Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  ** Now known as the Republic of Taiwan.

  A city physically cut in half by the Berlin Wall, erected on Khrushchev’s orders in June 1961, West Berlin was the only city on the planet—aside from host city New York—to have its own pavilion. And Berliners insisted on having the lot directly next to the US Federal Pavilion, wanting to be situated as close as possible to their American protectors, symbolic of the link between the Cold War allies. The Germans, perhaps afraid of being overshadowed by bigger pavilions—they were representing only half a city—wanted to show themselves in the best possible light, literally. Planners for the pavilion personally lobbied Moses to use outdoor lighting of their own design after they found the Fair’s uniform streetlamps lacking. “So please, let us install our own lamps,” they implored Moses, who refused their request. America might, unlike Germany, be a free country, but in Flushing Meadow things were done the Master Builder’s way.

  Pavilions would also be built by twenty-three states and twenty-eight representatives from corporate America, perhaps the real star of the Fair. The consumer culture that it preached and that would soon dominate every aspect of American life would be on full display in Queens. Many of the biggest names in American industry, including IBM, Travelers Insurance, RCA (which would display a new novelty for Americans: color television), US Royal Tires, Eastman Kodak, Bell, and DuPont, would all build pavilions. And, of course, no single industry was better represented than Detroit’s Big Three automakers.

  But it wasn’t just corporate America that was looking to the future. NASA, then busy planning the Apollo moon mission, would show off its wares at the US Space Park—a critical chess move in the Cold War–era Space Race with the Soviet Union—including a fifty-one-foot-tall replica of the Saturn V Boattail rocket engines, the crucial stage-one propulsion jets that would help various Apollo missions reach outer space. They would also send a life-size Lunar Excursion Module, or LEM, the actual craft that Apollo 11 astronauts would use to touch down on the moon’s surface just four years after the World’s Fair was over. The 1939–40 World’s Fair might have put the “World of Tomorrow” on display, but its Fairgoers could only dream of a spaceship that actually landed on the moon; in the early 1960s, NASA was working diligently to make it happen.

  As popular as these exhibits would prove to be, one of the most enticing draws was more than 450 years old. Crowds would line up to see the dramatic beauty of Michelangelo’s sculpture La Pietà, which showed an almost lifelike Virgin Mary cradling a crucified Christ, at the Vatican Pavilion. It was the first time the Renaissance masterpiece was permitted to leave Italy since its creation in 1499, thanks to the personal intervention of Pope John XXIII himself and New York’s influential Cardinal Francis Spellman, a close ally of Moses and a powerful player in New York and Washington political circles. When the Master Builder bragged months before opening day that “Michelangelo and Walt Disney are the stars of my show,” it wasn’t an exaggeration. Instead, Moses left the exaggerations to the World’s Fair Corporation’s chairman and public relations executive, Thomas J. Deegan, who promised that their exhibition would be “the greatest single event in history.”

  6.

  Thanks to some old-fashioned magic we call “imagination,” this Ford Motor Company car will be your time machine for your journey. Carrying you far back to the dawn of life on land and transporting you far out into the future.

  —Walt Disney

  In early 1960, Walt Disney called a meeting with his executives in his Anaheim, California, office. He had been following the news from the East Coast about the upcoming New York World’s Fair and saw an opportunity for his Walt Disney Company, especially its design and development offshoot, WED Enterprises, to expand its horizons and reap a serious windfall at the same time.

  “There’s going to be a big fair up in New York,” Disney told his executives. “All the big corporations in the country are going to be spending a helluva lot of money building exhibits there. They won’t know what they want to do. They won’t even know why they’re doing it, except that the other corporations are doing it and they have to keep up with the Joneses.” That’s where WED Enterprises—billed as an “architectural services and engineering company”—came in.

  He wanted the group to make pilgrimages to the boardrooms of the country’s biggest corporations—General Motors, Coca-Cola, General Electric, Pepsi-Cola, Ford Motor Company, Travelers Insurance, Kodak, IBM, and AT&T—all the blue-chip firms that were going to spend millions on Fair pavilions, and offer the company’s services. Disney saw an opportunity to develop new rides, new concepts, and—with the benefit of corporate subsidies—new technologies. In addition, he would charge corporate clients $1 million for the use of his company’s name in their pavilions—his surname had become synonymous with his patented, unique brand of American entertainment. (Ever eager to find new revenue streams, after one company agreed to his usage fee, Disney immediately thought he had lowballed himself. “Don’t you think you might have asked for a little bit more?” he asked the executive in charge of negotiations.)

  When a company expressed interest, Disney would personally fly in on his private Gulfstream jet for further discussions. However, none of WED’s technicians—Imagineers, they were called—thought that money was the real factor motivating their boss: Disney wanted to establish a theme park east of the Mississippi River. He knew that California’s Disneyland was only playing to one-fourth of the country’s population, and the New York World’s Fair would be his testing ground. “He wanted to see if his kind of entertainment would appeal to the more sophisticated eastern audiences, ‘sophisticated’ in that that’s where the nation’s leaders, the decision-makers were based,” reported an associate.

  Soon after Disney gave his executives their marching orders, Robert Moses came calling. He told Disney that he was saving eight acres of the Fairgrounds with the idea of creating a permanent “children’s village.” Long after the World’s Fair was gone, this Disney-designed attraction would be a major draw in Moses’ new Flushing Meadow Park. Not only would Moses build the greatest park in all of the five boroughs, but he would also personally import a piece of Disneyland for the children of New York. Moses would show his critics exactly whose side he was on: the side of the angels.

  Although not one to share the spotlight—or the credit—Moses wanted Disney to have a headlining role at his Fair. From the get-go the Master Builder and the Master Showman hit it off. Although Moses was thirteen years older than Disney, the two men had characteristics in common. Disney had remade the American pop culture landscape, just as Moses had reshaped the actual landscape of New York City—each according to his own vision. Both had outsize imaginations and egos; both were leaders who surrounded themselves with armies of technicians on whom they could rely; and both were intensely driven workaholics. Disney would bring home scripts, poring over them, one after another, in his living room. He would often awake in the middle of the night, unable to sleep because he had an idea. His wife would wake up to find him doodling a sketch, or muttering to himself about a new design.

  But the similarities ended there. Born on Chicago’s South Side in 1901, Walter Elias Disney was the fourth child of Elias Disney, a hardworking, demanding, and deeply devout father, who despite his best efforts, never found the fame and fortune he so desired. His mother, Flora, was a nurturing, patient woman who doted on her youngest son. The family didn’t have an easy life, moving often throughout the Midwest so that Elias could pursue another failed business venture.

  For a time they settled in the Windy City, where—before Walt was born—Elias worked as a carpenter at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. (This biographical detail came in handy decades later when Walt Disney had some labor trouble with the New York–based construction crews working on his Fair pavilions. As he chatted up the hard hats, he casually mentioned how his own father had been a laborer at the Chicago fair; after that, his labor issues
were solved.) The Disneys also lived in Kansas City, Missouri, for a time, but the place that Walt would always consider his true home was Marceline, Missouri, a rural railroad town that grew in significance to him the older and more famous he became. The celebrated Main Street, USA, at his Anaheim theme park was his idealized version of Marceline’s town center.

  Quaint Marceline, where the roads were unpaved when the family moved there in 1906, would be the source of Disney’s small-town America ethos, and as he rose from the modest circumstances of his Midwestern childhood to become one of the richest, most famous moguls of his day, he was all too happy to talk about it. He favorably compared the family farm he grew up on to big-city life, recalling specific details of languid summer days spent lolling by trout-filled streams, picking apples or gathering wild grapes and hazelnuts from the nearby woods with his older brother Roy.

  It was on the farm and in the surrounding forest where Disney developed a love for animals, sitting and watching rabbits and foxes and the meadowlarks and cardinals perched in their trees. “That is what you experience when you go into the country,” he would say. “You escape the everyday world—the strife and struggle. You get out where everything is free and beautiful.” But more than anything, Disney pitied “people who live in cities all their lives . . . they don’t have a little hometown. I do.” He would spend the rest of his life trying to recapture the magic of his years in Marceline. Four decades later, when he was a rich man living the American Dream, he added a studio/office to his California home: It was an exact replica of the family barn in Marceline.

  An admittedly unexceptional student, Disney was a dreamer and class clown with two early passions that would stay with him throughout his life: art and entertainment. Schoolmates remembered him always with paper and a pencil in his hand. He later indulged in his love of acting by performing in school plays, portraying Abraham Lincoln in the fifth grade and even committing the Gettysburg Address to memory. When the First World War broke out, and his older brothers already overseas, Disney was swept up in the wave of patriotic fervor and enlisted despite being underage. He finally got shipped to Europe as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross, just after the war ended.

  He returned home to the United States in 1919, and three years later created his own cartoon film studio in Kansas City. Although he struggled early, including having to file for bankruptcy, ever the dreamer, he chased his vision and created the first cartoon shorts upon which he would build a global multimedia empire, eventually expanding from cartoon to feature-length animated films to live-action features to theme parks—and, of course, all the merchandise that went along with it. By the 1955 opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, Walt Disney had reinvented American pop culture, having built a company that would entertain millions of people around the world.

  In August 1960 Disney flew east to dine with Moses at Jones Beach and discuss his plans for the World’s Fair. Disney let Moses know that the “children’s village” wouldn’t be practical or profitable without a financial commitment from New York State to make it permanent (such an assurance was not forthcoming). Even so, Moses urged Disney to get more involved with his Fair. There were corporate pavilions that needed building, Moses told him, and suggested that Disney could provide the various companies’ bigwigs with what they needed most: ideas.

  Disney, of course, was way ahead of him. On that same East Coast trip, he met with executives at GE, IBM, AT&T, American Gas Association, and General Dynamics. By the end of the year, WED had secured a contract with GE worth $50,000 for research alone; more money would be provided to design and actually build the pavilion. But Disney harbored bigger ambitions, the fulfillment of which required lasting relationships with deep-pocketed corporations. He had become obsessed with urban planning—Robert Moses’ area of expertise—and sought to build not only a new theme park, but also an ideal city, a futuristic idyll where his employees could live—a location without pollution or urban sprawl that combined the cultural opportunities of an urban center with the small-town community of his youth.

  While making plans for the World’s Fair, Disney cryptically asked one of his workers, “How would you like to work on a future city?” The employee didn’t know what to say, and Disney didn’t go into further detail. But he already had a name for this new city: Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT. What it sounded like, more than anything, was a permanent World’s Fair, one completely of Disney’s own making. Now those ideas and designs could be tested on the millions of Fairgoers who would flock to Flushing Meadow Park.

  There was one particular sophisticated concept that Disney wanted to try out at the World’s Fair. It was his own brand of robotic technology: life-size and lifelike automated mannequins that could move, speak, stand, or sing, thanks to an internal recording device. He called his creations “Audio-Animatronics,” a phrase he had trademarked. It was a concept that Disney had been mulling over since the early 1950s, and for the global audience of the World’s Fair he resurrected the idea.

  The Ford Motor Company hired Disney to design its Magic Skyway ride, a twelve-minute journey back in time. In a stroke of marketing genius, the company chose the Fair to introduce its latest model, the Ford Mustang, which would go on to become one of the best-selling automobiles in American history. Millions of adult Fairgoers—each a prospective customer—would get a free ride in a Mustang convertible as they were propelled by a conveyor belt–like device, gliding past scenes of Audio-Animatronic brontosauruses, tyrannosaurs, woolly mammoths, and cavemen. Audiences were dazzled by these special effects—far superior to most Hollywood special effects at the time.

  The Magic Skyway even had a Neanderthal hero—“the inventor of the wheel,” according to the ride’s narrator, Disney himself, who informed his captive audiences, “The wheel gave man a new freedom. Now he could leave the caves behind and travel on to seek his fortune in the wide, wide world.” The suggestion that such a journey should be undertaken in a Ford automobile went without saying.

  For General Electric’s World’s Fair pavilion, Disney designed a $10 million Carousel of Progress, which featured an Audio-Animatronic family—complete with a cute dog—inspired by Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Fairgoers would watch various decades of American history play out: the 1880s, the 1920s, the 1940s, and up to the present-day 1960s. The auditorium itself shifted—like a carousel—and with each passing decade, the family’s life was made progressively easier thanks to ever-improving household products (like the ones GE made). It was typical Disney: a nostalgic look back at a simpler time, brought to you via state-of-the-art technology and all while hawking his corporate clients’ products as you were being entertained. “There was more of Walt in ‘the Carousel of Progress’ than anything else,” said one WED Imagineer.

  But when Disney informed the GE vice president in charge of the pavilion about his concept, the VP suggested that the company would come up with a different approach. After all, he told Disney, what would a company like GE that sold technological gadgets want with a show that was based on nostalgia for simpler times? Disney flew into a rage. “I spent my whole life telling stories with nostalgia,” he shouted, “and this is the way you communicate with people!” He even called his legal department and told them to see if there was any way to terminate the contract.

  Although things were quickly sorted out, GE executives would fly to Anaheim occasionally to check in on Disney’s progress—and like Moses, he didn’t appreciate the oversight. At one meeting, he stood at the head of a conference table and delivered a blunt message. “All right, gentleman, what I want you to do is go down to the Coral Room and have a good lunch. Then I want you to go back to Burbank Airport and get in your Grumman Gulfstream and fly back east where you came from and stay there until I’ve got something I want you to see. Then, I’ll call you. Thank you, gentlemen.” He then turned around and walked out of the room. Moses couldn’t have done it better himself.

>   It was Moses, in fact, who made it his personal mission to find a place at the World’s Fair for one of Disney’s pet projects, the Hall of the Presidents. On a trip to New York, Disney had shown Moses a slide presentation of his idea—an exhibit of Audio-Animatronic American presidents. Moses was sold. He was convinced that the Hall of Presidents should go in the US Federal Pavilion. Disney had the same idea. He had even flown down to Washington, DC, with Charles Luckman, the architect of the pavilion, to meet with the Commerce Department and sell them on the idea, but they didn’t bite. Moses used his personal influence to convince Undersecretary of Commerce Franklin Roosevelt Jr. to change the department’s mind, but he got nowhere, too. Moses then tried to convince Disney that WED should construct its own pavilion for the exhibit, but Disney didn’t want to foot the bill. Undaunted, Moses pressed on, believing that the exhibit was “too important to the Fair and to Walt Disney to drop this without exhausting all possibilities.”

  Then in April 1962, while hosting Moses at Disneyland to review progress, Disney asked Moses if he would like to meet Abraham Lincoln. It seems Disney hadn’t completely forsaken his Hall of Presidents concept, devoting a group of Imagineers to work on an Audio-Animatronic version of American’s sixteenth president. He quickly ushered Moses into a secret room in his studio’s Animation Building, and there a robotic President Lincoln offered his hand in friendship. Moses was completely astonished. “I won’t open the Fair without that exhibit!” he shouted. Disney said it would take his team of Imagineers years to perfect Lincoln. It didn’t matter; Moses wanted Lincoln at his Fair, and no was not an option.