Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

THE HIPBONE OF ABRAHAM L.

I don’t think anyone else in the country has what I have in my basement office.

The hipbone of Abraham Lincoln.

We’ll come back to the hipbone in a moment. First…

On the Bob Hope Radio Show in 1938 I heard Jerry Colonna shout as follows:

“Hello, Hope! We’re building a bridge. And starting at the top.”

“Impossible, Colonna!”

“Alright, boys, tear it down!”

Which about describes the artists, architects, blueprinters, builders, and the dreamers of Disneyland, Disney World, and EPCOT, all located at WDI, Walt Disney Imagineering, in Glendale, California.

The gentlemen golfers who build bridges, starting at the top.

Long before I met them, I had defended their dream. Having found from meteorologists the location of the best California weather, they built near Anaheim. When Eastern critics laughed at their fantasy land that would soon sink into the earth, I fired back. My first visit to Disneyland had been with Captain Bligh, Charles Laughton, who plowed through the crowds, cresting the waves of people to take over the Jungle Ride boat and deliver me to joy. Anything, I said, that was good enough for Captain Bligh, was good enough for me.

So, the Disney gentlemen saw me coming a long time before I arrived. But, finally, how did I get to meet these master Imagineers, who painted futures in the middle of the air and then ran to build a foundation under them?

I met them through Walt Disney, who came to me gift wrapped one week before Christmas 1964. Crossing a crowded Beverly Hills department store, I saw a man bearing down on me, his chin tucked over an armload of presents.

My God, I thought, it’s my hero.

“Mr. Disney?” I asked, and told him my name.

“I know your books,” said Walt.

“Thank God,” I said.

“Why?” asked Walt.

“Because,” I said, “some day I’d like to take you to lunch.”

“Tomorrow?” asked Walt.

Not next week or next year. But—dear Lord!—tomorrow!

Before lunch the next day, Walt’s secretary warned me: “One hour, from twelve to one. Then—git!”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said and went in to sit with Walt for a lunch of soup and sandwiches served on a card table.

“Nothing has to die,” said Walt.

He said this not as prophecy but practical fact.

He was, in fact, speaking on some future blueprints for Walt Disney World, the architectural clone, one-size larger, of Disneyland. And far off in the future, EPCOT Center, in Florida.

We were commiserating with each other over the fact that in the history of nations, World’s Fairs were built one year, to be torn down the next. Dumb, stupid, ridiculous were some of the terms we tossed back and forth. Why not, we asked in our verbal badminton game, build a fair and let it stand forever? And, on occasion, tear off the wallpaper inside and repair with new fancies, notions, concepts, ideas, dreams?

At one o’clock that afternoon, I leaped to my feet, shook Walt’s hand, rushed for the door on cue. “Wait!” Walt said. “I have something to show you.”

He hustled me out the door to examine the latest robot hippo, some spare-part mock-ups for the future Pirates of the Caribbean, and the plans for a PeopleMover that could one day solve big city traffics.

Breathless, we staggered back to Walt’s office at three in the afternoon. Walt’s secretary glared at me, tapping her watch. I pointed at Walt and cried: “He did it!”

And indeed he had. If Walt saw from your face that you truly lit up about one of his wildest notions, you were lost and gone on the grand tour, always winding up at Disney Imagineering.

Disney Imagineering’s artists thrive and pomegranate-seed explode inside a nondescript Glendale building that looks as if it might house a thousand endless noon board meetings. There is no sign out front to indicate that at Christmas and Easter, here hides a madhouse of costumes and ambulatory self-wrapped gifts.

No hint that, at Halloween, Imagineering becomes a ghost manufactory, a giant Ouija board that summons up ghouls, skeletons, a mirror with a grotesque mask frozen in it that runs about telling folks they “are not the fairest of them all,” while Maleficent the Dragon inflates herself to tower above the outside parking lot.

Who are the maniacs in charge of this madhouse? John Hench, sent by Disney to study at the Sorbonne in 1939, and the nearest thing to Walt himself. Beyond eighty, John, as he chats with the inhabitants of this millrace, scribble-sketches blueprints and critters with a fine-artist’s hand.

Marty Sklar, the quietest of maniacs, keeps Imagineering off the rails but on the tracks. Hired at age twenty-one, while editor of the UCLA Daily Bruin, Marty remembers that Disney gave him—a raw, untrained reporter—a chance to edit a Disneyland newspaper the month before Disneyland opened, 33 years ago. On Walt’s behalf, he gives other young people a chance to jump off cliffs and build their wings on the way down, at Imagineering.

Between these two, Disney Imagineering has hired some fairly improbable, as I mentioned before, gentlemen golfers, to tee off mind-grenades instead of golf balls.

Item: Tony Baxter, whose career was popping popcorn at Disneyland in his spare time, built a working model of a gravity-fall train. This 3-D calling card gained him the Imagineering job of creating the Big Thunder Mountain Railroad that roars down mountain tracks at Disney’s theme parks. Its twin will soon be built at Euro-Disney, and the chief designer for this new Magic Kingdom will be… Tony Baxter.

Item: Harper Goff, lover and collector of miniature model railroads. Walt Disney and Goff met in a London railroad-model toy store and saw the glazed stare of an amateur locomotive fiend in each other’s faces. Goff wound up helping art sketch-design the Adventureland Jungle Cruise and making sure Disneyland’s locomotives ran on time.

Future item: Tom Scherman. The young man who was so enamored of Jules Verne that he secretly converted his Hollywood apartment into a clone of Captain Nemo’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea submarine with portholes, periscope, and seashell telephones. His landlady, unaware of the transformation, blundered into the apartment one day and, stunned, threw Scherman out and dismantled the submarine. Scherman wound up with Disney Imagineering, building Nautilus submersibles and dreaming up The Jules Verne Discovery World.

And so it went and so it goes.

Sklar and Hench, then, are curators of a vast and vital storage hall of history, a living museum, a World’s Fair unto itself.

In sum, the Renaissance did not die, it just hid out at Imagineering Inc. You need but ask for Sleeping Beauty’s castle, the turrets of Pierrefonds, Mad Ludwig’s towers, or touches of Vaux Le Vecomte. So summoned, they will sprout in a Glendale back lot to be truck-transited down freeways to Anaheim, Orlando or across the ocean airs to Japan.

Let me recount a telephone episode of a few years back.

An editor for the French magazine Nouvel Observateur called from Paris. “Monsieur Bradbury,” she said, “it has been announced, Disneyland comes to France. How do you feel about this? All those toys and games!”

“My dear young woman,” I said. “You don’t understand. It is not toys and games. It is France’s gift of itself to itself!”

“What, what?” the lady cried.

“Good grief,” I said, “don’t you know how much Walt loved France and Paris and your gardens and flowers, and your twenty thousand restaurants and art museums and Carcassonne and Chantilly and Chambord and how he came to visit you year after year and looked around at the United States and said, ‘I will bring all this to my country, one way or another?’ And the gardens were planted and thousands of tables, chairs, and umbrellas were placed where visitors might sit and people-watch, and the castles arose and one was Disneyland and the other Walt Disney World.

“A final touch, my dear young lady. In the past few years, visiting France, I have fallen in love with the work of the French architect Viollet-le-Duc, who rebuilt Pierrefonds, Carcassonne, part of Notre Dame de Paris, and who designed and placed the stone gargoyles up there in the wind and rain. Returning to Disneyland last year, I saw a spire on the side of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, a duplicate of the convoluted and beauteous spire Viollet-le-Duc raised atop Notre Dame one hundred years ago. I called John Hench out at Imagineering, ‘John,’ I said, ‘how long has Viollet-le-Duc’s spire been on the side of Sleeping Beauty’s castle?’ ‘Thirty years,’ said Hench. ‘My God,’ I said, ‘I never noticed before! Who put it there?’ ‘Walt,’ said Hench. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because he loved it,’ said Hench.

“Because he loved it.” Something not needed but needed, not necessary but necessary. Costing approximately $100,000. But added to the castle at that time because Walt wished it to be there. Because of Walt, Viollet-le-Duc lives in America.

“Oh, Monsieur Bradbury,” cried the lady editor in Paris. “You make me feel so good!”

“Because,” I replied, “it’s true.”

What else is true? Besides Euro-Disney, what other wonders have Sklar and Hench summoned up by striking the earth with Walt’s old sketchbook?

Norway, with its fjords and dragon-headed ships as part of the EPCOT Showcase territory.

A pulsing heartbeat excursion through the human body in the Wonders of Life adventure at EPCOT Center.

And the lazarus-like resurrection, out of the California tombs, of Hollywood itself!

Millions of Japanese camera-hung tourists fastbrake their limousines at Hollywood and Vine each year. Leaping out merrily, they are shocked to be greeted by slimy winos, dilapidated hookers, arthritic dogs, burned-out hot dog stands and homeless vagrants whose arms look fresh from a porcupine fusillade.

All this being true, do you rebuild Hollywood? Yes!

But, two-thousand miles away! at the Disney-MGM Studios at Walt Disney World.

Here stands Grauman’s Chinese, when it first rose to confound the apple-yard architects and cowboy real estate agents of the 1920s. Here lives Hollywood and Vine as it never was but should have been, with real movie stars on each corner. The last time anything like that happened was when Cecil B. DeMille drove his chariots through the intersection, on his way to Galilee. Once, as a child on roller skates, I thought I saw Clark Gable there, flagging a taxi. But it was another country, another time. Disney will rebirth the whole thing. Harlow, Gable and Colbert would feel right at home parading down this boulevard.

Ironic then, that while the old Hollywood staggers toward a renovation that will maunder on until 2005, Disney’s Tinsel Town, for the same cost, will long since be up and operating.

Like Hollywood, like America, like the world.

For the simple fact, proven over and over in the history of towns and cities, is that city fathers and chambers of commerce know not habitations, nor much of anything else. The cities have gone to ruin and the people a ruination within. With no imaginative cures, the mayors and councils have floundered and sunk in tar and taxes. The Disney duchies are the answer.

The Disney duchies? Men who answer to the motto: In excellentia lucrum. In excellence is profit. Imagineers who show up, ask for carte blanche, no interference from dreamless officials high or low, and proceed to blueprint a city and build a dream.

Just a few years back, Houston Intercontinental Airport asked Imagineering to create a PeopleMover to sort out and distribute the airport’s mobs.

Imagineering has just completed a master plan for recreating the remnants of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, delivering forth a fresh new Seattle Center.

With this as a beginning, by century’s end, most if not all of our American towns will have been touched and changed all for the good, by Walt’s Paris-inspired, France-rejuvenated ghost.

After Walt died, a rumor had it that he had become a giant popsicle at some cryonics morgue in East Azusa. Not so! How ridiculous! Walt didn’t have to immortalize himself.

As he himself said: “Nothing has to die.”

So—turn backward, turn backward, O Time in thy flight. Let old cities and new arise.

And Walt? Hell, he’s not dead. Just hiding out, like the hipbone of old Abraham L. and the Renaissance, at Disney Imagineering.

Or, as he said to me one day when I asked him to run for mayor of Los Angeles:

“Oh, Ray, why should I be mayor, when I’m already king?”

As for the Hipbone of Abraham L.? When the Disney technicians finished a new model of Lincoln and were ready to discard the old robot, someone, looking at the mechanical hipbone, said, “What’ll we do with this?”

“Why,” said someone else, “send it to Ray Bradbury.”

They did.

It’s here, on my desk, as I write.