This was my first visit to Walt Disney’s Magical Money Maw, and I initially had a typically cynical Chicagoan’s reaction. This place was an amusement park posing as a Disney movie come to life, with college kids in big-headed cartoon-character costumes mingling like monsters among children whose reactions veered between disappointment and terror. Here, the creator (not God but the beaming mustached one on TV) served up turn-of-the-century childhood memories painted with a pastel brush, inviting visitors into a fanciful American past sprinkled with pixie dust to banish actual memories of an era awash in financial failures, railroad strikes, immigrant tenements, racist lynchings, and social protest, right and left.
What a bunch of bullshit, I thought.
And then my son slipped his hand in mine.
It had been some time since my boy had done that simple thing. At nearly eleven, he was just too old for such sentimental slop. But Disneyland was overwhelming, and for every kid there were four adults, so the view moving through the throng was mostly of grown-up asses.
I’d parked my latest Jag in the vast parking lot for a quarter before paying a buck for myself and a half dollar for Sam at the gates. We’d promptly entered a tunnel taking us under the Santa Fe and Disneyland Railroad tracks into the Town Square and Main Street where awaited gas streetlamps and brightly colored Victorian buildings that housed shops with no resonance for a kid like Sam. That Uncle Walt was playing to grown-ups like himself, as we entered his Kingdom, was obvious — firehouse with horse-drawn wagons, Keystone Kops, general store, apothecary, penny arcade, with only the soda fountain not quite yet a thing of the past. Even the movie marquee would mystify a kid like Sam, ballyhooing a Buster Keaton comedy and a D.W. Griffith cowboy picture.
But then Main Street emptied out into pathways to worlds where Sam could immediately relate — Frontierland (Davy Crockett!), Tomorrowland (moon rocket!), Adventureland (African safari!), and (as Sleeping Beauty’s castle in all its looming presence promised) Fantasyland.
That was where we started, going over a drawbridge where finally kids seemed as prevalent as grown-ups, and ($4.25 for fifteen attractions) (never a prosaic “ride”!) into the domains of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Snow White and especially Mr. Toad and his very wild ride (well, even Disney couldn’t deny that was a ride).
In Adventureland, a jungle river cruise offered ersatz hippos and real foliage, while in Tomorrowland I jammed into a mini-sportscar with my son at Autotopia’s freeway before trading them in for pack mules in Frontierland. As a parent who could afford it, and a single dad anxious to show up his ex-wife, I was prepared to endure any indignity, up to a cumulative fifty bucks.
The hand-holding had only lasted through the squeeze of Main Street, but Sam’s giddy reaction to everything but the long lines was almost as good. And in those lines we took advantage of ice cream and other treats from sunny vendors in straw hats and striped shirts who called themselves hosts, addressing us as “guests,” not customers.
On the sky ride, as we sat aloft in a bucket, a wide-eyed Sam asked, “You ever see anything like this in the whole world?”
And I realized something had been tugging at me from the moment we emerged from that tunnel — Disneyland was unique and yet seemed somehow familiar. Not because of any kind of county fair nostalgia, but it stirred memories of the Century of Progress exposition in ’33 and ’34. That I hadn’t made the connection at once seems stupid in retrospect, but the Chicago World’s Fair had been futuristic whereas everything in Walt’s world spoke either of the past or of fantasy — even Tomorrowland had Jules Verne’s Nautilus sub in it, and that dated back to the 1800’s.
But the size, the scope, the audaciousness of it all, took me back twenty-five years, to where my business had begun — when my late uncle had hired me at my fledgling one-man agency to handle the pickpocket problem at the fair. They’d had a ride like this, too, in a “rocket” car between tall towers. On the other hand, Disney didn’t have Sally Rand. But sexy little Tinkerbell was based on Marilyn Monroe, they say, so maybe he did at that....
And Donald Duck’s daddy also had Annette from the Mickey Mouse Club, autographing near an old-fashioned bandshell in a mouse-eared cap and white short-sleeve turtleneck with her name on it, as if any identification were necessary. Watching this little Italian dish asking Sam his name was the first time I ever saw my son blush.
“There’s something about her, Pop,” he said, walking away, staring at the 8x10 image and glistening signature. “Just can’t put my finger on it.”
“Someday you’ll try,” I said.
Looking back at that long, terrible, wonderful day, two things really stand out, and I’m not talking about Miss Funicello. The first is Sam and me lining up along the dock by the Mark Twain Sternwheel Riverboat while Zorro — Guy Williams himself, not some nameless stunt man — engaged in a fierce sword fight on an upper deck. When the evil commandant finally leapt from the boat into the drink to flee Zorro’s rapier blade, that small hand slipped into mine again.
That was the other thing — not Sam’s hand clutching mine in excitement while a good guy in black dueled a bad guy in red, white and blue; but the thought it prompted: that another boy, who’d also have been almost eleven, would never give his father that simple joy, or himself experience the delight of seeing Zorro in person, triumphing over evil.
I might not have made that connection if Bobby Greenlease had not been on my mind of late — after all, the dead boy had in part prompted this trip to L.A. Maybe I’d have just put Sam on a plane home if the Greenlease kidnapping of five years ago had not cropped up again, in however unlikely a way, a few days before.
It began, as much does, in Washington, D.C.
The town’s most despised, fearsome journalist worked and lived (when he wasn’t on his farm) in a townhouse tucked away on the corner of the kind of cobblestone Georgetown street where few Americans could afford to reside — not even in reconditioned slave quarters. After dark, in the glow of gas streetlamps, the yellow-brick, Early American-shuttered, brass-trimmed house had an antiquated charm that even Walt Disney would consider a little much.
The blue-eyed blonde of perhaps thirty who answered the bell had assigned her curves to a white silk blouse, a navy blue pencil skirt and bright red heels, a patriotic ensemble indeed, unassuming but for its contents. Her name was Connie and we’d met. She wore horn-rimmed glasses that weren’t fooling anybody — this was Drew Pearson’s latest “fair-haired girl.” Pearson’s middle-aged wife, who rarely strayed from the family farm, either did not care or had learned how to pretend she didn’t.
“He’s expecting me,” I said.
“Oh I know,” she said. We knew each other fairly well. The last time we’d commiserated about what a cheapskate her boss was had been at the Mayflower, where she’d come over.
I followed her, eyes fixed impolitely exactly where most men would, past a glimpse of a living room and adjacent formal dining room, down a few steps into a bullpen of desks where young men and women sat at machine-gunning typewriters and spat dialogue out of The Front Page on telephones between insistent ringing. Smaller offices fed this newsroom-like area, whose walls were hugged by filing cabinets and a brace of news tickers attended by several anxious young men, who had to be wondering how their journalism degrees had led them here.
Connie paused outside the open door of Pearson’s office, where her boss sat transfixed as he typed a few million words a minute on his Smith Corona on its stand to one side of his scarred schooner of a wooden desk. He wore a maroon smoking jacket (though he was not a smoker and didn’t provide an ashtray for any who were), a big man, burly not fat, who even sitting down looked tall. For such a formidable figure, he had a prissy aspect, his egg-shaped head and waxed mustache reminiscent of Christie’s Poirot.