Yes. Ray Kroc was having dinner at the Criterion restaurant and was speaking to the restaurant’s owner, who was interested in becoming a McDonald’s franchisee. During the conversation, Ray noticed an attractive woman playing “classy organ music” in the background. The owner took Ray over and introduced him to Joan Smith. Unlike in the movie, the restaurant’s owner, Jim Zien, was not Joan’s husband. She was married to Rollie Smith, who did eventually become involved with McDonald’s, as the manager at Zien’s first location. Kroc, an experienced piano player, did perform duets with Joan, but not until later meetings. They only exchanged small talk during their first encounter. Soon, Ray moved out and divorced Ethel. Like in the movie, he gave her $30,000 a year in alimony, the house, the car, and pretty much everything else, except stock in McDonald’s.
It would take another eight years before she would leave Rollie to marry Ray. In the meantime, Ray married Jane Dobbins Green, who was John Wayne’s secretary and completely opposite Joan in personality. More of a pushover and less strong-willed than Joan, Ray never found true happiness with her, in part because he had never stopped loving Joan. Ray and Jane divorced in 1968. He married Joan the following year. -Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s
What the movie doesn’t show is that Joan’s daughter and mother had helped to convince her not to get a divorce and stay with her husband Rollie, despite having fallen in love with Ray Kroc
Yes. Kroc wasn’t aware that the agreement excluded the original restaurant, but the McDonald brothers insisted it did. He became furious and since he now owned the rights to the McDonald’s name, he forced Dick and Mac McDonald to rename the restaurant “The Big M.” Kroc then opened a brand new McDonald’s a block away, and after six years it put The Big M out of business.
After the brothers refused to give Kroc the original restaurant, he supposedly cheated the brothers out of the 0
Did Ray Kroc renege on his handshake deal to pay the McDonald brothers a percentage of the revenue from the franchises?
Yes. 5 percent royalty agreement they had been getting, which would have been valued at $15 million a year by 1977 and as high as $305 million a year by 2012 (according to one estimate). In his book, Kroc wrote, “If they [the brothers] had played their cards right, that 0.5 percent would have made them unbelievably wealthy.” Relatives of Richard and Maurice McDonald say that Maurice (Mac) was so distraught that it attributed to his eventual death from heart failure a decade later. -Daily Mail Online
Yes. After the McDonald brothers sold the company to Ray Kroc in 1961 for $2.7 million, he began to take credit for its birth. “Suddenly, after we sold, my golly, he elevated himself to the founder,” said Richard McDonald in a 1991 interview (Sun Journal). Kroc reinforced his claim of being the founder in his 1977 biography, Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald’s, in which he largely traces McDonald’s origins to his own first McDonald’s restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois (it was actually the ninth restaurant overall). However, he does include Dick and Mac and their original restaurant in his book. Kroc didn’t open his Des Plaines restaurant until April 15, 1955, roughly seven years after the McDonald brothers opened the original San Bernardino location in 1948 (The New York Times).
For years, McDonald’s celebrated Founder’s Day by honoring “founder Ray Kroc.” However, in 1991, the company decided to honor the McDonald brothers in addition to Kroc. “They are founders, they founded the concept,” https://www.hookupdate.net/escort-index/savannah/ said Fred Turner, McDonald’s then senior chairman. “Ray Kroc founded the company that developed that concept into the largest food service organization in the world” (Sun Journal).