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    Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald's Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away
    Unavailable
    Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald's Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away
    Unavailable
    Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald's Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away
    Audiobook9 hours

    Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald's Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away

    Written by Lisa Napoli

    Narrated by Lisa Napoli

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    The movie The Founder, starring Michael Keaton, focused the spotlight on Ray Kroc, the man who amassed a fortune as the chairman of McDonald's. But what about his wife Joan, the woman who became famous for giving away his fortune? Lisa Napoli tells the fascinating story behind the historic couple.

    Ray & Joan is a quintessentially American tale of corporate intrigue and private passion: a struggling Mad Men-era salesman with a vision for a fast-food franchise that would become one of the world's most enduring brands, and a beautiful woman willing to risk her marriage and her reputation to promote controversial causes that touched her deeply.

    Ray Kroc was peddling franchises around the country for a fledgling hamburger stand in the 1950s-McDonald's, it was called-when he entered a St. Paul supper club and encountered a beautiful young piano player who would change his life forever. The attraction between Ray and Joan was instantaneous and instantly problematic. Yet even the fact that both were married to other people couldn't derail their roller coaster of a romance.

    To the outside world, Ray and Joan were happy, enormously rich, and giving. But privately, Joan was growing troubled over Ray's temper and dark secret, something she was reluctant to publicly reveal. Those close to them compared their relationship to that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. And yet, this volatility paved the way for Joan's transformation into one of the greatest philanthropists of our time. A force in the peace movement, she produced activist films, books, and music and ultimately gave away billions of dollars, including landmark gifts to the Salvation Army and NPR.

    Together, the two stories form a compelling portrait of the twentieth century: a story of big business, big love, and big giving.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateNov 15, 2016
    ISBN9781524702564
    Unavailable
    Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald's Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away

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    Reviews for Ray & Joan

    3.5/5

    17 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A decently thorough look at how the McDonald's empire came together, and how its runaway success allowed Joan Kroc to completely leave it behind and dedicate an enormous fortune to philanthropy and any other pet project she wanted. It's relatively well-known how Ray Kroc took over a restaurant chain that he didn't invent, but this gives a fuller story, even including what happened to the McDonald brothers and their original location afterward. There were a couple of things I could have done without, though, including the breathlessly specific descriptions of Joan's house, pets, etc.
    • 4/5
      Lisa Napoli’s dual biography of Ray and Joan Kroc is a detailed account of the lives of two people who turned out to be a whole lot more fascinating than I expected they would be. Admittedly, Ray and Joan were not always fascinating for the right reasons, but no one could ever call Ray Kroc boring - and anyone that managed to live with the man as long as Joan did, has to have been a little different herself. By opening Ray & Joan with a story about how each preferred to “outsource bad news,” Napoli hints at the kind of eccentric behavior common to both of them. According to the story, rather than tell his second wife that he wanted a divorce (so that he could marry Joan), Ray had his lawyer tell her. Too, rather than face them himself, Ray had his longtime secretary fire employees – sometimes for the most frivolous of reasons (such as wearing a hat he disapproved of or drinking a cocktail he considered to be less than manly). Outsourcing at its finest. Perhaps learning from his example, after Ray’s death, Joan removed her son-in-law (who lived just down the street from her in California) from the McDonald’s board of directors by sending her Gulfstream jet to Chicago to bring her chief advisor to her home to receive instructions about flying back to Chicago to remove the man from the board for her. Apparently that worked so well, that years later Joan even outsourced the difficult task of telling her immediate family that her death was imminent. Ray Kroc, who once sold underwater plots of land to Florida tourists that failed to do their homework, was a born salesman. He may have been a short man, but what Ray lacked in height was more than offset by the man’s self-confidence and bluster – and he was always looking to get in on the inside of the next big idea before anyone else beat him to it. So when he saw the success that California brothers Dick and Mac McDonald were enjoying with their hamburger joints, Ray knew that he wanted in. And by convincing the brothers that he was the right man to sell McDonald’s franchises across America, he got in at the perfect moment. As Napoli clearly shows in Ray & Joan, although there were times that failure was much more likely than success, Ray’s association with the McDonald brothers would ultimately change the face of America (and, ultimately, the rest of the world) in ways both positive and negative.Joan Beverly Mansfield Smith, on the other hand, was a St. Paul lounge singer when she caught Ray’s eye. As beautiful as she was talented, the attractive blond was married (as was Ray) when Ray came into her life, but Joan would soon learn just how little her marriage would concern Ray – or slow down his efforts to make her his wife. It took Ray a bit longer than he had hoped, giving him time to work in one more ex-wife, but six years after Joan turned down his first marriage proposal she finally said yes. Then all they had to do was shed their current spouses.Largely due to Ray’s unrepentant alcoholism, prejudices, authoritarian nature, and single-mindedness, theirs was never going to be an easy marriage. Joan seems to have been surprised as to what she was getting when she married Ray, but her own passive-aggressive approach to their differences did little to ease the couple’s problems. Ray, twenty-five years older than Joan, was not destined to live a long life, and the $500 million fortune he left behind, allowed Joan to become one of the most generous philanthropists ever (during her life, most of her grants and donations were made anonymously). Bottom Line: Lisa Napoli’s account of one of the most amazing rags-to-riches stories in American history makes for intriguing reading. Ray Kroc was a fascinating man, a “character” who met his match in Joan Kroc, the woman who was only too happy to give away the fortune Ray left her.
    • 4/5
      After watching “The Founder”, it was interesting to have more of the story. Immensely readable, Joan Ray Kroc’s third wife, is shown to be a force of her own. She may have lived in the shadow of her husband, but once he died, it was as if she was reborn. No longer worried about showing her liberal leanings, her philanthropic gifts were varied and generous. What surprised me was how despite her lack of baseball knowledge she kept the San Diego Padres that her husband had purchased. Good reading.