Short Take |
The story you won’t see in the film: “Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away”
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Published: Jan 16, 2017
In the new movie “The Founder,” Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) comes off as first cousin to a certain hard-charging, win-at-all-costs businessman who’s found a second career.
There’s much more to the Kroc story than that, and Lisa Napoli unearths it in “Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald’s Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away.” It turns out that when Ray met Joan, they were both married. That he was an alcoholic, prejudiced against pretty much everybody, and on the far side of the “obsessed” spectrum. And then he died, and something great happened — his wife started giving money away, often anonymously, to causes that Ray despised. The Salvation Army. NPR. Hospices. AIDS research. Alcoholism treatment. No wonder McDonalds expressed “absolutely zero willingness” in helping Napoli with his book — it’s got considerably more protein than a Big Mac. I gobbled the pages. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
