THE BIG CHEESE
‘Ray’ shines light on big-screen portrait of McDonald’s ‘Founder’
Michael Keaton stars in “The Founder” as Ray Kroc, the salesman who turned McDonald’s into a billion-dollar global fastfood empire.
The film’s focus is limited to the 1950s, when Kroc discovered and exploited the McDonald brothers (Richard and Maurice, played by Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch), who invented their ground-breaking fast food concept: assembly line production that delivered fast and consistent hamburgers, fries and shakes.
Kroc made the Golden Arches ubiquitous and, a corporate shark, eliminated the McDonalds from the hamburger’s history and the business. What “The Founder” doesn’t tell is plenty.
But a recently published book does. Lisa Napoli’s exhaustively researched “Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away” (Dutton, $27) uncovers the man behind the burgers.
In “The Founder,” Keaton portrays Kroc as being transformed through his success from an exasperating dreamer to an egomaniac.
The real Kroc, writes Napoli, was that — and a functioning alcoholic. He dumped his long-suffering first wife, Ethel (Laura Dern in the film), for the love of his life, Joan Mansfield Smith (Linda Cardellini), a married piano playing, cigarette smoking lounge entertainer.
As he wooed his future wife, Kroc gave Joan’s husband, Rollie (Patrick Wilson), a McDonald franchise that made him a rich man.
“The Founder” skips the lovers’ complicated reality. In 1963, Joan, pressured by her mother and husband, broke her engagement to Kroc.
Kroc rebounded just
weeks later and married another blonde. Five years later, they divorced (with a $20 million settlement) and in 1969 he finally married Joan.
“Ray & Joan” goes behind the couple’s glamorous facade of mansions, a private jet, luxury yacht and the San Diego Padres baseball team to reveal Ray’s abusive temper and drinking problem.
A stroke forced Kroc into rehab. After his death in 1984, his widow’s lifelong passion was to highlight the dangers of alcoholism, financing studies on alcohol addiction and several issue-oriented TV movies.
Kroc was a staunch conservative; his liberal wife, often anonymously and impulsively, supported AIDS research long before it was fashionable, donated to the Democrats, National Public Radio and gave more than $2 billion to the Salvation Army.
A lifelong chain smoker, Joan died of a brain tumor in 2003. She was 75.
(“The Founder” opens Friday.)