Jaundiced stories about the town were legion among area residents, some of whom referred to us as the “Village of the Damned.” Men, it was alleged, were not allowed to have facial hair (another Disney spinoff). Children, all potential Huckleberry Finns, were hired to cast fishing rods into the lake. It was obvious to us that many tourist visitors to town wondered if we were paid to live there, or at least to make appearances on our porches and verandas every so often for photo opportunities. I was hailed regularly by visitors on Market Street as I emerged bleary-eyed, breakfast tea in hand, to greet the bright Florida day from my second-story balcony; “Look, there’s a real person.” Some kids in town got their kicks from miming the stiff, jerky movements of Disney’s audio-animatronic figures for the benefit of these bemused visitors.
Sales Preview Center (Charles Moore, architect). (Photo: the author)
The local press had a heyday with Celebration stories. One wry classic came from Orlando Sentinel columnist Greg Dawson, who recounted the alleged testimony of one Allan Oakley, from the nearby Indian Wells subdivision, who was in the habit of taking his pure white hound dog for walks in Celebration. Only after several visits did he encounter another dog, a “purebred, all solid black and tall and groomed,” walked by a nicely dressed couple. The gentleman said to Oakley, “Is your shift over soon?” On meeting his quizzical response, he told Oakley he was being paid to walk the dog around the lake. “It makes the town more real,” he said. As Dawson pointed out, “whether or not the story is true, it sounds true,” summarizing a prevalent belief among area residents that the town just looked too good to be true.1 This story had stuck around, and some residents were still asked by visitors if they were the people hired to walk the dogs.
ZIP code 34747; the post office (Michael Graves, architect). (Photo: the author)
The rumors about Disney were a dime a dozen, among which was the widespread belief that the company had retained ownership of the land beneath peoples’ houses, or would reclaim it in ninety-nine years. Several of the renters also gave lip service to a belief widely held outside of Celebration that homeownership here involved a lengthy and rigorous screening process by the company. A bizarre rumor circulated that gypsies were taking up residence in town. It appeared to have originated in an internal Disney memo, lending the town the ambience of a medieval fairy tale, even though the memo’s purpose was to warn of the thieving ways of gypsies. Most prevalent of all was the canard that the company was pulling out of Celebration after only seventeen months, largely because of the bad publicity generated in articles in major newspapers about “trouble in paradise” and the teething troubles undergone by the school. Recently, Disney had taken its name off the billboards advertising the community, and, most conspicuously, had withdrawn its name from the water tower marking the main entrance to the town from route 192. These signs had been closely read. The withdrawal rumor was given credence by all and sundry, including several Disney employees. For several weeks, hearsay flew fast and thick around town. There was talk of a strike among the merchants, distraught at the loss of sales that accompanied the town’s divorce from the high-revenue brand name. There was talk among disgruntled homeowners about picketing the sales Preview Center to alert prospective buyers that the company was not vouchsafing the guarantees that went with its name.
Detail of a highway billboard, before the Disney name was dropped. (Photo: Ron Dickson)
All of this talk prompted Brent Herrington, the town’s community manager, to address the rumor at length in his monthly Town Hall newsletter in November:
Is Disney happy with Celebration? I raised these issues in a recent meeting with management and the answer was an emphatic “Yes!”…
In terms of marketing strategy, the company has been eager for the public to begin recognizing Celebration as a real, thriving community with its own unique identity, separate and distinct from the entertainment-oriented images of Mickey Mouse, the Magic Kingdom, and so on. According to Leigh-Ellen Louie, Disney’s Vice-President of Business Planning and Development, when she reads about Celebration in the future, she hopes to see “The Town of Celebration” in big letters and “Disney” in small letters—rather than the other way around. Thus, future advertising and marketing materials will include less emphasis on “Disney” and more on “Celebration.” The company plans to vigorously market Celebration on its own merits, featuring all the special things that give the community its warmth and unique character. A recent example of this philosophy was the phrasing on the town’s newest Celebration billboards. The difference? Celebration is not billed as “Disney’s town.” In the new campaign, the “Town of Celebration” is the star.2
At times like this, Herrington’s handling of his intermediary role was difficult to read. His style was not to everyone’s liking, though his was surely the most difficult job in town (with the exception of the school principal’s). The genial patriarch hired to manage the town’s affairs in lieu of an elected mayor, he was enforcer of the rules, tax collector, redresser of grievances, cheerleader of the community spirit, and signature father and resident. Many professed bafflement about who actually employed him; in fact, he and his staff were employees of Capital Consultants, a Fort Worth community management company, and their services were contracted by Disney. An imposing Texan, built so solidly he should, by force of nature, have been unflappable, Herrington bared his discomfort in his facial expressions, though seldom in his speech. Some disaffected townsfolk regretted his personal stiffness, which often lent an air of enforced hedonism to community events—“It’s Saturday afternoon, kids, it’s time to have fun.” Those who knew him personally had a warmer appreciation of the professional smarts he brought to the job and its daily scrapes. Part of that job was to serve as a target for wronged residents. Most seemed grateful for his rhapsodic sobriety if only because it kept the town’s sense of itself on track during the turbulent formative years, when support from the company itself appeared to fall off.
Hefty doses of boosterism were administered through his monthly newsletters and those sent out by Kathy Johnson, director of the nonprofit Celebration Foundation. These communiqués were always underpinned by Herrington’s own ardent testimony as a community member in residence. A high-profile veteran of the world of community association professionals, he assured me that “it is almost unheard of for someone who does community management to live in his or her own community. You’re never off duty, so to speak.” There were also numerous public occasions, emceed by Johnson and Herrington, the town’s model Mom and Pop, for keeping up morale and stoking the flames of volunteerism. Town meetings held periodically to promote “stakeholder pride and the sense of ownership,” as Herrington put it, were reassuring exercises in community therapy. One that I attended in the school gym was mostly a community update (“All the news that’s fit to hear,” announced Johnson) and was capped by a performance (“Feel the Rumble, Hear the Roar!” “Be Aggressive! Be Aggressive!”) by the Pep Team, fledgling infant cheerleaders from the school. By midsummer, these meetings were scaled down to intimate chat sessions with Herrington, initiated in no small part with a view to dispelling corrosive rumors around town, but also marked by his own weary desire to avoid the standard gripe session, where as he put it, “some guy gets up to complain and everyone will hoot and holler ‘By God, Disney ought to pay for this.’ ” Eventually, he introduced electronic town hall meetings, televised on the community TV channel, where he and Johnson took incoming questions on e-mail and addressed the populace through the camera.
But this time around, his handling of the Disney withdrawal rumor produced only ripples of reassurance. One close reader of the newsletter text pointed out to me that it did not actually rebut the rumor. Others said they saw only corporate smooth talking, and Herrington’s emissary role reinforced a prevalent perception of him as a “hired gun.” Was he in an effective position to arbitrate the interests of residents and those of the powerful developer? “So far,” he told me at our first me
eting,
the interest of the developer and the interests of the residents have run parallel, and so there’s very little tension in the system. The first time there’s an issue in which that’s not true, Town Hall will be in a very difficult spot. Reasonably, the residents will expect Town Hall to be an unflinching advocate for their point of view. This is exactly what the developer wants us to be. If I’m successful at providing residents with good communication, making them feel connected, active, and involved, then having Town Hall against you on a critical issue is not something to be looked forward to. But I think the developer realizes that Town Hall cannot function if it is otherwise. If the residents had to wonder about my loyalties, and whether I’m going to stand with them, then I have no credibility, and the developer would be guilty of what it’s often accused of—a paternalistic, over-controlling, over-engineered approach to community building. So it’s been made exceedingly clear that they see my job as to always take the residents’ part.
If you went by the book, Herrington was probably right. There had been no clear-cut conflicts of interest so far, but his “loyalties” would be put to the test repeatedly in the course of the year (his last in Celebration, as it turned out). As a parent of school-going children, for example, Herrington was perceived to be an advocate of the school’s progressive methods, and so its many antagonists felt he had taken sides on an issue very dear to residents. Nor had he enjoyed much more than a day or two of smooth sailing in managing developer-resident relations. Fractious in most new planned communities, these relations were complicated here by everyone’s prior encounters with the pixie dust treatment. Residents who felt their interests were being neglected by the company were genuinely surprised to discover that Disney, as a developer, had limited liability in the matter. Conflicts with the builders? Not our bailiwick. Problems at the school? Our hands are tied. Retail sales hurting? We’re not responsible. Tax assessment hikes too high? Don’t look at us. Long before the Disney rumor circulated, many townsfolk and merchants had come to realize that far from enjoying the sheltering paternalism of the Mouse, their relationship felt more like that with an absentee landlord. For Celebrationites who wanted unmediated contact with Disney, Herrington could be only a poor substitute.
Many of the pioneers I had met so far cited the Disney name as a primary reason for their moving to Celebration: “they do things right.” They had vacationed, year in and year out, at the theme parks and were accustomed to high standards of customer satisfaction. Some were outright Disneyphiles, although I never met one who clearly matched the profile attributed by others to this Magic Kingdom type—a near-delusional believer that the company’s pixie dust would transform daily life into a wonderland where all cares are banished. But a large proportion of townsfolk felt they had been led to expect more attention and support from the company, and were dismayed when the Mouse was perceived as taking a back seat. For the company’s part, there was a clear tendency, on the part of senior officials whom I interviewed, to attribute some of the town’s troubles to the zealotry of the Disney fans: “we didn’t quite understand how rabid some of the Disneyphiles might be,” acknowledged one TCC executive. “They had watched too many Disney films and they expected too much perfection.” From the Disney perspective, the more fanatical Celebrationites were a multiheaded monster of the company’s own creation.
THE MAN AT THE TOP
One popular response was to write directly to Michael Eisner. Any number of residents told me they had done so, for one reason or another, usually in the form of a petition over some grievance. Only one said she had received a response. Margot Schwartz, one of the town’s most vigilant citizens and a former employee of the American Institute of Architects in Washington, D.C., had written to suggest that Eisner stage a day of architecture appreciation for the residents—an event that did eventually take place. Others believed that although Eisner had not responded directly to their letters, he had solved their problems by putting a word in the right place. When I interviewed Eisner the following summer, he did not appear to have noticed the receipt of any of these letters. Internal sources told me it was standard practice for these letters to be rerouted to TCC officials within Celebration.
With his reputation as a hands-on mogul, Eisner was perceived as fully accountable, a godlike figure who, when all other avenues had been pursued in vain, could be called on to “lay down the law” and say, “I want these people to be happy.” This, at least, was the perception of residents like Ron Dickson and the pastor Donald Jones, who had teamed up to lead the campaign against Town and Country builders. As part of their organizing efforts, they had written to Eisner about the problems with their builders:
Walt Disney’s dream of a model town has become a horrible nightmare for many home buyers in Celebration, Florida. For over a year, countless homebuyers have struggled with their contractors to remedy delayed completion dates, poor planning and supervision, defective building materials, poor workmanship, and other serious problems. The level of frustration and bitterness is extremely high. Some have said that buying a home in Celebration has been the worst experience of their lives. Many disgruntled home buyers have asked senior employees of The Celebration Company to come to their aid, but these employees have declined to get involved in dealings with the contractors.
The letter, sent by certified mail, contained suggestions for action and fair notice of the talk around town about impending lawsuits and whistle-blowing in the local and national media. There was no response from Eisner, though shortly afterwards he happened to be in town and his visit was followed by the first direct responses to their grievances from Town Hall (the promise of inspection visits by an engineer and the bettering of relations with the offending builder). Dickson and Jones believed Eisner had personally ordered these changes after “chewing out” TCC employees. This was the Eisner who during the same visit, according to Jones, had ordered all of the pillows in the Disney resort hotels to be replaced because they were “not right.”
If Eisner was their last court of appeal for many townsfolk, he was also clearly a fantasy embodiment of power—the man who could get things done and make everything right. The desire for such a figure is palpable and extends well beyond Disney, although Walt had succeeded better than most in defining the model personality (with a personal connection to consumers) for the corporate one-man show. The legacy of Walt’s intimate profile within Disney ranks was so strong that many home buyers could feel they had signed a personal contract with Eisner himself, and that he was responsible for keeping up his end of the deal.
Aside from the fantasy of the all-powerful man at the top, there were a few practical explanations for the direct appeals to Eisner. By the summer of 1997, most of the original development team had left TCC, and there was no one recognizably in charge at the company’s Seminole Building across from my apartment. TCC was now being run out of California, and with a new emphasis on the bottom line. In addition, Celebration was regarded as Eisner’s brainchild, in which he had a special personal stake. “I’d liked to have lived there,” he told me, “if it weren’t for the heat. Initially I didn’t, because of the risk of being seen to have an unfair advantage in the lottery.” Some residents, however, liked to tell stories that contradicted Eisner’s intimate relationship with the town. At the opening ceremony for the town center, Scott Biehler—life and soul of the downtown apartment community—and a friend had approached Eisner as they waited for the official events to begin. “Where are you living?” he asked. Biehler said he lived in one of the apartments. “Are there apartments here?” the CEO responded in surprise. Whatever the extent of Eisner’s real involvement, the smallest changes in the townscape were regularly attributed to decisions made by the man at the top.
What was the response from the Seminole Building to the Disney withdrawal rumor? Celebration, I was told by TCC officials, had been planned as a town whose residents, given all the right resources, would have to prove themselves as a community with its
own characteristic identity. To do so, it would be necessary to downplay any dependency on Disney and to gently sever the paternalistic ties that went with this relationship. This version of the events is what Herrington’s newsletter alluded to, and many of the pioneers favored it because it clearly offered them a more active role in shaping the community. These were the joiners and the doers who had answered to the tacit call for community builders in TCC’s advertising campaign. Among them were folks who made a point of not identifying as Disneyphiles, and who vocally berated those who were infantilized as “Disney nuts” or mindwashed “Disnoids.” Predictably, it was among the most highly educated and professional residents that the scorn for Disneyphilia was most pronounced.
Even so, there was little zeal in any sector of the population for the prospect of the company’s withdrawal. No one wanted to see Celebration become “a ghost town,” as one resident put it to me, laid waste by “social problems” and plummeting realty values. Too many of Celebration’s pioneers had experienced communities hyped by double-dealing developers who had pulled out before the lots were all sold, leaving the infrastructure to crumble rapidly and at great cost to the residents. Nor would you have to look very far in Florida, with its reputation as the “most lied-about state” and as the world capital of the huckster real estate deal, for a landscape littered with warnings about sleazy land and community management. Whatever folks thought of Disney as a company, everyone knew his or her property values depended on the company staying put.
Why then was the rebuttal of the Disney rumor so widely disbelieved? Why was it necessary for people to continue to believe that the company was pulling out or distancing itself from the town? This response confused me at first, but over time I saw how and why the rumor might be helpful for residents. For one thing, it could be used as potential media leverage to persuade the company to get things done in town. Celebrationites quickly learned they could embarrass Disney with exposure by threatening to go to the press. In this regard, they wielded a kind of power over the developer that is not ordinarily available to residents. Disney goes to great lengths to avoid bad press, and public opinion in Celebration is a free agent that the company cannot ultimately muzzle. In December, a lengthy article appeared in the New York Times magazine, questioning the lack of “democracy” in the town. The article suggested that Disney was not coping well with the needs and demands of real people, and was backing off from its commitment to the residents.3 While widely interpreted in town as just another snide piece of Yankee journalism, the article still gave fresh credence to the withdrawal rumor. By then, some folks had begun to view me as an authority on the town’s doings, and so I was often directly asked whether the rumor was true.
The Celebration Chronicles Page 13