Big Dreams

by Bill Barich

  The grand opening of Disneyland was carried live on ABC in July of 1955. The hosts were three clean, white Republicans, Art Linkletter, Bob Cummings, and Ronald Reagan.

  Walt Disney loved his amusement park and loved to tinker with it. Often he had breakfast at Aunt Jemima’s pancake house and dinner at Disneyland Hotel. He and Lilly spent nights in an apartment above the firehouse on Main Street. In the morning, he could sometimes be observed walking in his bathrobe to the Sunkist store for a glass of orange juice.

  In his later years, Walt threw himself into a curious plan for a “city of the future” in Florida that would be even cleaner and more distant from reality than Disneyland—Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or Epcot. He did not live to see it built. His health went downhill through the 1960s, and he died of lung cancer on December 15, 1966.

  DISNEYLAND ON A MORNING in late August was abuzz with paying customers about to be transformed into “guests,” Walt’s quaint locution for those who passed through the portals of the number one tourist attraction in the state. For many guests, Disneyland would be California, its summation and its raison d’être.

  The parking lot was filling rapidly at nine o’clock. There were rental cars from Canada, vans packed with hyperactive brats from the Deep South, and an old Bluebird bus loaded with Explorer Scouts from Chihuahua, Mexico. I found a spot on Pluto Street and looked enviously at the dads, uncles, and grandpops who held a child by the hand, wishing that somebody had opened a Rent-a-Kid shop for people like me.

  It seemed obvious that an unaccompanied adult was not going to have a great time inside. He would not think that the park was the happiest place on earth. Disneyland might once have been fun for grown-ups, but it had devolved over the years into a cultural rite of passage. A child, especially a California child, could no doubt file a suit in court if his parents hadn’t taken him there by the time he was ten.

  I pictured how the scene would play on the evening news, with some postliterate, yellow-haired TV reporter kneeling to get the scoop.

  “We’re here with young Peter Piper of Gardena,” he’d say. “Pete, can you you tell us why you’re suing your mom and dad?”

  “I’ve never been to Disneyland.”

  “How old are you, Pete?”

  “I’m eleven!”

  Disneyland had only one entrance because Uncle Walt had wanted it that way, the better to control and manipulate his guests. You could walk to it easily, but almost everybody lined up to ride there in an open-air tram, surrendering their willpower at the earliest opportunity. Then, at the ticket booths, you got to spend another twenty minutes in line waiting to fork over your thirty dollars.

  Waiting would prove to be the order of the day. In my notebook, I wrote, “Getting into the park is like being inducted into the army.” I had a feeling that everybody had been briefed but me. Those Hmongs from Fresno would shine here, I thought. They’d chew up Disneyland and spit it out for breakfast.

  The young woman in the ticket booth was very polite, but that was part of her job. Walt had been a stickler about demanding courtesy from his hirelings and had lectured them, sometimes scornfully, if they fell short. They were told to think of themselves as actors, not as wage slaves, and to believe that they had a role in a grand theatrical pageant.

  Disney had laid down other rules to protect the sanctity of the park. Employees were forbidden to bring a car inside because it might destroy the illusion. Administration buildings were banned for the same reason. And for the same reason, nobody was allowed to take a photo of Disneyland when it was empty, without any guests to give it some life.

  At last, I was moving through the entrance. Almost all the guests headed directly for the souvenir shops to buy some Disney memorabilia before they’d done anything worth remembering, but I was fixed in my tracks by the look of the park. It bore an uncanny resemblance to the interchangeable subdivisions of California, with familiar businesses spoking out from its hub—Coca-Cola, Carnation, Kodak, and Bank of America, among others.

  When you glanced down the pathways and lanes off the hub, you caught glimpses of attractions that were intended to excite you. The tease was deliberate. Walt hoped to stir the juices of his guests and referred to the glimpses as “weenies,” after the hot dogs that animal trainers dangle on a stick.

  The lines inside the park were worse than those outside. You could wait for an hour to get on a crack ride such as Splash Mountain—a ride that only lasted for a couple of minutes. In a way, the waiting expanded the scope of Disneyland and made it seem even grander and more insurmountable. If you could see everything on a single visit, you might feel cheated.

  The waiting also fostered a weird sort of greediness. Once you’d decided not to squander an hour on Splash Mountain, you started grabbing at any old attraction so that your trip wouldn’t be a total waste. That was how I came to be in line for the ten o’clock showing of Captain EO, a 3-D movie in which I had not the slightest interest.

  Waiting, ever more waiting. A battery of TV sets overhead bombarded us with commercials for Disney films and the Disney Channel. By the time we were seated in the theater, we were at the mercy of our environment, very nearly brainwashed and desperate for something, anything, to happen. The Disney planners were aware of that, of course, and they delivered in Captain EO the equivalent of a shot of crystal meth into the mainline.

  The movie wasn’t about anything but sensations. It had no story that you’d relate to a friend, even if you were a child. The music was loud, and the visuals were smashing. Captain EO simply overpowered you. It bullied you into submission. The long lines had put us to sleep, and now we were locked into a room with an alarm clock that we couldn’t shut off. All around me, I could sense numbed nerves leaping into action, and strange hormones starting to flow.

  Our release from the cool, dark theater into full sunlight was another shock to the system. The strategy of Disneyland became apparent—little shocks of a minute or two interspersed with cottony periods of waiting. It grieved me to think that somebody had spent countless hours devising the formula, that market researchers had been set to measuring just how much manipulation a human being could tolerate before he or she went over the wall.

  What next? I did some shooting on Boot Hill at the Frontierland Arcade and rode the Mark Twain paddlewheel steamer and saw some Indians, a burning cabin, and some robot deer and elk. In Adventureland, I had a glass of pineapple juice at the Tiki Juice Bar, where the host was Dole Pineapple. For lunch, I went to Big Thunder Barbeque, where the host was Hunt’s Ketchup and Barbeque Sauce.

  And then, at one in the afternoon, I went over the wall.

  Disneyland was a magnificent achievement, I thought. Whether consciously or not, Walt Disney had managed to anticipate the exact feel of life as it would later be manifested in much of surburban California. He had kept things neat and tidy and had given his park the appearance of virtue. For that, he owed a debt to his Bible-thumping father, Elias, who had always craved a world where there were no dark rides.

  As Ronald Reagan was the Ultimate Californian, so, too, was Disneyland the Ultimate Suburb.

  The organization that Disney built had survived him, and it had prospered through the 1980s. Its stock jumped from $12.50 a share in 1984 to $113.75 toward the end of the decade. Its CEO, Michael Eisner, earned a total compensation of $40.1 million in 1988, more than any other executive at a publicly held corporation in the United States.

  In interviews, Eisner was modest about the company’s profits. He attributed them to a favorable exchange rate that had attracted foreign tourists, a reemphasis on family values, and an indefinable something that he called “a quest for things past.”

  IN ANAHEIM, packing up for Palm Springs, I bid farewell to my traveling companions, Edwin Bryant and William Brewer. They had not explored the meridians to the east or to the south, or the far reaches toward the border. Their California existed only in flickers now, in preserves and museums, in the depths of rivers, and in m
emory.

  Bryant had lived out the balance of his life shuttling between Kentucky and the West. For a time in 1847, he served as alcalde, or chief magistrate, of San Francisco, and got caught up in the real estate craze and sold town lots until 1853, when he went back to Kentucky again. In 1869, he made a final trip to San Francisco and died there in a hotel, possibly a suicide.

  Brewer met with a cheerier fate, accepting a chair in agriculture at Yale when his tour with Professor Whitney was over. He married for a second time and had four children, Nora, Henry, Arthur, and Carl, and taught for thirty-eight years before retiring.

  Despite his commitment to teaching, he never lost his taste for travel. He joined an expedition to Greenland in 1894 and journeyed to Alaska five years later when he was seventy-one. The University of California rewarded him with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1910, the year of his death.

  Brewer’s life was long and full and good. He was a great appreciator. On a Sunday evening in 1861, while camped in the Santa Ana Mountains, he looked up at the sky and wrote dreamily, “We have the most lovely sunsets I have ever seen.”

  CHAPTER 26

  SAN JACINTO TOWN on the way to Palm Springs was dry and bleached and almost empty of citizens on a Sunday morning. Roadrunners darted through it on their way to Arizona. The mayor, Trammell Ford, had left some business cards around that gave his home phone number. It made you want to call him up and say, “Here I am in San Jacinto, Trammell,” to see what he could possibly produce in the way of entertainment.

  The cards also showed some potatoes rolling out of a cornucopia into verdant fields. Potato farms and dairies were links to San Jacinto’s past. In its future, there were Republicans, golf courses, and two thousand new houses.

  San Jacinto was in Ramona Country, a region of California that Helen Hunt Jackson had put on the map with her novel of that name. She was the child of a Brahmin minister from Massachusetts. Her friend Emily Dickinson had counseled her to take up writing when she was about thirty-five, as an emotional release after her husband had died.

  Jackson went to work with a vengeance and quickly poured out a flood of poems, stories, and travel sketches. She became a famous literary figure before she was fifty, hobnobbing with the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Jameses, Henry and William.

  After she married for a second time, she went with her new husband to live in Colorado. Her life underwent a profound change in 1879, when she was on holiday in Boston and heard some touring Indians from the Ponca tribe address a public meeting at which they outlined their grievances against the U.S. government for trying to move them from their ancestral territories in Nebraska to a reservation in Oklahoma.

  Jackson was incensed and turned into a staunch defender of the rights of Indians. Two years later, she published A Century of Dishonor, a pamphlet that was an indictment of the government for its crimes against Native Americans. That led to her being appointed a commissioner of Indian affairs by President Chester A. Arthur, who asked her to compile a report of the Mission Indians of southern California.

  In 1883, she and a fellow commissioner traveled through the domain of such tribes as the Serranos, Cahuillas, San Luiseños, and Dieguiños. Sometimes Jackson spooked the Indians by wearing a hat made from the entire head of an owl. She recorded a pattern of abuse wherein white settlers were forcing the tribes from their lands, trashing their fields, and stealing their houses.

  In San Jacinto Valley, she came to a Soboba village at the foot of the San Jacinto Mountains. The Indians were “greatly dispirited and disheartened at the prospect of being driven from their homes,” she said. They had always supported themselves as farmers and by hiring out to shear sheep and do vineyard labor, and they had no desire to change.

  A Soboba schoolchild, Ramon Cavavi, had written a letter to President Arthur, and Jackson had inserted it into her report.

  Dear Sir: I wish to write a letter for you, and I will try to tell you some things. The white people call San Jacinto ranch their land, and I don’t want them to do it. We think it is ours, for God gave it to us first. Now I think you will tell me what is right, for you have been so good to us, giving us a school and helping us. Will you not come to San Jacinto some time to see us, the school, and the people of Soboba village? Many of the people are sick, and some have died. We are so poor that we have not enough food for the sick, and sometimes I am afraid that we are all going to die. Will you please tell what is good about our ranches, and come soon to see us.

  Your friend,

  Ramon Cavavi

  Cavavi’s handwriting, said Jackson, was “clear and good.”

  After finishing her report to the president, she set about composing a “sugar-coated pill,” Ramona, whose intent was to create a sentimental fiction that would drive home the fact that Indians were being mistreated throughout the nation. The story was a spin on Romeo and Juliet, telling of a doomed love affair between a beautiful halfbreed, Ramona Ortegna, and her full-blooded Indian husband, Alessandro.

  Ramona was a cause célèbre, the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of its day. It touched the emotions of readers and nudged Congress into action. Three movies were patched together from it, one of them directed by D. W. Griffith, and it also generated a popular love song.

  The reservation, Soboba Springs, could still be found in San Jacinto Valley, across the dry bed of the San Jacinto River. The first thing I saw there was a brown mongrel with its tongue hanging out. The second thing was an immense Bingo parlor, as big as a K mart, where an Indian guard in a security uniform was on patrol.

  Then the dusty road ran on over bleak, unyielding earth past a Catholic church, a day-care center, two backyard auto-body shops, and a Little League field that had weeds growing in the cracked basepaths and a refreshment stand collapsing into timbers. A hard grounder hit there would roll on forever, all the way to Orange County.

  Young Indians left the reservation for nearby Hemet whenever they could, I was told in San Jacinto, and only returned for family emergencies, or if they were ill or had lost a job.

  Some of the new houses being built in the valley were not far away, in a development called The Villages at Soboba Springs. The homes were clustered around a golf course that was the only patch of green for miles around. White golfers in peacocky clothes were riding around in carts and smacking at balls.

  Maybe you needed the heart of a wealthy Republican to survive down south, I thought, an organ cast in concrete and fitted with pacemakers and plaque-free plastic tubing to let you last through the millennium or the next eighteen holes, whichever came first.

  Just another Sunday in the Colorado Desert.…

  DOWN THE ROAD in Gilman Hot Springs, in a parallel universe, some Scientologists were holding an open house, squeezing it in before the end of the world. Their bait was a trimasted clipper ship, Star of California, that appeared to be sunk up to its hull in the ground. Young men and women in quirky naval uniforms scampered over the deck with a paramilitary fervor. The ship and its surroundings had the compelling isolation of a cult compound fortified against a threat, real or imaginary.

  Apparently, I had stumbled into a corner of the state where weirdness was king. A few miles away, under a burning sun, Republicans were playing golf on the bones of Soboba Indians, while here the disciples of the late L. Ron Hubbard were making promotional and educational films and tapes about the Churches of Scientology at their compound, Golden Era Productions.

  I saw the “gold” in Golden Era and remembered how Charlie Manson’s school bus, with Hollywood Productions written on its side, had been parked under the trees at Dennis Wilson’s house. Manson, who professed to be a theta clear.

  In the early 1970s, I’d been stopped a couple of times in San Francisco by recruiters for Scientology, who carried clipboards and elaborate questionnaires and wondered if I were interested in bettering myself by getting rid of irrational behavior. I found them scarier and more intense than any of the Moonies or Hare Krishnas who’d intercepted me. Once, I had
even taken home a questionnaire and grappled with it until the degree of self-reference that it required defeated me.

  I was still interested in bettering myself in those days. Now all I wanted was a concrete heart.

  Star of California was a tribute to L. Ron Hubbard, who had a passion for nautical imagery and had dubbed his inner core of adepts the Sea Organization, or Sea Org for short. Hubbard himself was “the Commodore” and knew the Colorado Desert well. After publishing Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health in 1950, a nationwide bestseller whose merits were touted in such magazines as Astounding Science Fiction, he had holed up in a Palm Springs apartment to work on his second book, Science of Survival.

  The Churches of Scientology had bought 520 acres of land and several buildings at Gilman Hot Springs from Massacre Canyon Inn, a resort, in 1978 to create a haven for Hubbard, reportedly paying $2.7 million for the property. According to a former associate of Hubbard’s, the Commodore ordered a house built for himself nearby, outside Hemet, insisting that it be constructed on bedrock in a neighborhood where no blacks lived. It had to be free of dust, defensible, and on higher ground than anything around it.

  Armageddon was coming in the form of a nuclear war, the Commodore suggested in a bulletin to his inner circle, but his true enemies were the FBI and the IRS.

  The clipper ship was meant to offer Hubbard some comfort in his declining years, when he was rumored to be ill, sometimes grossly overweight, and often incapacitated. It had cost about a half-million dollars to build, but the money had gone mostly for materials, with Sea Org carpenters contributing the labor.

  Hubbard seems not to have made much use of the Star of California. Instead, he lived reclusively in a motor home on a 160-acre ranch in Creston, about thirty miles from San Luis Obispo, where yet another house was under construction. Six akitas guarded the ranch’s perimeters, and there were also horses, cattle, some llamas, four buffaloes, and Bubba, a prize bull, in residence. At Creston, attended to by his personal physician, the Commodore died of a “cerebral vascular accident” in 1986.