McDonald's: Why the fast food tycoon's wife was nicknamed 'Saint Joan of the Golden Arches'

Picture the scene: In the late 1960s, a yacht sails through a canal in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, United States.

Guests are gathered on board to toast a couple, Ray and Jane Kroc, who will soon embark on a cruise around the world to celebrate their 5th wedding anniversary.

Travel, champagne, caviar, fancy dresses... Ray had recently become rich, very rich, in fact.

The business he had taken from a single diner in San Bernardino, California, to national domination had just gone public.

Yes, Ray Kroc is the man behind McDonald's.

And suddenly, in the middle of the party, Ray realizes that he doesn't want to travel around the world with Jane. He doesn't want to be married to her.

What he wants is to win back his lost love, Joan — a woman he ran away to Las Vegas with years before, but with whom the wedding plans never came to fruition.

Maybe, Ray thinks, enough time has passed for Joan to give him another chance.

So he calls his lawyer, says he wants to divorce Jane and wants to be notified immediately.

Also, offer him $3 million and the house if she accepts a quick settlement.

With those details sorted out, Ray left the party.

His new wife, Joan, would outlive Ray, inherit nearly $500 million upon the burger magnate's death and leave an estimated $3 billion in endowments upon her death in 2003.

In life, she was one of the great philanthropists of the 20th century and her generosity was so exuberant — although discreet — that she would be nicknamed Saint Joan of the Golden Arches.

Founder?

In 2016, a film was made about the life of Ray Kroc, called The Founder , which was titled Hunger for Power in Brazil and had Michael Keaton in the main role.

This title reignited a long-standing debate, because Kroc was not exactly the founder of McDonald's.

In 1954, he was 52 years old and a successful traveling salesman of disposable cups and mixers.

On his travels, he met Richard and Maurice McDonald, two brothers who ran a diner with a different operation.

The menu was limited and no substitutions were allowed. Even more surprising for the time was that the brothers required customers to park their cars and walk up to the counter, rather than have a server bring their order.

This meant they could serve more consumers, an aspiration to which their production-line approach to cooking contributed.

They designed their ideal kitchen by sketching it out in chalk on a nearby tennis court: the grill here, the milkshake maker there, and the frying station with Idaho potatoes fried to perfection for crispy texture.

Everything was optimized to reduce the time between ordering and eating. That's why they called it fast food.

Although the McDonald brothers sold franchise agreements that allowed them to use their logo—the Golden Arches—menu, and mascot, they were never able to replicate their system elsewhere.

This was the part of the business that Ray Kroc took charge of and turned McDonald's into a phenomenon.

As he wrote in his memoir, "Grinding it out," he spent his time working: "Work is the meat in the hamburger of life."

In the midst of all this, one day Ray went to a restaurant and saw a beautiful blonde woman, 26 years younger than him, playing the piano for the customers.

He was a frustrated musician. His father had insisted that he find a real job.

He fell instantly in love with Joan Smith.

Separations and reconciliations

Both Ray and Joan were married.

When Joan's husband Rowley opened a McDonald's franchise, it gave Ray the perfect excuse to visit.

And the visits could be many, given that he was a difficult man to please.

Their restaurants had to be spotlessly clean and follow every single guideline in an 84-page tome.

At first, women were not allowed to work at McDonald's because they could be "a distraction." This ban was later lifted, as long as they were not too attractive.

Love blossomed between Ray and Joan, but after the Las Vegas fiasco, she returned to Rowley's arms.

Ray divorced his first wife of nearly 40 years and the McDonald brothers, from whom he purchased the company with all its trademarks and copyrights.

In 1963, he married Jane Dobbins Green, but Ray's feelings for Joan always cast a shadow over the relationship.

Until he suddenly left her aboard a yacht in Florida five years later.

Joan accepted Ray's marriage proposal.

They were married in 1969 at Ray's largest home, named J&R Double Arch Ranch in honor of his ex-wife. But since her name also began with 'J,' they didn't even need to update the sign.

Joan wore a pink suit and her engagement ring was an 11-carat pink diamond in the shape of a heart.

However, not everything would be rosy.

Ray had "a violent and uncontrollable temper," according to court documents from Joan's 1971 divorce petition.

The defendant, the papers said, "inflicted physical harm, violence and injuries upon the plaintiff."

The news became public and newspapers reported Joan's suffering "from extreme mental cruelty."

But the couple reconciled in early 1972 and the matter was never discussed again.

Human problems

Ray had strong conservative views, so Joan kept her progressive sympathies hidden.

"It would not have been ladylike or appropriate to disagree with him in public forums," she would later say.

But what she couldn't completely hide were her concerns about her husband's drinking.

Every day, he began drinking a whiskey called Early Times, which, as the name suggests, he drank from the beginning of the day until the afternoon.

Joan launched an alcoholism awareness campaign called Operation Cork, which not only means "cork" in English, but — as she later explained — is also Kroc spelled backwards.

"I know it's an unglamorous subject," he said in a 1978 interview with The New York Times.

She explained that she had previously participated in "charities that always have people in line," such as the Heart Ball and the Cancer Fund.

"But when it comes to alcoholism, people are always looking for back doors," he added.

She never revealed why she had chosen this particular cause. In that interview, she assured that she was not an alcoholic nor did she have any close family or friends who were.

Among many actions, Operation Cork produced television dramas about the impact of drinking on the family, and convened conferences of social workers and doctors who did groundbreaking work to address the problem, including updating medical school curricula to focus more on the problem of addiction.

"Our main focus is on the families of the country's 10 million alcoholics," Joan said.

"For every alcoholic in a family, four or five members are seriously affected. We want to show them what they can do and how they can get help."

"I'm just not interested in business," she said. "I have a good head and I'm logical, but my real concern is human problems."

Ray Kroc died at the age of 81 in 1984 and it could be said that it was then that Joan Kroc's life really began.

She was 55 years old and was the sole owner of one of the largest fortunes in the United States.

And his intention was to get rid of it.

There are two ways to view his philanthropy: one is as a tribute to Ray, ensuring his name was remembered, and the other is as quiet revenge.

Many of the causes Joan supported would have horrified Ray.

She gave the Democratic Party its first $1 million donation in its history.

One of its main causes was nuclear disarmament.

In 1985, he donated $6 million to create "a multidisciplinary research and teaching center on the crucial issues of peace, justice and violence in contemporary society."

The Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at Notre Dame was created, in part thanks to her $69 million gift.

She was an early promoter and funder of AIDS hospitals and research, and paid for a boy living with HIV to have a special tutor when his schoolmates refused to sit next to him.

It has funded author and academic Norman Cousins' pioneering work on the effect of the mind on health and resistance to disease, as well as struggling films, zoos and theatres.

Her radical and euphoric generosity, sometimes calculated, and other times spontaneous, provoked by some news that irritated her or people who crossed her path with stories that moved her.

This does not mean that everything was charity work.

Joan did not lead an ascetic life.

He used his private jet as a taxi, to take his friends to Las Vegas for gambling sprees or to have them bring their pets, and he bought things like a Fabergé egg with a small elephant inside for $3 million at Christie's auction house.

He once promised an opera company a $1 million donation if he could skip the show and go straight to dinner.

But when it came to charity, he did most of it without wanting his name associated with it.

When in 1997 she anonymously donated $15 million to flood victims in North Dakota and Minnesota, it only became known because a journalist discovered that she was the benefactor, but she refused to accept public recognition.

This happened on other occasions when it was discovered that she was the source of the donations.

Unlike Ray, she never wrote a memoir. Most of what we know about her comes from her biographer, Lisa Napoli, and her book Ray & Joan: The Man Who Made the McDonald's Fortune and the Woman Who Gave It All Away.

Napoli compiled a list of causes Joan supported, from funding a mushroom cloud statue to the Olympic torch relay.

When she died in 2003, Joan bequeathed $1.8 billion to the Salvation Army, roughly half of her fortune. The bank transfer didn't go through initially because there were too many zeros.

The millions came with instructions to fulfill their wish: the creation of several dozen first-class recreation centers in poor neighborhoods across the country.

Another sum that stood out on the list of beneficiaries was the $220 million she left to NPR, the US public radio network, the largest donation in its history.

She left nothing to public television because they did not return her calls.

Perhaps they didn't know who she was; she had operated virtually in the shadows.

So much so that when he died of brain cancer at age 75, his obituary in The New York Times was just five paragraphs long.