In a key scene from The Founder, a new drama about the making of McDonald’s, 52-year-old salesman Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) tries to persuade the McDonald brothers, Dick (Nick Offerman) and Mac (John Carroll Lynch), to let him franchise their revolutionary fast-food business across the nation. The brothers are small-time operators, content with their thriving restaurant in San Bernardino, California, but Kroc, an Arlington Heights entrepreneur who’s been chasing business opportunities all his life, has a special feeling about McDonald’s. For years he’s been crisscrossing the country as exclusive sales agent for a newfangled multiple-milkshake mixer, and in every small town he sees a courthouse topped with a flag and a church topped with a steeple. To these he wants to add the brothers’ golden arches. “McDonald’s can be the new American church,” he tells Dick and Mac. “And it ain’t just open on Sunday, boys. It’s open seven days a week.”
Faith and family are naturally intertwined, and as The Founder demonstrates, Kroc sold McDonald’s as the ultimate family experience. “McDonald’s—is—family,” he tells his small staff, and in many cases this is literally true: spouses, Kroc discovers, make the best franchise owners, usually with the husband handling the kitchen operations and the wife keeping the books. Ironically, Kroc had a tense relationship with his grown daughter, and as he wrote in his memoir, Grinding It Out, his discovery of McDonald’s turned his marriage into “a veritable Wagnerian opera of strife.” Siegel follows the slow dissolution of Kroc’s marriage to the easygoing Ethel (Laura Dern), who’s tired of never seeing him, and his secret courtship of Joan Smith (Linda Cardellini), whose husband, Rollie (Patrick Wilson), operates a McDonald’s franchise in Rapid City, South Dakota. Like the adulterous protagonist in The Master, Kroc chooses a lover from among his flock.
Joan Kroc is a relatively flat character in The Founder, but in real life she demonstrated some of the humanity her husband lacked. Theirs was a stormy marriage—in 1971 she filed for divorce and took out a restraining order against him—and according to Lisa Napoli’s biography Ray & Joan, her fruitless attempts to get him off the bottle led her to Al-Anon and eventually inspired her to launch an alcohol-awareness campaign through their Kroc Foundation. After Ray Kroc died in 1984, Joan focused on giving his fortune away to charity—Napoli’s book includes an 11-page appendix of the millions and millions of dollars she donated during the next two decades to peace initiatives, AIDS treatment, addiction treatment, medical research, cultural organizations, hunger programs, and on and on. Her posthumous gifts included $225 million for National Public Radio and $1.5 billion for the Salvation Army. Too bad there aren’t more churches like that, and open seven days a week. v
Directed by John Lee Hancock
