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Faced with long odds, an entrepreneur must know when to give up and when to adapt. Robert I. Earl owned an Elizabethan "theme restaurant" in Orlando called Shakespeare's of Church Street that provided an evening of light wassailing and big eats; last year he moved his operation closer to Disney World and changed the restaurant's name to King Henry's Feast. Why? "People who come to Orlando want to have fun," he told the International Drive Bulletin, "and too many people thought Shakespeare's was something serious and cultural."
This is a mistake unlikely to be made by anyone making a theme-park trek across Tennessee. Start at Opryland. "If you're going to be a theme park in Nashville," says Park Flack Tom Adkinson, "you'd better be about music." But not just country music: Opryland's 120 acres embrace doo-wop and Duke Ellington in as many as a dozen simultaneous stage shows. Then it's 20 miles northeast to Hendersonville and a stop at Twitty City, the monument Country Star Conway Twitty has built to himself, including a guided tour conducted by a giant mechanical Twitty Bird. (Just down the road is Johnny Cash's House of Cash, a museum that is proud to display Al Capone's favorite chair.) The next day you'll tool eastward to Dollywood, "the friendliest town in the Smokies," where you can roast pigs over an open hearth, munch on buffalo- burgers and take a mountain trek on a 90-ton steam train. If you're in luck, Dolly will be there to say hi.
Hank Williams Jr.'s rendition of the red-neck anthem If Heaven Ain't a Lot Like Dixie (Then I Don't Want to Go) should be spitting out of your car radio as you make the more than 150-mile drive from Pigeon Forge to Fort Mill, S.C. It will put you in the mood for Heritage USA, Televangelist Jim Bakker's hotel and convention complex that attracts 5 million of the faithful each year. Cynics call the place Six Flags over Jesus, but you will be disappointed if you come expecting a Holy Roller coaster or a guided walk across the Sea of ! Galilee. Still, Heritage is not your everyday theme park. Now and again, lifeguards shut down the swimming pool to perform a baptism, and at Eastertide the song-and-dance acts are replaced by a Passion play. In a salon of the 500- room hotel, blue-haired grannies sip tea (no alcohol is served) as a harpist plays nearby. "Jim Bakker grew up and asked, 'Why can't everything be nice?' " reports Aide Richard Dortch. The genteel slickness of Heritage USA is Bakker's answer to that question: the triumph of born-again nice.
Disney had, of course, savored that triumph long before Jim Bakker was born. And having tasted success with Disneyland in California, he looked for a larger playground. His gaze fell on central Florida. Twenty years ago, the region was not much more than scrubland, orange groves, gas stations and $5-a- night motels. It was a place vacationers drove through, as quickly as possible, on their way to Miami or the Gulf Coast. But just before his death in 1966, the Man with the Mouse had bought, secretly and at the fire-sale price of roughly $200 an acre, 43 sq. mi. of Orlando ruburbs (about twice the size of Manhattan and more than 100 times the area of California's Disneyland) on which to build the world's largest theme park. Florida's Governor predicted that the scheme would "bring a new world of entertainment, pleasure and economic development to the state of Florida."