Walt Disney: The Triumph of American Imagination, is Neal Gabler's long-awaited, long-in-the-works definitive bio of the Man who Made the Mouse, the animation innovator, the inventor of the Theme Park, the Icon on Ice (Not, Gabler says).
I just got it and immediately thumbed to the chapter on the day Disney took over Orlando.
Gabler, who had access to Disney archives like no one before him, reminds us that Disney had been looking at Florida since the 1950s for a second "Disneyland," that he was entertaining discussions for an indoor park in St. Louis (discussions kept afloat to keep reporters and real estate speculators off the scent) almost up to the day that the Orlando Sentinel-Star finally broke the story that the "mystery" buyer of all that land in the middle of Florida was none-other than the Mouse, under the guise of a string of front companies.
The then-governor was in on it. Walt decided on Orlando because here the park "wouldn't have to compete with the ocean and the Gulf."
He made that decision the day JFK was assassinated.
It was the fall of 1965 before the Sentinel was able to get to the truth, and Disney promptly had a press conference announcing the deal.
The book is thoroughly detailed in how Walt's interest was never in the park here, but in creating that utopian planned city, which he labeled EPCOT. It's a vision that outlived him in name only.
Celebration, Florida, is a bit of that dream. EPCOT, Walt's Experminental Prototype COmmunity of Tomorrow, became just a whiz-bang hi-tech corner of Walt Disney World.
Gabler notes a couple of the influencial books in Walt's thinking about what a liveable city should be like...Garden Cities of Tomorrow (published in 1902) and The Heart of Our Cities and Out of a Fair, a City. The vision Walt had that Gabler describes is not unlike George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch (hidden parking, greenspace preserved by putting amenities underground) and a bit like what's been done at Disney World.
One of the great pleasures of the Michael Eisner years was going to a press conference and making him squirm when you asked about "Walt's original vision" for a theme park, a planned community where those folks working at the park would live, and miles of undeveloped nature around it. "Walt's vision" no longer matters. Walt Disney World is a vast sprawl that has eaten up that dream and a lot of that acreage in the interim. They built Celebration mainly as a way to get cash out of land that was disconnected from the park by miles of tacky tourist trap kitsch that surrounds the property.
Gabler is the friend of a friend, and I first met him when he was working on the wonderful Walter Winchell bio (about the culture of celebrity's origins), and I interviewed him, it must be 7 or 8 years ago for something (he also wrote the great film history, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood) and he was already deep into Disney research.
Can't wait to ask him how Walt's sentimental, old fashioned conservatism mixed with what Gabler sees as his liberal tendencies jibes with what has been published about Walt's anti-Semitism, FBI informant union-busting, etc., Hoover friendship, etc. And what took so long!
