the New Jersey Turnpike in a marshland near Secaucus. The report concluded that it would require 76,000 hours of ride capacity, as compared to 46,000 at Disneyland at the time; that it could operate for only 120 days annually given the weather; that it would cost $46.4 million; and that it would yield a low return on the investment that “does not point to a profitable venture.” Walt had his own doubts. He didn’t feel that the New York area would support a theme park because, he told Harrison Price, “that audience is not responsive.” Other offers came from the new Brazilian capital of Brasilia—“Walt is interested and might come to Brazil personally if the whole thing looks promising,” a Disney executive told officials—Niagara Falls; Monterey, California; and Kansas City.
The most promising prospect was a plan for downtown St. Louis, which Walt apparently had encouraged when a commission planning the city’s two-hundredth anniversary asked if the studio might produce a film for the occasion, and Walt countered with a suggestion for a development. Officials pounced on the idea. A delegation from St. Louis, including the city’s mayor, met with Walt at the studio in March 1963, after which Walt called in Harrison Price to conduct yet another feasibility study. Two months later Walt visited St. Louis himself with Lillian, Sharon, and Sharon’s husband, Robert Brown, to assess the redevelopment area, called the Riverfront Zone, and he made another visit in November, at which time he laid out his terms: the local Civic Center Redevelopment Corporation would provide a building to house the attractions, and Disney would provide the attractions themselves, which the Disney company would own and control. By the end of the month he was meeting with WED Imagineers to discuss potential exhibits: a Circarama film on St. Louis, an Audio-Animatronic exhibition, a New Orleans French district, a haunted house, an Audubon bird room, a Davy Crockett cave, and a pirate ship walk-through.
Walt continued to confer both with St. Louis officials and with his Imagineers through the spring, and in July The New York Times reported that Disney had finally committed to a second Disneyland, an indoor park, to be installed in a five-story building in the downtown St. Louis area. But Walt hadn’t committed to anything yet, and despite the news story, he wrote one correspondent that the “St. Louis project is only in the talking stage.” By the end of the year he had lost interest. Some claimed, falsely, that August Busch, Jr., the head of the Anheuser-Busch brewery located in St. Louis, had scolded Walt and called him “crazy” for declaring that liquor would not be sold on the premises; others claimed that Walt and the local officials couldn’t agree on the finances, which were projected by Disney to be $40 million.
But the real reason may have been that Walt had by that time found another, better location. From the beginning, when he had first contemplated another theme park, one of the most logical sites was Florida, largely because of the weather, and as early as 1959 Walt candidly told a reporter for the Miami Herald that he had been driving through the state and had come to the conclusion that “Florida would be better than California in many ways.” This wasn’t just idle talk. At the time Walt was already in discussions with RCA and with multimillionaire John D. MacArthur, head of Banker’s Life Insurance, about developing a “recreational enterprise” called the City of Tomorrow on five to six thousand acres north of Palm Beach that MacArthur owned. The plan was to place a new theme park within a planned community, just as Walt had hoped to place his schools within a City of the Arts. As always, Walt commissioned Harrison Price to do a feasibility study, and Price determined that the “area offers a theme park attendance potential which equals or exceeds that experienced by Disneyland in Southern California.” Even Roy reconnoitered the property in MacArthur’s limousine, specially equipped with a hydraulic system that lifted the car above the palmettos, then went to New York to lobby with RCA, hoping, he said, that WED’s world’s fair projects would “influence RCA’s plans.”
As it turned out, the plan faltered and was eventually abandoned. “It just wasn’t working” was how Bill Cottrell put it. But enthusiasm for building a new park in Florida still ran high. In his studies Price had come upon one stubborn fact: “It was that Disneyland, in Anaheim—for all of its high penetration in the available Southern California tourism—had a low rate of penetration each year in the Eastern populations.” By his calculations, it would take one hundred years at the present rate of attendance to saturate the population east of the Mississippi River, which then constituted two-thirds of the population of the country. The only way to reach those people, Price believed, was to build a park in the east, and the best place to build it was Florida. Price was already providing Walt with possible sites as early as spring 1961, while Donn Tatum, now the vice president of administration at the studio, went to Florida to survey available real estate in the central belt of the state. “We are more enthusiastic than ever about the potentials and await your guidance in carrying the ball further,” Tatum wrote Walt upon his return.
That guidance wasn’t immediately forthcoming, most likely because Walt was preoccupied with planning the world’s fair exhibits and steering the studio again. But sometime early in 1963 he convened a small, highly select, and discreet group of executives—among them Tatum, Card Walker, and Joe Fowler, the vice president of Disneyland—and charged them with finding five to ten thousand acres in Florida for a new park. (The size was necessary because Walt had always regretted not having more property around Disneyland to keep the surroundings from seeming tawdry and spoiling Disneyland’s effect.) He code-named the enterprise variously Project Future or Project X to maintain its secrecy. When Walt revealed his plans to Lilly, she later admitted she was aghast. “What do you want to do that for?” she asked. To which Walt, who was working at the time on the world’s fair and CalArts as well as on the studio’s production schedule, replied that “he would get stagnant if he didn’t do new things.”
From the first, it was a cloak-and-dagger operation. No one was to know that Walt Disney was trying to buy property, or prices would soar. As Card Walker laid out the scheme to Walt that September, “We would carefully select a third party (like Governor Arnell) who would be our front. He would actually be seeking the land for another carefully selected company or person. In turn, this third party would select a real estate man or lawyer knowledgeable in real estate who, on a pre-determined plan, would assemble the land. The real estate man would never know we are involved. We would have a ‘team’ to follow and call every move as it develops. The land, for example, might be a ‘retirement village’ for senior citizens, as it would be similar to our project.”
Meanwhile the ongoing St. Louis negotiations and the discussions with Seagram’s on developing Niagara Falls had become subterfuges. That November, Walt, Sharon, Bob Brown, and a handful of executives flew to St. Louis and then on to Niagara Falls and Washington, D.C., before detouring to Florida, where Walt drove from Tampa to Ocala, looking the land over.
On the way back to California they flew low over the Florida coast to survey it, and as they headed westward, according to one account, Walt conclusively decided that the park would be set in central Florida near Orlando so that it wouldn’t have to compete with the ocean or the gulf. That same day, November 22, during a refueling stop in New Orleans, Walt learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated.
Walt would revisit Florida several times over the next six months, though Robert Price Foster, the vice president of legal affairs for Disneyland whom Walt had entrusted with implementing Card Walker’s plan to buy land, thought that Walt seemed less interested in the prospective park than in flying in his new Gulfstream jet, which the studio had bought that March. In April, while Walt was attending the opening of the world’s fair, Foster headed to Miami to meet with a Florida attorney named Paul L. E. Helliwell, who had come recommended by Disney’s New York counsels. Foster was so cautious that he waited hours to tell Helliwell, an old World War II OSS officer himself, that Walt Disney was the client, and when Helliwell recommended a realtor named Roy Hawkins to identify properties, Foster didn’t immediately let him into his confidence either. In fact, Foster began using the name Bob Price, lest someone trace him back to the Disneys.
One by one that spring and summer Foster targeted properties and began purchasing them through a series of front corporations, nine in all, though Roy risked exposure when he decided to go to Jacksonville himself to negotiate the purchase of a particularly large and important plot. Still, the company operated in secrecy. Only in June 1965, according to Foster, did Walt assemble a group in his office, including not only the Project X committee but the board of directors, to announce that the new park would be built and to describe its contours—a meeting Foster called “our own constitutional convention.”
Of course, all of this was kept within the company. Even internal memos on the park were numbered so that they could be tracked; when, during one Florida visit, a waitress recognized him, Walt first denied that he was indeed Walt Disney, then asked her to promise not to tell anyone else who he was. Publicly Walt continued to disavow any interest whatsoever in a Florida theme park. “There are so many things we haven’t done yet at Disneyland,” he told a reporter for the Daytona News-Journal that April. “Right now, we’re getting ready to spend $50 million in the next five years to revamp our ‘Tomorrowland.’” But by that time Disney had already purchased 27,400 acres at a price of just over $5 million—about one-tenth the cost per acre of what he had spent on Disneyland twelve years earlier—with all the money coming from the studio.
Even state officials were to be kept in the dark. As late as August 1965 Roy received a call from an old contact at Prudential who had retired and become chairman of the Florida Development Commission asking if he and the Florida governor on the way back from a trade visit to Hong Kong could meet with Walt and Roy at the studio to “sell you on the idea of your possibly building an entertainment plant in Florida.” Roy cagily answered that neither he nor Walt would be available. “I fibbed a bit about us being away,” he wrote Walt, because “I think it would be premature for us to expose our hand.” Both Helliwell and Hawkins, who had finally been let in on the secret, advised that Roy and Walt meet with the governor only in the presence of county officials and leading citizens of Orlando so that the governor wouldn’t be able to renege on any promises he might make.
But the company could conceal its plans only for so long. A reporter from the Orlando Sentinel-Star visited the studio with a press contingent early that fall of 1965 and asked why Walt had been touring the Orlando area, to which Walt, evidently surprised, gave a rambling answer. “He looked like I had thrown a bucket of water in his face,” she said. A few weeks later Walt’s secretary warned him that the reporter, Emily Bavar, was suspicious. In fact, that October, Bob Foster and Bob Jackson, the vice president of public relations for WED, were in Florida scouting locations for a press conference at which to announce plans for the park when they spotted the headline of the Sentinel-Star in the lobby of the Cherry Plaza Hotel. “WE SAY: ‘MYSTERY’ INDUSTRY IS DISNEY,” ran the banner. The story by Bavar explained that Helliwell and Hawkins had been purchasing land for a new Disney theme park, and it even quoted the proprietor of a local grocery at the periphery of the Orlando property who claimed that strange men from California kept coming to get sodas from him. “The only thing I can tell you is that it is big and fat,” Helliwell commented inscrutably.
Florida governor Haydon Burns confirmed the story that day, and Walt made his own formal announcement at the Cherry Plaza in Orlando on November 15, 1965, at a news conference—actually two conferences—attended by close to five hundred reporters. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do before we can even begin to think about starting construction,” he told them. “You just can’t go out and build a whole new world of entertainment without a lot of studies and before our people solve a lot of problems.” He anticipated that the project would take eighteen months to plan and another eighteen months to implement, aiming for an opening in early 1969, and he said he would spend $100 million just to “get the show on the road.” Then he presented a slide show illustrating the effect that Disneyland had had on Southern California—nearly $1 billion in revenues. Governor Burns, who called November 15 the “most significant day in the history of Florida,” predicted a 50 percent rise in tourism and tax revenues. But Walt said that while they obviously expected to make money, “making money is the furthest thing from our thoughts in this new enterprise. I mean it. We want it to be a labor of love.”
Walt also waxed philosophical, saying, “We want something educational, something to keep the family together—that would be a credit to the community, to the country as a whole,” but he was vague as to specifics and told an associate afterward that he had done a “lousy” job in his presentation. In fact, he had not been specific because there were no specifics to mention other than the notion that there would be two “cities”—the City of Yesterday and the City of Tomorrow. Indeed, according to Robert Foster, Walt hadn’t actually seen the exact property until the morning of the announcement, when he flew over it in his Gulfstream, and he didn’t set foot on it until the morning after the announcement, when he tramped there with Roy, Donn Tatum, General Potter, and a local politician, motorboating across a lake on the site with what Foster called a “rare expression of approval.”
The truth was that Walt wasn’t especially interested in building another amusement park in Disney World, as the new complex was to be called, and when Roy formed a central committee to set general strategy for the park, Walt was not even a member. Walt had already built a park, and as Roy told one journalist, “Walt instinctively resists doing the same thing twice. He likes to try something fresh.” What he had not done—what he had long hoped and dreamed of doing since at least the City of the Arts—was create an entire urban environment from scratch: a perfect city. Walt didn’t particularly like cities—while riding in the train from the Chicago Railroad Fair in 1948, he commented to Ward Kimball that he couldn’t understand why people lived in cities when they could live in open spaces—and he especially hated Los Angeles’s urban sprawl. Imagineers said that when they were planning Tomorrowland, Walt would carry around books on city planning and mutter about traffic, noise, and neon signs, and he kept three volumes in his office to which he frequently referred: Garden Cities of Tomorrow by Sir Ebenezer Howard (originally published in 1902 and reissued in 1965), which promoted a vision of a more pastoral urban life; and The Heart of Our Cities and Out of a Fair, a City, both by an architect and mall designer named Victor Gruen, who urged the reconceptualization of the city as more ordered, rational, and humane. Walt’s interest in city planning was so intense that the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who had met Walt in a department store during a Christmas shopping spree and become a friend, once approached him about running for mayor of Los Angeles. “Why should I run for mayor when I am already king?” Walt told him.
Th
e appeal of Disney World to Walt—its only real appeal to him—was that he would finally have a chance to build a utopian city adjacent to the theme park as a place where employees of the park might live. For those who said Disney had no interest in addressing contemporary problems, only an interest in ignoring them, this was also his response to social ills, especially urban unrest. “Walt was intrigued with solving the problem of a central commercial area and a residential area co-existing and making the whole thing work for the moving of people and traffic in and out,” said WED Imagineer Marvin Davis. Walt knew he couldn’t solve all the problems himself no matter how extensive his planning, and he knew that he couldn’t solve them all immediately. What he foresaw instead was an experimental community, one in which, Davis said, the “people living there could be a constant source of testing out materials and ideas and philosophies.” He called it an Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT, and as Marvin Davis said, “It was the real wienie” of Disney World.
Still, if it was an experiment, it was also to be a real community—a “living, breathing community,” as Walt put it—with 20,000 residents by 1980, though at other times Walt pegged the population at 60,000 or even 100,000. “It will worry about pre-school education,” he said, “home environment, employment.” It would have a teen center in an effort to prevent delinquency, and a nearby facility for senior citizens. It would have recreational zones and areas for houses of worship. As for government, though Walt would never have surrendered his ultimate authority, he contemplated a bifurcated system in which the company controlled all the planning and building while other issues were determined by a democratic process. At another time he suggested that residents be rotated on “sabbaticals” so that no one would have permanent voting rights.* Indeed, so expansive and futuristic was his vision that in some ways it owed as much to his animations as to his park. “Walt expected things that people have been hoping for, twenty-five and thirty years in the future,” Joe Fowler said. “He expected a house that would be completely self-sufficient, its own power plant, its own electricity, no garbage or trash collection, all automatically taken care of with pipes that belong to the place…. He expected transportation in all of its modern forms, without automobiles in the streets. He expected educational facilities that are twenty years ahead.” Robert Moses, another monumentalist who appreciated the scale of Walt’s ambition, called EPCOT “overwhelming” and predicted that it would be the “first accident free, noise free, pollution free city center in America.”
