Fantasy's Reality

By PRISCILLA PAINTON/ORLANDO

It takes people a while to get used to living in Orlando. This is a city where they vacuum the streets at night and disinfect the public telephones with Lysol, where the airport has a moat with live alligators in it, where you can buy your hubcaps at Hubcap World. "At first Orlando weirded me out," says Bob Simonds, 28, a producer from Los Angeles who filmed a movie there. "I saw it as a big Disney production. It seemed like a fraud, a city on overload. Now I love this place. It's like Norman Rockwell's America or Dennis the Menace on acid."

If Simonds seems to be groping for a figure of speech, so is everyone else who passes through Orlando. Yet in one sense, what is happening in central Florida is as old as the nation. Americans have always built new communities in the image of earlier ones -- from New Amsterdam to San Francisco's Chinatown to Miami's Little Havana. In another sense, the phenomenon of Orlando is something new. Orlando, the boomtown of the South, is growing at a staggering pace on the model of Disney World: it is a community that imitates an imitation of a community.

Orlando's destiny was sealed on Disney Day, Oct. 1, 1971, when Disney World opened wide its gates. Since then, the swamp, once called Mosquito County, has become the top commercial tourist destination in the world. Currently it draws 13.3 million people a year, up from 4.6 million in 1980. As a shrine, it is surpassed only by Kyoto, Mecca and the Vatican. The 2,558-sq.-mi. metro area has the largest concentration of hotel rooms in the country (76,300), with the highest occupancy rate (79%). More than 18 million passengers arrive at Orlando International Airport every year, three times the number entering 10 years ago -- and, if the planners are right, half the number who will alight three years from now. Cities from Rio to Frankfurt have direct flights to the Disney doorstep, and airport officials are already preparing for a day in the next century when tourists from San Francisco will hop across the continent in 39 commuting minutes.

Disney World lures them, but Disney World can't keep them. So people who are enthused about Disney's meticulous vision of social order are moving next door to Orlando -- in droves. In the past decade the population of Seminole, Osceola and Orange counties (which cradle Orlando) has swelled by 102 people a day, to slightly more than 1 million, which is as if the entire population of Tulsa had pulled up stakes and moved there. In the same period, the region led the nation in creating new factory jobs -- nearly 2,500 a year -- while employment in the service sector increased 137.9%. Tupperware and Martin Marietta have been in Orlando for 40 years, but they have recently been joined by other bedrock institutions like Westinghouse, the American Automobile Association and AT&T.

High-tech businesses were attracted decades ago to Cape Canaveral, 40 miles away, and they are still coming. Today they are creating jobs in Orlando at a rate three times the national average. Patriot missiles, infrared sights for night warfare and other inventions of the Star Wars era are assembled only a few miles from the site where tourists board fantasy rocket rides based on George Lucas' Star Wars. Disney World has the Space Mountain roller coaster; Orlando has FreeFlight Zephyrhills, a firm that is experimenting with wind- tunnel technology to simulate a skydiving experience on the ground. Disney's Epcot Center has Michael Jackson in 3-D as Captain Eo; Orlando created the simulators on which allied pilots learned to aim their smart bombs.

The movie industry too has moved in. Both Universal and Disney have built studios hard by Disney World, helping to give Orlando the nickname "Hollywood East." Universal has constructed six sound stages and the largest back lot outside Hollywood. In the past two years, as many as 12 feature films, 500 television episodes and dozens of commercials have been made there.

In the spirit of the place, Universal and Disney studios also double as playgrounds where tourists can experience "real" versions of screen phantasms. Universal offers a bumpy encounter with a robotic King Kong, whose breath is banana scented. Not to be outdone, Disney-MGM Studios Theme Park has created participation shows like the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular, where visitors pretend to be extras along with actors who pretend to be extras on sets that pretend to be sets.

Orlando's rococo industry of make-believe has put some zip into local gossip columns. Hollywood celebrities pop up regularly. Some, like Steven Spielberg and Robert Earl, the British mastermind behind the international chain of Hard Rock Cafes, have even bought homes in Orlando. The area, says Earl, is "full of millionaires driving trucks and wearing jeans."

Millionaires in jeans is the stuff of ordinary boomtowns. But not every boomtown has the Mouse as its Medici. When the $5.8 billion Walt Disney organization established itself near Orlando, it settled on a 43-sq.-mi. property (twice the area of Manhattan) and won from the Florida legislature a sovereignty often compared to the Vatican's. Above all, it brought to Orlando the power of the Disney ethos, which can never be overstated. Executives have traveled to the park to learn about the Disney style of management, which trains employees to cherish Walt, despise stray gum wrappers, follow a manual that sets the hem length of costumes to the exact inch and put on a smile all day every day. KGB agents have visited the park to line up for photographs with Mickey Mouse. Cultural anthropologist Umberto Eco has studied the Disney iconography. Novelists like Max Apple have produced mythical tales about the park's genesis in Orlando. And so many terminally ill children have made a trip to Disney World their last wish that a foundation has established a permanent village nearby to accommodate them.

But even Walt, ambitious social engineer that he was, might have been taken aback by the adoption of his commercial vision as Orlando's urban-planning model. Many new arrivals value the place because it offers the virtues of an escape: it is a suburban sprawl that strives to eliminate every kind of vexatious complexity. "People come here because they know it's going to be safe," says Thomas Williams, head of Universal Studios Florida. "They don't have to worry about the weather. They don't have to worry about the car getting broken into. They don't even have to worry about whether they are going to be entertained." Says William F. Duane, a lawyer who moved there in 1974: "It's like a voluntary conformity. You kind of feel seduced away from reality. But maybe I'm wrong; maybe this is reality." Charles Givens, an Orlando resident whose book Wealth Without Risk has been on the best-seller list for more than two years, puts it another way: "The best place to live is where everybody wants to vacation."

But about 20 miles away at Disney World, many tourists hold just the opposite: the best place to vacation is the place where you can only dream of living. "It brings you back to a moral, clean time that today we've lost," says Shirley Schwartz, 44, of Wayne, N.J. Praise of Disney World by its patrons often turns into condemnation of the disorder and unsightliness in the rest of America. "Do you see anybody here lying on the street or begging for money? Do you see anyone jumping on your car and wanting to clean your windshield -- and when you say no, they get abusive?" asks Linda Staretz, 48, of Livingston, N.J. "Look at the quality of the people. Doesn't that say anything?"

What it says is that Disney World is predominantly white and middle class -- and so is Orlando. The city, like Disney World, offers relief not just from the pressures of geography (it is flat and still undeveloped) and of history (more than half the area's population arrived during the past 20 years) but, most of all, from contending ethnicity. In that sense, Orlando is a new psychological frontier, a jumping-off place for a society that revels in the surface of things, even if deeper problems remain unaddressed.

Orlando spends tax money, for example, to have workers pick cigarettes out of tree planters, but the Florida Symphony Orchestra, one of Orlando's major cultural adornments, almost folded four months ago for lack of community support. Orlando faces all the pressing burdens of a boomtown, from lengthening traffic lines on its highways to pollution in its lakes, but the region will not raise taxes to deal with them. (Orange County has lowered its property-tax rate almost annually since 1969.) In the post-Disney real estate explosion, bureaucrats, farmers and tire salesmen have become instant millionaires, but so little money has been spent on the overcrowded regional school system that some classes have been taught in gym storage rooms. About 15,000 people pack the Orlando Arena for every game of the Orlando Magic, the two-year-old National Basketball Association team; but residents and civic leaders in Orange and Osceola counties complain that the area lacks a sense of community responsibility. "It's a lot easier to pull for the hometown team than to volunteer at a hospital," says Linda Chapin, chairman of Orange County. Says her counterpart in Osceola, Jim Swan: "It's hard to govern when you have no clear idea what kind of place a place wants to be."

If Orlando does not know what it wants to be, it knows at least how it wants to behave: cheerfully, at all cost. Boosterism is almost a civic duty, with a Disneyesque tinge. The city's pitch for a National League baseball team included a promise to build not just a concrete mega-ballpark but an old-time, intimate "field." Orlando hopes to embrace mass transit, but an old- fashioned trolley line is getting priority over a modern elevated rail system. Orlando basketball games are not games but "theatrical productions," in the words of Magic manager Pat Williams. He spent more than a year searching for the fabric and color of the team's uniform. "Disney sets the tone for everything in Orlando," he says.

Before Disney World, Orlando's attractions were the Tupperware Museum and Gatorland, where visitors could watch alligators lunging for chicken carcasses. Gatorland is still there, but now there are Sea World and Reptile World, Wet 'n Wild and the Mystery Fun House, Xanadu and Cypress Gardens. In Orlando, restaurants, hotels, shops and golf courses all want to be theme parks, or at least themes. A store selling Christmas trinkets is called Christmas World. There are Bargain World, Flea World, Bedroom Land and Waterbedroom Land. At the Medieval Times restaurant, patrons can eat roas meat with their hands and watch knights in armor joust on horseback. At the Arabian Nights, sheiks steal gossamer-clad princesses during dinner shows. Orange County's most famous golf course, the Grand Cypress resort, has reconstructed the layout of the hallowed Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland. The Florida Peabody Hotel copies a ritual of the original Peabody in Memphis: every day at the appointed hour, mallard ducks waddle off the elevator to wade in the lobby's marble fountain.

Orlando's residential subdivisions have the same dreamed-in feel: strung along narrow county roads, many are pastel agglomerations of arbitrary architecture, all behind secure walls. "When you drive around Orlando," says John Rothchild, author of Up for Grabs, a cultural anthropology of Florida, "it's not clear where Disney World begins and ends."

That's because the city and the park are looking more like each other every day. The heart of Disney World is Main Street U.S.A. -- constructed, at the creator's specifications, so that the buildings are subtly miniaturized. "This costs more," Walt Disney said, "but made the street a toy, and the imagination can play more freely with a toy. Besides, people like to think their world is somehow more grown up than Papa's was." Now architect Andres Duany wants to bring a residential equivalent of Main Street to eastern Orange County. His proposal is named Avalon Park, a 9,400-acre community made up of compact neighborhoods with convivial squares. Like Disney World, Avalon would be strollable and full of shops and parks, and like Disney World, it would be built in the middle of nowhere. In nearby Osceola County, Disney is getting into the business of residential utopias, harking back, in a way, to Walt's original concept for Epcot. His Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow was intended to be sealed under a glass dome to keep out heat and humidity. It was to have had stores, apartments, schools, churches, offices, marinas, parks, golf courses, a monorail, a vacuum-tube trash-disposal system, a central computer controlling everything from streetlights to hotel reservations -- and it was to have housed temporary residents who were to abide by Disney codes of dress and behavior.

Epcot never took that form, in part, according to author John Taylor, because Walt realized he would have had to subsidize residents to attract them to his closely monitored community. Epcot today is a permanent world's fair that includes two sets of pavilions: scientific ones that celebrate mankind's technological mastery of the universe and a clutch of foreign lands without masses of foreigners -- 11 cultural boutiques that fit around a man-made lagoon as a symbol of human fellowship. "Probably it's much cleaner here than some of those countries you would go to," says visitor Sandy Hyde of Hacienda Heights, Calif.

The current generation of social engineers has proposed an Epcot-inspired "new town" called Celebration, where the cultural center will be known as a "learning resort," streets will be "themed" in styles borrowed from Charleston and Venice, and a special site will showcase industrial wizardry used to design everything from tennis balls to compact discs. The 8,400-acre property, near Kissimmee, will also have a grocery store with computerized carts that display suggested menus.

The concept of Epcot is resonating through another fantastical project, which is being promoted off Port Canaveral, 40 miles to the east. Developers have proposed a $1 billion "city of tomorrow" that would be built on the world's largest cruise ship, capable of handling 5,600 passengers. The floating city, like Epcot, would mix pleasure and pedagogy: alongside the three hotel towers, casinos and villages aboard the nearly quarter-mile-long vessel would be a 100,000-volume library and a giant conference center. At sea or in port, Phoenix World City would be a "place where the best of a civilization converges and cross-fertilizes to produce a fuller way of life," according to a florid brochure.

A group of Soviet and Alaskan businessmen, in the meantime, have come to town proposing to build what they are calling Perestroyka Palace, a park for disco, diplomacy and dealmaking. Plans call for an $18 million palace modeled after St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow's Red Square, linked symbolically to an Alaska mining- and trading-company post by a bridge over a man-made reproduction of the Bering Strait.

Another developer has picked Orlando for a project on an even higher plane: a 480-acre theme park called Vedaland, scheduled to open in 1993. The Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the saffron-robed Indian guru who brought transcendental meditation to the world (and to the Beatles), has teamed up with magician Doug Henning to produce a spiritual equivalent of gourmet TV dinners, a high-tech, fakery-filled playground, ostensibly to help put man in harmony with nature. The 38 attractions will include a building that appears to levitate above a pond, a chariot ride inside the "molecular structure" of a rose and a journey over a fabricated rainbow. Naturally, there are unbelievers. Says Orlando Sentinel columnist Robert Morris: "Somehow I just can't picture Buster and Betty Lunchbucket of Racine, Wis., along with all the little Lunchbuckets, lining up to get in touch with their inner selves."

Orlando has also spawned a number of homegrown financial visionaries, like Glenn Turner, whose name is to financial pyramids what Ivan Boesky's is to insider trading. Before his "dare to be great" marketing schemes earned him a seven-year jail sentence for fraud in 1987, Turner had built a $3.5 million Cinderella-like castle near Orlando and set his theme song to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club anthem ("Now's the time to say goodbye to all our poverty. M-A-K . . . I-N-G . . . M-O-N-E-Y"). While Turner sits in prison, one of his disciples, best-selling author Givens, is prospering in Orlando. Givens bought a lakefront spread outside the city and decorated his driveway with a white Rolls-Royce, a white BMW convertible, a white stretch Lincoln limo and a white Excalibur convertible. Givens married the former Miss Sexy Orlando, and is getting rich through his books (along with Wealth Without Risk, there is the newly released Financial Self-Defense) and financial-advice club by spreading something akin to the Disney spirit. "Life should be lived like a movie" is one of his favorite mottoes.

Beyond wealth without risk, what else should a 21st century American mecca offer its pilgrims? How about eternal life? Social worker Jerry Schall, 46, claims to have discovered the Fountain of Youth near Orlando, and five years ago rented billboard space in his hometown of Philadelphia to advertise its existence. (Schall claims that the miraculous rill is somewhere in the woods, a 35-minute drive from Disney World.) He says he was "disillusioned" with the apathetic response he received, but who needs the Fountain of Youth when Disney's own powers of rejuvenation are well known? "The place makes me feel like I'm living all over again, like I have a second wife," says Louis Schein, a septuagenarian visitor to the theme park. He illustrated the point by opening his umbrella and beginning a little shuffle to the tune of Singin' in the Rain.

Orlando offers hope for spiritual immortality too. Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical group that plans to bring the Gospel to 6 billion people worldwide by the year 2000, is moving its headquarters from San Bernardino, Calif., to the area. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which owns a ranch in rural Orange, Osceola and Brevard counties 10 times the size of Disney's property, wants to build a community for 10,000 families.

Even Tammy Faye Bakker, the wife of defrocked televangelist Jim Bakker, has moved the vestiges of their New Covenant Ministries to a warehouse on the outskirts of Orlando; Tupperware salespeople once used the place to hold inspirational meetings. Standing in a sanctuary with pink walls, a pink rug and large brass giraffes around the altar, she reveals that Disney World holds the secret of her intended comeback. "The spiritual person and the person who wants to have fun, it's the same thing," says Bakker, who helped her husband build Heritage USA, the giant Christian theme park in Fort Mill, S.C., that went under. "When you're in Disney, you have hope that things can be better. And when we know God, there's always hope for a better place, which is of course heaven."

While Orlando's entrepreneurs sell instant Edens, Orlando residents are finding that their earthly garden is being turned upside down. The last orange grove on Orange Avenue was knocked down in 1977. A tourist's only glimpse of the crop that once supported Orlando's economy is likely to be the miniature orange trees "that really bear fruit" sold in souvenir shops. In the past 20 years at least four of the city's main thoroughfares have become cluttered with fast-food joints, gift shops, motels, hotels and gas stations that mount a neon assault ($2.99 FOR MICKEY MOUSE!) on passersby. On some strips, condominiums and steak houses have been put up a few yards from pastures where cows are still grazing.

"It's ugly, it's awful, it's appalling," says Sentinel columnist Morris. "You live here every day as a Floridian with a tremendous sense of loss." The former mayor of Orlando, Carl Langford, chose to retire somewhere else. "I spent 30 years of my life trying to get people to move down there, and then they all did," he says from his new home in Maggie Valley, N.C.

Orange County commissioner Bill Donegan, who grew up in California, sees signs that Orlando could become the next Los Angeles. Traffic on Interstate 4, which runs through the heart of the city, slows to a long standstill at rush hour. A regional planning group has said the highway will need 22 lanes by the year 2000; it now has six. A beltway that will run from the airport around the city is being started just as the head of Disney Attractions, Dick Nunis, is beginning to talk about the need for a second such artery. And so far, no one can agree on where, or even whether, to build a public transportation system for the metro area.

Perhaps the clearest indication of the area's hypertrophy is the state of its public schools and welfare agencies. There the precarious prosperity of a low-paying but fast-growing service sector is quickly exposed. Osceola County had only 19,000 residents in 1960; now it has that many hotel rooms. Many of the maids and clerks who work in them earn $4 to $6 an hour without health insurance in a community that requires a car. They are a mishap away from poverty. "Many people come down here chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but they come down unprepared," says Sally David, who helps steer new families to affordable housing in the county. "They don't have enough money to survive if their car breaks down or if they have to go home when they don't make it."

The lucky members of this fragile immigrant class live in Osceola's throng of trailers. Welfare workers, who have more than tripled their case loads in the past decade, report finding newcomers sleeping in cars or in the woods. At Osceola High School last year, transience was the only constant: 700 of the school's 2,200 students were newcomers; 500 students withdrew before the end of the term. "Kids in the classroom don't even know the other kids in the classroom. The teacher has to say, 'Hey, you,' and point," says David Campbell, executive director of the county's mental-health agency. The Orange County school system is so overcrowded that temporary classrooms have gone up on almost all the 112 school sites.

Part of this mess came about because Orlando's glowing prospects turned nearly everyone into a developer. Land that went for $200 an acre before Disney Day can soar overnight to $100,000 on the rumor that Disney is nosing around. Even Herbie Pugh, one of the area's most vocal environmentalists, admits that he sold 10 acres to a developer eight years ago and pocketed $100,000 in return. "They offered me such a good price, I couldn't resist," he says. Climatic freezes that devastated the orange groves three times in the past 10 years have added to the frenzy by driving farmers into developers' arms.

County commissioners say that until recently, any discussion of controlling growth brought charges of communism. Now local leaders say residents have pulled the growth alarm, but in petty ways and without a corresponding sense of commitment to the metropolitan region as a whole. Orange County commissioner Donegan says he had a group of voters come by his office not long ago to ask him to stop a luxurious 4,000-sq.-ft. house from going up in their neighborhood because they were convinced that the project would raise the value of their homes and thus their tax bills.

Part of Orlando's evident lack of a psychological core comes from the fact that the area has never had any control over the bonanza that has given it definition. In 1967, Walt Disney persuaded the Florida legislature to give him absolute power over his newly purchased domain in the form of a government of his own, seated on the Disney property, with its own fire department, taxation authority and building codes. As a courtesy every year, Disney issues to the surrounding counties an official communication called the "State of Our World" address, which spells out the theme park's plans. The only people allowed to vote in elections affecting the entire Disney property, officially christened the Reedy Creek Improvement District, are its landowners, which means Disney and a handful of others chosen by the company. "They could build a nuclear plant out there, and there'd be nothing we could do about it," Commissioner Donegan says.

Disneydom is used to such hyperbole. Company officials say it's the price the firm pays for being the big man in town -- the largest taxpayer ($23 million a year), the largest employer (33,000 workers) and the largest contributor to Florida's tourism industry. In sum, it is the lure for 60% of the 40 million tourists who dump more than $26 billion into the state economy every year. To charges that Disney is dangerously omnipotent, Disney executive Nunis has a firm retort: "But what have we done wrong? When we came, this was a community that was dying because young people were leaving. Today you name an industry and it now exists in central Florida."

Nonetheless, the county has begun to chafe at Disney's power. In 1988, Orange County commissioners threatened to challenge the company's self- governing status after Disney announced that it would double the number of hotel rooms it owns inside the park area, add a convention center, a six- nightclub Pleasure Island with a 10-screen movie theater, and a water park. Disney was locking up all the tourists on its property, the commissioners complained. Disney settled in the summer of 1989 by agreeing to pay the county . $14 million to help defray the costs of widening roads off the park site. In exchange the commissioners agreed not to challenge Disney's dominion for seven more years.

Everyone seemed happy with the deal until Disney shortly thereafter announced its plan for the '90s: seven more hotels, 29 new attractions, 19,000 more employees and a fourth amusement park. There were cries of betrayal from downtown Orlando. Then the dispute between Disney and the county took yet another turn.

Every year the state of Florida allows regional governments to sell a limited amount of tax-exempt bonds to finance local projects. Last January $57.7 million worth of this funding became available to governments in central Florida on a first-come, first-serve basis. Despite an announcement 25 years earlier that the use of such money for private projects is "repugnant to us," Disney has regularly stood in line for the offerings. This time the company was at the front of the line: it took all $57.7 million to upgrade the Disney World sewer system, just when Orange County wanted the funding to build low-income housing.

When word got out that a corporation that earned $703 million in 1989 had appropriated money that could have helped the poor, the public outcry could be heard all the way to Future World. The Orlando Sentinel called Disney the "grinch that stole affordable housing." Disney kept the money, but the controversy forced the company to promise it would not apply for the bonds in 1991.

Disney's image has also suffered from several unpleasant illegalities. Last year it was fined $550,000 by the Environmental Protection Agency for sewage violations and for improperly storing toxic waste on its property. The company made headlines in 1989 when -- in an effort to stop vultures from pecking out the eyes of tortoises on Discovery Island -- Disney employees apparently trapped and beat some of the scavengers to death. Federal and state officials charged the company that animated Bambi with 16 counts of animal cruelty. Disney agreed to give $95,000 to local conservation groups; the charges were dropped.

"Walt Disney was the messiah," says Bob Ward, designer of Universal's 444- acre theme park. "Disney saw the future, and it was the themed environment." Ward may be right, but even Disney planners are sometimes surprised by the infectiousness of their founder's idea. Everyone might have been less surprised had they observed the Magic Kingdom's effect on a small ^ corner of nature. When they were creating the theme park, Disney planners turned an island on one of the property's lakes into a semitropical jungle and bird sanctuary, a place of bamboo and palms, of plants from Central and South America, India, China and the Canary Islands. The intention was to populate the island mostly with lifelike robot birds, with a few real ones thrown in for charm's sake. But the living birds attracted hundreds of others, which flew in from all around the region.

Now there are no robots on the island, only a colorful, noisy bird colony. Like Orlando, it is thriving, out of the reach (almost) of predators, deep in Disney World's embrace.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Orlando