No less than Disney’s allergy to bad press is its fear of a bad day in court. Many residents, especially those who had been beaten up by the builders, increasingly suspected that the company was backing out to avoid liability in class-action lawsuits, especially if a case came to a local jury trial in Osceola County, where cumulative resentment of Disney might take its toll. Whether this was true or not, the rumor helped spur on homeowners, like Dickson, Jones, and others in the more badly built houses, in their resolve to protect what might turn out to be a minimal return on their housing investment.
On other occasions, the substance of the rumor could be used to allay the prejudices of outsiders about the town. For example, just before the first (and last) Catholic mass was conducted in town in early December, an informational meeting was conducted among those interested in forming a parish in the Celebration area. One gentleman in the audience, who was not a resident, wanted to know about Disney’s involvement in the initiative. From his tone, it was clear that he would view any such involvement as a bad thing. Rodney Jones, a leader of the Catholic group in Celebration, assured him that the company had played no role in the group’s plans, and implied there was no longer a direct connection between Disney and the town. In a county where Disney’s presence is resented as much as it was welcomed, any distance the town could establish from the company helped its residents counteract a local bias against Celebration. This prejudice was all too readily evident in encounters in supermarkets and in daily interaction outside the white picket fence. Joan Jones, ex-music teacher and wife of the pastor, summed up a very common experience for townsfolk: “People look you up and down when they learn you are from Celebration—as if you’re not a real person and if you are, what are you doing shopping in Walgreens anyway?”
Whatever other uses, public and private, that people had for the rumor, it was born of an intimacy with the company that was quite different from these infamous rumors about the tainted products of large corporations that circulate internationally and that are often impossible to eradicate: Kentucky Fried Rat, horse-meat Big Macs, the “satanic” Procter and Gamble logo. These stories provide lowly consumers and disgruntled employees some control, however desperate and minuscule, over the workings of powerful corporations. The Celebration rumor was in an entirely different class, but I grew to believe it harbors some truths about the principles of subcontracting by which Disney and most other large companies have come to do business. Under this arrangement, liability and accountability are passed down along with the labor contract. While the needs of the parent company drive the chain of labor, the company does not consider itself responsible for what happens further down the chain. This is the principle that gives rise to sweatshops and exploited labor all over the global economic map. While the development of Celebration does not strictly adhere to this business model—builders and school boards and hospitals are not exactly subcontractors of the developer—it behaves in a way that is quite similar, providing the company with exemption from accountability: in home construction, in schooling, in the health facility, and in civic affairs. From the perspective of Disney’s presence, Celebration may already be something of a “ghost town,” its streets faintly echoing with the footsteps of Imagineers lately departed or long gone. Some part of residents’ fantasies about Eisner surely stemmed from the practical desire to hold a paternal figure accountable to a local community, the way it once was in the era of large family companies, before subcontractors became prevalent, and before CEOs became technocrats, accountable only to their stockholders and hardened to the habit of picking up their cellular phones to order the transfer elsewhere of hundreds of local jobs.
There were a few more mundane realities behind the withdrawal rumor. In the fall of 1997, the company had opened Downtown Disney—an urban entertainment complex of restaurants, movie theaters, music clubs, and retail stores—within Disney World itself. There were internal worries that tourists would confuse Celebration—advertised hitherto as “Disney’s town”—with the Downtown complex. Celebration’s merchants were especially sensitive to the debate, knowing full well that the company’s percentage of sales in town were meager compared to the revenue potential of Downtown Disney. Their written demand to TCC that the company start busing in tourists to Celebration from the Disney World properties was roundly rejected. Similar anxieties had plagued the design plans for a hotel in Celebration. Initially a quaint forty-room inn designed by Graham Gund, the hotel was redesigned, at considerable cost, with the aim of stimulating the sluggish retail sector. It morphed up to a size—115 rooms that would put it in competition with Disney’s own resort hotels. Dominating the lake frontage on two acres, the contract for the new four-star hotel was eventually secured by Richard Kessler, who has the reputation of being the Donald Trump of Central Florida resort developers.
The internal wavering over these and other perceived conflicts of interest was complicated by the rapid turnover of management within TCC. Somewhere along the way, balls got dropped, threads got lost, memories got revised. Like any other complex organization, there were differences of opinion and knowledge recall within Disney ranks. In my interviews with management, I often heard stories at variance with each other. One TCC official told me that Disney’s name was never supposed to be attached to the town, and that its appearance in marketing materials was actually an oversight. A similar confusion surrounded the decision to treat Celebration as a one-off project. Despite assertions to the contrary from officials, former members of the TCC team suggested that there had been expectations of further development projects, and that the momentum of the team’s work had been arrested by the decision to close the company’s development arm in Florida.
Lines of communication got crossed. Eventually, a consensus story emerged and was laid over the old ones, like a smooth new road surface. In November, at least, the story went like this: Celebration is to be developed as its own brand, distinct from Disney’s, and so, from a business point of view, is being treated in a way similar to company products that are not branded with the parent name. The network TV shows produced by Disney-owned ABC, for example, are not Disney branded, and as such, protect the company from full accountability for their content. In the case of Ellen, which fueled a Southern Baptist boycott of the company’s products, and Nothing Sacred, which provoked a Catholic League boycott, this arrangement provided some, though not enough, relief from exposure.
THE ELLEN EFFECT
The mere presence of Disney provided raw material for speculation, sometimes as baroque as the fantasies it has merchandised for much of this century. Some of the more bizarre centered on the sexual preferences of Disney employees. This had been a center stage focus ever since the Southern Baptist Convention and the American Family Association voted in 1997 to boycott Disney for its granting of standard company benefits to same-sex partners, for the “promotion of homosexuality” in some of its films and TV shows like Priest and Ellen, and for the use of its theme parks as the occasion for the annual Gay Days (an event that is not promoted by the company but is immensely lucrative, coming at a slow time of the year). As a result, Disney is now perceived locally as a “gay” company. Notwithstanding the prejudicial origins of this perception, Disney, as a media entertainment company, would be expected to have a sizable proportion of gay employees. As it is, the company, whom its gay and lesbian employees consider to be gay-friendly, was still the last major Hollywood studio to extend same-sex benefits.4
Christian boycotters against “The Tragic Kingdom,” who occasionally leafletted the slow-moving traffic on route 192, just outside Celebration, put the consensus figure of gay employees at 40 percent. One of Celebration’s own gay male residents acknowledged that he wasn’t at all surprised by this estimate: “How many straight guys would do that kind of job? Having to be that perky and smiling all day long?” He was referring to the kind of emotional labor that is performed by many of the front-rank employees (“cast members”) in the park. Another, who said th
at he had come to Celebration “to live happily ever after with my prince,” remarked that “the straight guys at Disney, even those who are married with seven kids, are soft and gentle, and almost ‘swishy’ in the way they say ‘Hello’ to you in the street.” As for the town, it needed more gay men: “Who the hell else is going to help with the decorating of all these houses?” “I’m so Disney,” he informed me, and, laying it on a bit thick, “this really is the gayest straight town.”
Interrupting an otherwise routine chat at Barnie’s coffeehouse one morning, George Gleason, a resident with a good deal of time on his hands, leaned over to quiz me: “Now, you’re a heterosexual man, aren’t you?” He seemed to be hoping I would say yes. “I guess so,” I replied. “But you’ve had homosexual experiences?” again hoping I’d say yes. “Well, of course, haven’t we all?” Apparently comforted by my response, he recounted how his male neighbor, who was having proverbial marital problems, had come on to him on their porch one evening. Having your neighbor “bury his face in your crotch,” as George put it, is not exactly the kind of Celebration experience he had been expecting. But the neighbor was a Disney employee, and, he added, “you know how they can be.” Accordingly, relations between the two neighbors became a mite strained. It so happened that George’s neighbor on the other side was also a cheater; she had been having an affair with a Disney executive—another woman, I was led to assume. All of a sudden, George was caught in a tightening circle of homosexual lust, besieged on all sides by same-sex tomfoolery. “As I walked downtown I noticed all of the buildings had these pastel colors, and I got to thinking that this town must have been designed by homosexuals. Then you go to the school and you have all these fancy methods that the gay teachers have cooked up. What the heck’s going on here, man?”
Who knows what game George thought he was playing with my head on that particular morning? But it was not the last freakish conspiracy theory about homosexuality I would hear in this town so devoted to realizing the full potential value of the nuclear family, and not the last time my own sexuality was probed. Sometimes the anxiety about sexuality was a little more public. One of the many issues that embroiled the school during its first year was the choice of its mascot and logo. A Disney cartoonist had been commissioned to draw a barely truculent (and almost happy-go-lucky) winged lion, and the moniker “Pride” was proposed for the school; the intended reference was to a pride of lions. The student body as a whole had voted for the proposal, although the seniors, more mindful of the impact the mascot might have on the reputation of the sports teams, had voted against. Sure enough, Celebration’s athletes were often taunted by other teams for the effete, or insufficiently aggressive, associations carried by the mascot—a fuzzy cartoon friend and not a would-be predator—and also by the rallying cry of Pride, associated with the gay liberation movement. Not a few of the students came from deeply religious homes, and one of them explained the situation to me:
Insufficiently aggressive: the Celebration School mascot. (Photo: the author)
One thing most kids are concerned with is the school name. I don’t want to sound politically incorrect, and since you’re a college professor, I’m sure you know what Pride means—it’s a little club. But many people here don’t like that sort of thing. They have suspicions about some of the teachers and their preferences. People from the South are not open-minded about that sort of thing, they don’t quite understand it. Personally, it doesn’t get to me that bad, because my Mom works at Disney and many of her coworkers are gay. It’s something I’ll ave to live with and I really can face it, even though I’m Christian and we believe it’s wrong. The Bible says it’s wrong. One of my dad’s bosses was gay and he was really good friends with him. But you want a really strong name, like the Eagles, or the Bears or the Tigers, not Pride. There’s never been a recall on it—though many folks are opposed—so I suppose we’ll have to live with it.
Others students said they didn’t care whether or not someone was gay but still resented the taunts and accusations of “wimpiness” that went with being bearers of Pride. In a region that is heavily Southern Baptist, the sports teams had a tough time defending the choices. So did members of the school’s advisory council who debated the issue for several weeks. After a certain point, the parents in this generally tolerant community had a more difficult time discussing the matter, as if drawing attention to the links would further inflame the issue. Not a few had made some skewed connections themselves, and, like George, were no doubt wondering, “What the heck is going on here?” But who could regret that such issues were matters of public discussion at all? The American landscape is peppered with small towns that gay people have famously made a culture of fleeing from. Celebration already boasted a sizable gay population, including several same-sex couples who happened to live on the same street, prompting the cute rumor that the neighborhood had been designated as a “gay ghetto” by the town’s planners. While the town also hosted a smattering of religious homophobes, the prevailing ethos in a community so identified with families was one of inclusion.
Despite the initial efforts, happily curtailed, to provide the town with “background stories” in the Disney tradition, this was a place that had managed to evade the Disney policy of storytelling. But there was no dearth of storytelling among Celebrationites, some of it generated by the romance of the new town and the publicity it had garnered, and some by people’s breathless efforts to keep track of fast-moving events. Gossip on the street was so lush it grew rumors like spring shoots. At times, I was witness to its raw, nonadult form, in full flow that evening outside the cinema, and on many subsequent occasions among the edgy adolescents of Celebration as they fanned out over downtown in nomadic bands after sundown, skateboards in tow and hormones at a barometric high. At other times, I saw the germination of the stories in public meetings, among socially prominent citizens, or in the heat of dialogue among company employees and anxious residents. But most of the time you could tap the rumor mill simply by taking to Celebration’s streets, designed, after all, for high sociability.
Ten weeks into my residency here, my own dilemma was becoming clear. Would it be fair to draw any conclusions from these stories and the experience of residents about the future of suburban living? A number of writers had already declared, often grudgingly, that Celebration might hold the key to one version of tomorrow’s world. But however representative in the range of residents it had attracted, it was unique in several respects, and in one above all: the high-profile circumstances under which it was evolving—almost every national and international media organ had run a Celebration story—were, from the outset, a dynamic factor in the growth of the community. There had never been a town so exposed to media attention, and I could not count myself apart from that scrutiny. But since I was not looking for headlines, I had at least pledged to meet people where they were, and not where I, or my editor, or my colleagues, would like them to be. I would take the stories I heard and the exchanges I saw on trust and in sympathy, if only because trust, while no guarantor of truth, is not always a willing accomplice of make-believe, and sympathy, more than urban design and planning, is the master key to community life.
6
RIDERS ON THE STORM
“THE GIANT PIZZA”
One day a giant pizza went to town. It crushed a car. It crushed another car. Then it crushed a building. Then it crushed a car. Then another giant came.
—Poem on a wall, Lower 3 neighborhood, Celebration School
In January and February, Florida is a rehearsal area for two kinds of events that see major league action elsewhere. One is baseball spring training (the Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros are Osceola stadium tenants), the other is tornado season. This year, tornadoes became the main event. With the lower branch of the jet stream sagging south of the Panhandle, and the Gulf of Mexico relaying and feeding the Pacific winter storm track, the clash of cold and warm air often creates pressure gradients sharp enough for twisters to touch down. T
hey are typically weak and less likely to stay on the ground than those that fire up later in the season in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. In an El Niño year (and this was the year when El Niño was blamed for everything), the energy levels of the storms are turbocharged. In late February, several killer tornadoes with wind strengths as high as 250 mph, or twice the speed of Hurricane Andrew, came to town, devastating Osceola neighborhoods just two miles to the east of Celebration and in all three counties to the north. Forty people died and hundreds were left homeless in the wake of the state’s worst ever twisters. These counties, especially Osceola, had already absorbed record rainfall (six times the average) throughout my winter stay. Officials in Celebration had seen fit to praise the town’s drainage system, which had kept residents high and dry while much of the county was under water. Winds from hell now joined the high water.
The Celebration Chronicles Page 14