I was having dinner last Friday in Brentwood with Geoff Morrell, the Walt Disney Co.’s new senior executive V.P. and corporate affairs officer, when he spotted a familiar face a few tables away. It was Bob Iger, the former Disney C.E.O., quietly dining with his wife, Willow Bay.
Morrell, a former BP spokesman and George W. Bush appointee to the Defense Department, who now runs communications and government affairs for Disney’s current C.E.O Bob Chapek, had never met Iger. Yet Morrell was in the middle of a burgeoning crisis over Chapek’s decision to stay neutral on Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, which would bar “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity.” It was a crisis made more incendiary because Iger had come out against the proposed law, tweeting to his 241,000 followers that it “will put vulnerable, young LGBTQ people in jeopardy.”
