Castle Keepers
Disney dangles beauty of a sleeping arrangement
Disney’s next marketing campaign—”Year of a Million Dreams”—teases theme park visitors with the chance to win several once-in-a-lifetime experiences, such as cutting lines with a Golden FastPass or reigning as grand marshal in park parades around the globe. But one prize in particular has fans abuzz: each day, one lucky Disney World guest will be chosen at random to spend the night in Cinderella Castle.
A tiny, cast-members-only elevator will whisk the lucky VIPs and their family 10 stories up to the castle’s penthouse, where they can play princess for a night.
They’ll be enjoying a thrill supposedly dreamed up by Walt Disney himself, but one he never lived to experience. According to company legend, Walt had his architect spec in a family suite in the top of the castle as the plans for the Magic Kingdom were first being mapped out in the mid-1960s. Even after Walt died in 1966, the room was kept in the plans. Some theorize it was to eventually be furnished as a private suite for Roy and his family. Roy died two months after the Magic Kingdom opened.
Even then, the room had already become occupied by the park’s PBX in-house phone operators. In the years since, it’s been used off and on by various departments, such as for an attic and most recently as a dressing room for the dancers who perform on the stage in front of the castle. For a while, in between official uses, the apartment was appropriated by a park electrician, Harry Mason, who secretly redecorated the space as his own personal office. Eventually management discovered the hideout, terminated the maintenance man, and tore the place up to deter future squatters.
Currently the room’s not in exactly livable condition—unless you’re on of us easy-to-please Disney die-hards or homeless. Disney construction crews have six months to transform the non-descript workspace into a fancy “royal bedchamber.” (Although the promotion’s supposed to start in October, guests won’t be eligible to sleep in the castle until January 1.)
Interestingly, this prime real estate has never before been open to the public—even though one top executive had been pushing the idea for years. And, about 15 years ago, Disney came close to offering the perk to normal guests (well, normal guests with limitless amounts of disposable income). The idea was Tom Elrod’s, once president of marketing and entertainment for Disney’s theme parks and the man who invented the post-Super Bowl “I’m going to Disneyland!” campaign.
Elrod’s plan was to convert the underutilized cubbyhole into a one-of-a-kind “hotel suite.” He says, “There was enough room—the telephone operators were up in the castle [at the time]. I wanted to get the telephone operators out. There was a balcony. We had ideas—you had a bedroom and a living area. We could have serviced it with room service from the kitchen and the restaurant downstairs. It was all there. It would have been a humdinger.”
The executives in Burbank were “supportive” of the idea, says Elrod. “The internal team down here [in Florida] didn’t like it. I still think it’s a great idea. Design it as the most exclusive, prestigious hotel room in the world. And it was strictly a logistical issue of how you service that room. You know, one room, when the park’s closed, all that kind of thing. It’s all operational issues. And that was just one of those [ideas] that I was unsuccessful in pushing through. Just the operations guys didn’t want to do it, and it was going to cost a lot of money. I still think it’s a great idea.”
But wasn’t Elrod concerned about the possibility of a guy in his bathrobe, sipping coffee on the castle’s balcony? “The balcony was about mid-waist-high, so you really wouldn’t have seen him,” Elrod replies. “It could have been done. Those were those things where you either get people onboard or you don’t. And that was one where I did really try, but wasn’t successful.”
The brick wall Elrod had to get through on the Operations side was Bill “Sully” Sullivan, who was running the Magic Kingdom park from the mid-1980s until he retired in 1993. A Disneyland Club 55’er, he breathed traditions and prided himself on protecting “Good Show.” Sully says he would have gone along with the idea if they could have figured out a way to make it work, but you can tell from his tone that he was pleased they never figured out a way.
“It was Elrod’s bright idea,” Sully recalls. “He wanted to build an apartment up there and lease it out to special people for $1,000 a night or something like that. And we had a hell of a fight over that. It was a beautiful place. It could have worked. [But] I had enough experience in the resort business [managing the Contemporary Hotel in the early 1970s] to know what it would be like: How are you going to get [guests] in and out? You tell me that.”
In today’s world, the challenges to consider might revolve around staffing: you’d have to have hospitality and security cast members to get guests to and from their room and make sure they stayed there all through the night. Sully, however, was concerned about Safety and Show. He points down Main Street. The middle of every night, he says, “I had an inch and a half of water going up this street, hosing it down because this place has to be clean. [Elrod] said, ‘Well, we’ll bring them in the back way.’ I said, ‘You don’t bring your guests in the back door.’ It was a hell of a fight, and finally I won.”
Well, times have changed. Disney isn’t nearly as squeamish at letting guests peek at its backstage as it was 15 years ago. Nowadays, Disney World visitors can pay for any number of behind-the-scenes tours, and Disneyland guests are regularly scuttled out of the park behind Main Street on especially crowded nights.
Now Disney’s committed to fixing the place up and giving it a try. And, if the penthouse promotion goes smoothly, it’s easy to see Disney one day charging for the privilege.
Certainly other “unviable” Elrod ideas would later become popular promotions and attractions. He was one of the people fighting hardest for a Space pavilion at Epcot’s Future World. (Mission: Space would open six years after Elrod left the company.)
He had an ingenious solution for extending the Magic Kingdom’s capacity. “I always thought the park should be open 24 hours during holiday periods,” he says. “This last Christmas they closed the parking lot and disappointed a lot of people. I’m convinced people would come at 3 in the morning if they could get on the rides. That one’s never happened.” (In fact, Elrod’s West Coast counterparts would keep Disneyland open for 60 hours straight to promote Star Tours in 1987.)
“I didn’t even know they did that!” Elrod reacts. “Sometimes a head of the park will glom onto an idea, sometimes they won’t. I always wanted the Rose Bowl floats at Disneyland. Here are these magnificent floats that go down Colorado Avenue in Pasadena and then they’re done. I wanted to truck them all down and put them in the parking lot at Disneyland for a week or two. The flowers you could reflower them.” (After the 2004 Rose Parade, Disney would temporarily relocate its Tower of Terror float at Disney’s California Adventure.)
Makes you wonder what other Elrod brainstorms are gathering dust in the reject file, waiting for Disney to figure out a way to pull them off.
