Why should I be mayor, when I’m already king?
A showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.
He recognized the man immediately. A mythic figure in his mid-60s, with a gray mustache and arms full of Christmas gifts. “Mr. Disney?” the writer asked. “I’m Ray Bradbury, and I love your movies.”
The admiration, it seems, was mutual. Christmas shopping finished, the two men met the next day at Walt Disney’s offices for soup and sandwiches on an old card table. The lunches continued for the remainder of Disney’s life. During one, he told Bradbury his plans to tear down and rebuild Tomorrowland, which had already begun showing its age. Bradbury eagerly suggested that his expertise in science-fiction would make him the ideal collaborator.
“It’s no use,” Disney let the writer down as gently as possible. “You’re a genius and I’m a genius. After two weeks, we’d kill each other.”
Another lunchtime conversation found Bradbury suggesting that Disney run for the Mayor of Los Angeles. “Why should I be mayor,” Disney asked with all the modesty afforded to a man who’d built an empire emblazoned with his own name, “when I’m already king?”
Disney harbored an open contempt for cities, often wondering aloud why people chose to live in such confined quarters. He’d moved to Hollywood at age 21, spending the remainder of his life despising Los Angeles’ sprawl and carrying around urban planning books with titles like Garden Cities of Tomorrow and The Heart of Our Cities.
Disney spent his 65th birthday in a hospital bed. He’d begun chain smoking as an Army ambulance driver in post-armistice France. First pipes and then unfiltered cigarettes, he was diagnosed with lung cancer in November 1966 and rushed to the hospital at the end of the month.
In his final years, the press regularly asked how he planned to follow up the success of Disneyland – a question he’d regularly deflect, saying it “will never be finished.” The Anaheim amusement park was the crown jewel of his growing empire, once telling a reporter, “That place is my baby, and I would prostitute myself for it.”
In spite of an immense amount of pride invested in the park, however, Disney was determined not to repeat it. Whatever project came after Disneyland would need to take a fundamentally different form. The planned Riverfront Square project had fallen apart only a year prior. The precise reasons for the collapse are myriad. Disney reportedly took issue when August Busch Jr. suggested that the St. Louis park wouldn’t attract visitors if it failed to sell beer.
In summer 1965, Disney announced that plans for the park had been abandoned, while beginning work on its successor in secret. He set out to create something bigger than a simple amusement park – a “living, breathing community” as he put it, citing the “urban crisis” that formed the subtitle of The Heart of Our Cities, which sat on his bookshelf at the time of his death.
Robert Moses, the unscrupulous planner who’d sought out Disney’s guidance on the 1964 World’s Fair, was suitably impressed by the scope of his plans. Moses predicted the project would become, “first accident free, noise free, pollution free city center in America.”
Disney christened the project, the “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow” – EPCOT for short. Niagara Falls, Washington D.C. and New Jersey were all explored as potential sites, along with Flushing, Queens, which had housed the World’s Fair. That Moses-run project had impressed Disney enough to consider maintaining the site as an East Coast amusement park. “Nothing has to die,” he cryptically told his brother Roy after Fair approached bankruptcy at the end of its two-year run.
Those plans, too, were ultimately abandoned, as Disney began work on “The Florida Project,” quietly purchasing 27,400 acres of land in the Sunshine State for around $5 million. Two months before its founder’s death, Walt Disney Studios released a 25-minute film, aimed at lobbying local politicians to support the massive project.
“EPCOT will take its cue from the new ideas and new technologies that are now emerging from the creative centers of American industry,” Disney’s narration noted. “It will be a community of tomorrow that will never be completed, but will always be introducing and testing and demonstrating new materials and systems. And EPCOT will always be a showcase to the world for the ingenuity and imagination of American free enterprise.”
Disney continued work on the project from his hospital bed, using ceiling tiles as a grid for his utopian vision. He died ten days after his 65th birthday, and so, too, did his planned utopia. His brother Roy, who’d sat with Disney as he traced out his EPCOT plans in the hospital room, could not convince the company’s shareholders to invest in such an expansive and risky endeavor.
Marvin Davis, the developer behind Disneyland, presented his plans to the company’s CEO. “Marvin,” Roy told the park planner, simply, “Walt’s dead.”
Sources:
Walt Disney by Neil Gabler
Nothing Has to Die https://www.waltdisney.org/blog/nothing-has-die-walt-disney-ray-bradbury-friendship