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Stern's Hotel Cheyenne is a theme park of its own, a fantasy re-creation of an Old West town. There'll be gunfights around the covered wagon parked on Desperado Street, a sandy boulevard banked by "saloons," "goldsmiths," "jails" -- all facades for the 14 two-story wood-frame buildings that house the guests. Stern's other gem, the Newport Bay Club, is instantly a diamond as big as the Ritz. Bigger, in fact; it's the largest hotel in Europe. The blue, white and cream colors of this seven-story megamansion suggest beachside elegance -- a jaunty, yachty summer idled away with the Rockefellers or Von Bulows.
Graves' Hotel New York has a stolid maroon, teal and coral facade. Inside, though, the joint comes alive. Giant floor designs of the Mets and Yankees emblems, an arcade evoking the city's subway system, Broadway posters, corridor carpet that looks like carpet on tile, a lamp in the shape of the Empire State Building, and big apples (big apples!) everywhere. It's Gotham without the crime or grime. Pure Gotham, pure Graves, pure Disney.
The Disney style need not be seen as the apogee of American culture; it can illuminate, it can suffocate, it can buoy or cloy. But when the Disney Imagineers get it right, they get it big. Euro Disney's Disneyland Hotel, the Imagineers' pink Victorian palace, boasts a giant Mickey Mouse clock and, at night, thousands of light bulbs that trace the spine of every ornate gable and cupola. The capacious lobby, with its 40-ft. ceiling, beckons you to collapse into its deep sofas and get toasty at the mammoth fireplace. In the guest rooms, a sculpture of Tinkerbell graces the highboy; in the bathrooms, Hyacinth Hippo, in her Fantasia tutu, cavorts in various poses on the bathtub tile.
As God might have said on seeing Disneyland, Walt is in the details. The spirit of Walt hovers over Euro Disney too. Mice with sewing needles and birds holding ribbons in their beaks adorn the capitals in l'Auberge de Cendrillon, the park's only French restaurant (try the dessert they call Cinderella's Slipper: chocolate mousse in a white-chocolate shoe mold). Dumbo snouts serve as the spouts for fresh water in man-made Lake Buena Vista. At the Hotel Cheyenne's Chuckwagon Cafe, which has antlers in all of its decorating, plastic horseshoes hold the condiments, and nailed to the wall is a dinner bell shaped in a silhouette of Texas. On sale in the Trading Post of the Hotel Santa Fe are tins of pate de bison.
Like the ubiquitous religious art of medieval days, Disney iconography reinforces Disney ideology: it announces that this is a complete, hermetic world, an American world that Disney reflects and helped create. And like a pop Chartres, Euro Disney offers an overwhelming wealth of instructive ornament, commandeering the eye and the mind to ensure that visitors breathe, eat, buy and damn well dream Disney. But the riot of detail is also part of the show, maybe the best part. At other parks -- Great Adventure, Magic Mountain, Universal Studios Florida -- the rides are the attraction; with Disney, the park is the ride.
And what a joyous ride it is, for those with open eyes and minds. As an old Franco-American hit had it, "Ooh, la, la, la, c'est magnifique."