Ray and joan, p.25
Ray & Joan, page 25
Though the Kroc Center was flourishing in the year since it had opened, Joan had had some sticking points with its operation. Staff had rebuffed the San Diego Gay Men’s Chorus, whose organizers had hoped to rent the luxurious theater for a concert. Word of the discrimination got out to the local gay press, which ran with the story. Chorus administration didn’t want Joan to think they were dismayed with her personally; she was a hero in the gay community for her long-standing support of AIDS patients and research. The group’s president wrote a personal note of apology to Joan, ashamed that her good name had been dragged into negative news. She invited him to lunch; then she upbraided Army higher-ups for their intolerance; and then she gifted the chorus with a $105,000 Bösendorfer half-grand concert piano, a twin of the one she’d had installed at the center. The present was the grandest the chorus had ever received.
Of course, family was on the guest list: her daughter, Linda, and Linda’s daughters, Allison, Amy, Amanda, and Holly, all grown now and living nearby. She had hoped, after their lives had twisted and turned, that they might want to “step into Grandma’s boots” as philanthropists. Though she had refused to start up a foundation of her own again, she’d set aside hundreds of millions of dollars in one she called the Four Flowers, in honor of her nickname for them. But she’d been disappointed. The girls never took up the cause, and the foundation had been dissolved, without a penny being spent.
Joan would dispatch the Impromptu to fetch her only sister, Gloria, and her husband, Jay, from back home in Minnesota. From the time Joan’s brother-in-law left his job in the stockyards to work alongside Rollie in St. Louis Park, McDonald’s had come to dominate their lives, too. Jay became a franchisee and at one point owned nearly two dozen stores. He was proud to have followed an advertising agency’s recommendation that he install collection boxes at his store’s drive-throughs, allowing spare change to be gathered from customers for his area Ronald McDonald House.
On the way west, Impromptu would stop to pick up a good friend from her South Dakota days, Thelma. Joan’s butler and her maid and her trusted advisors, the coexecutors of her will, would be in attendance. So would her doctor.
One person who would not be present was her companion, Phil. Shortly after Joan had received the news from her doctor, she’d sent him home for good to Minnesota, perhaps to spare him watching her demise.
As soon as the list was complete, the swirl of pre-party busyness began. The bright desert light streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, reflecting onto the crystal dining table. Joan remembered the joy she had experienced while building out the place, her own personal oasis. That day the semi arrived on the grounds, piled up with endless trees to add to the mature ones already on the land, the capstone to this grand creation she’d had constructed for herself. The warmth and flicker in the cold desert nights of the fireplace specially designed for the center of the enormous living space. Her beloved piano, which she now didn’t have the energy to play.
For a dozen years, this lavish home—the first place she ever lived in on her own—had provided a joyous sanctuary. Nights of silly fun with the rat pack, where they’d have dinner and dial up those pricey call-in astrology numbers—when they weren’t off on her plane or her yacht, headed to or from some gambling or shopping adventure. A team of full-time gardeners clipping and pruning the landscaping to keep it pristine, just the way she liked it. Maintenance men tending the Olympic-size pool, always turned up to a toasty ninety-five degrees. The dogs chasing after her as she tooled around the property in her golf cart, a cigarette dangling from her manicured hands.
She could feel the warm rush of nicotine from her lungs to her head.
Since her diagnosis with brain cancer just a few months ago, there had been more bustle and activity than usual on the compound, with so much to organize and to consider. Everyone falling all over themselves to please her, to make their presence known. All wondering, secretly, about her plans for the fortune.
The whirring and buzzing about excited Joan, even though it was painful to move right now. She was starting to lose her words and her wits in a veil of confusion. One of the staff had caught her feeding cash into a paper shredder.
On the morning of the party, Joan asked her guests to be alerted—those who didn’t know the secret—so they weren’t blindsided about her condition on their arrival.
“You are going to see something at Mrs. Kroc’s house today that will disturb you,” they were told by telephone. “Don’t be worried, though. Everything is going to be all right.”
Family members were cautioned to please not discuss the details with the other guests, so as not to darken the collective mood. The same cone of silence Joan’s circle had abided for years now: to leave what was better left unsaid, unsaid. Everyone who came into contact with Joan knew well this edict: Wall out the inevitable curious outsiders. Especially the press. She hated the idea that someone might write a book about her. Her death wouldn’t mean the end of the edict for silence.
The elegant millionaire greeted her well-wishers from the comfort of her new indispensible accessory, her wheelchair. Her hair and makeup were perfectly done, her nails, as always, meticulously manicured. Cosmetics, though, could not mask the drooping of her mouth and eye, nor could they correct her slurring speech. The deeper meaning of the warning call began to click into focus. And yet, the words rang false: Looking at Joan, nothing at all seemed as if it would be all right.
Over the course of the next few hours, cake was sliced and champagne glasses were kept filled to the brim by the attentive waitstaff. Not a single word was uttered about cause or illness or outcome—exactly the way Joan wished.
Toasts were made to the generosity, kindness, and happiness that St. Joan—St. Joan of the Arches—had brought to those gathered here today, and to San Diego, and the world beyond.
With her butler’s help to navigate her around the room, Mrs. Kroc managed a private moment with each of her guests to assure them, brightly, that “we are going to do great things together.” The guests smiled, sweetly, politely, sadly in affirmation, not quite understanding her mysterious words, uttered as if this were a game of Clue. Before everyone left, Joan joked with Commissioner Bond in front of the others. What would she do, she asked, if she left her house—this sprawling, magnificent acreage—to the Salvation Army? Awkward laughter followed. Didn’t everyone here hope Joan would leave them something so grand? They were all already part of an exclusive club of recipients of her generosity.
—
A crane arrived at Joan’s property to hoist the massive Henry Moore sculpture to its new home. The ten-ton bronze Figure in a Shelter, a celebration of maternal warmth and comfort, was to reside in the garden behind the Kroc Center library, the latest starry addition to the Rolando neighborhood. Kids instantly treated this museum piece like a very pricey jungle gym. Joan wished to see the monumental work in its new home, and so she was whisked over, pushed in her wheelchair for the view. No one at the center had known, till then, that she was ill. Her hair covered in a kerchief, she gazed from the sidelines at children gliding happily on the skating rink, swimmers splashing in the pool, the words of Fred Rogers at the center’s opening echoing:
Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. We are all intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not.
It was time to go home.
—
Joan died in her own bed, surrounded by her daughter and granddaughters in her 660-square-foot bedroom, on Sunday, October 12, 2003, at eight thirty in the morning. Her remains were interred directly beneath Ray’s, in a crypt that overlooks a thicket of trees in the Vista of Sunset at the Mausoleum of the Bells, just around the corner from the Sanctuary of Love. Her office issued a statement which gave a brief overview of some of her major gifts. In its own press release, McDonald’s called her a great woman: “The world has lost a true humanitarian, and McDonald’s has lost a true friend.”
The memorial service she’d orchestrated was held on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. Guests, hand-selected by Joan, arrived at the glorious “garden of the sea,” behind her peace institute at the University of San Diego, with its soaring views of the bay and the Pacific Ocean.
At her request, San Diego’s bishop, Robert Brom, led the service. The four speakers Joan had asked to deliver remarks took their turns: Linda Bond, who held inside a tremendous secret; Father Ted Hesburgh; former president Jimmy Carter; and Joan’s granddaughter Amanda.
Billowy clouds imprinted on the garden’s large reflecting pool. The guests sat flanked by the two sculptures installed amid the shrubbery, facing each other: one a gift from Joan, a bronze by Giacomo Manzu of a seated cardinal; the other of St. Francis of Assisi, the holy man who’d devoted his life to serving the poor. On one side of a card given to guests was printed a prayer so frequently attributed to the saint that it had incorrectly become identified as his own:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.
O DIVINE MASTER,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
A photograph of Joan at her most elegant graced the card’s reverse: The blond beauty perched on the bench in front of her beloved white Bösendorfer piano, smiling, trim and radiant in a white pantsuit, long nails painted red; simple, elegant gold jewelry accenting her neck and wrist. This was the Joan Ray had fallen for, years ago, only older, and fiercer, with finer accoutrements, and the means to exercise her big heart.
No organ, or piano, was played at the service. The only music was provided by a harp.
Postscript
It was up to Joan’s coexecutors, Dick Starmann, the former McDonald’s executive who had long served as her advisor, and Nancy Trestick, her longtime assistant, to enact her final wishes. This involved fending off crass, curious callers who wondered if they’d been “remembered” in her will; closing up her home to protect it and its contents; asking the court to seal the names of those listed in her trust, to protect beneficiaries from predators; informing the charities that had been recipients of her final gifts; and routing the money where she intended it to go.
A major part of their work included summoning Commissioner Linda Bond, who left behind Salvation Army business in Oregon to go to California to attend the urgent meeting. When she arrived in San Diego, she was driven to Joan’s office building in La Jolla. Lunch was brought in. As they dispensed with pleasantries and ate out of Styrofoam containers, a copy of the trust was slid across the table for her review.
Joan not only had willed Montagna de la Paloma to the Salvation Army, as she’d hinted, but had left instructions that Bond was to convey the enormous news to the rest of her flock: The church was to receive the bulk of her fortune and use it to replicate the center that had been built in San Diego. The sum was $1.5 billion, give or take several hundred million dollars, depending on the economic condition of the markets at the time the money was delivered. It was the largest philanthropic gift ever made by an individual in the United States.
Top Army brass called it a “gift from God,” but the major windfall presented a bewitching challenge. Senior church leaders prayed about whether they could accept the gift, which tasked them specifically with building more centers like the one in Rolando—a major undertaking outside of the Army’s usual area of expertise. There was fear that the enormous donation would discourage others from giving—“donor creep,” it was called in fund-raising. The church only formally agreed to accept the sum just before it was revealed to the public, in January 2004, after the Christmas bell-ringing season. (Wiring the money into the account proved a banking challenge: too many zeroes.)
The plan was firm, but loose: The Army would have to figure out how to enact her wishes. Half of her gift, Joan had stipulated, was to go toward building Kroc Centers, from scratch; retrofitting old buildings was not permitted. The other half would be deposited in an endowment to keep the centers running. The money was to be divided across the four quadrants that split the United States.
Despite the enormity of the gift, it would not be enough to sustain the centers. That left local chapters of the group with the challenge of raising money for this specific purpose. Bids were called for from cities across the country, and locals had to prove they could build and sustain and fund-raise to support their own Kroc Center. In several communities, like Detroit and Long Beach, California, goals went unmet and centers were never built.
Today, twenty-six Ray and Joan Kroc Community Corps Centers have been opened, from Hawaii to Puerto Rico, where kids skate and swim and play after school; where adults lift weights, sweat in exercise classes, and hold meetings—and anyone who wants to participate can worship in “Kroc Churches,” even though recruiting converts to the religion wasn’t the intention of Joan’s gift.
The year after the gift was announced, Bond suddenly resigned her position in the church. She returned to service a year later. In 2011, she was elected to its highest office, General—only the third time a woman had been named its international leader. Two years later, she retired abruptly and vanished from public life.
—
Kevin Klose received his news via telephone in his office at NPR’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “Are you sitting down?” asked coexecutor Starmann. Then he commanded the executive to pick up a pen and start writing down zeroes. Six of them. Klose had once said he hoped Joan might make a donation to NPR at the elite $25,000 level. In fact, Starmann told him, Joan had left the network approximately $220 million. It was the money that had been earmarked for the Four Flowers. (The sum reached $236 million by the time the gift was delivered.) “Is that the silver club or the gold club?” Starmann quipped.
This was more than twice the network’s annual budget and the largest gift NPR had ever received. The quinoa-and kale-eating public radio employees brought in Big Macs at lunch the day the gift was announced in November 2003. One vice president, Jay Kernis, remarked that it was like Christmas and the lottery, all rolled into one. The emerita network host Susan Stamberg joked she was changing her name to “McStamberg.”
The bulk of the gift, about $190 million, was earmarked for the network’s endowment, which, until Joan’s beneficence, only contained $35 million. Interest alone now would amount to $10 million a year. The remaining $20 million plus went directly to NPR’s operational costs.
As the Salvation Army leaders had been, top NPR brass was befuddled by the windfall. Would it dissuade devoted listeners from opening their pocketbooks to give to member stations? How would station personnel feel? They were perennially in fund-raising mode, paying the network handsome fees for programming. It was they who were on the front lines of the muddled identity between network and affiliates; they would have to explain to listeners that this Kroc windfall didn’t trickle down directly into their coffers. And what about the cranks who routinely criticized the network for receiving government funding? (In truth, NPR got a tiny portion of its funds from the government, but this myth was pervasive among the network’s detractors.)
By the next year, NPR administrators had hatched a plan: To flesh out news coverage worldwide, seventy new staff positions would be added, along with an internship program named for Joan. Fees paid to the network by member stations were temporarily lowered. Joan’s landmark contribution was acknowledged in the lobby of NPR’s grand new $200 million headquarters that opened in 2013, and she’s thanked on the air each day.
—
One by one, other gifts were revealed and announced with pride and fanfare. Sixty million dollars to be spread among the 120 Ronald McDonald Houses that had been formed in the United States since that seed fund created back in 1977 in honor of Ray. Fifty million dollars apiece to each of the two peace centers Joan had built. Twenty million dollars to San Diego Hospice. Ten million each to the Zoo and the opera she’d once walked out on. Five million to KPBS. A million to Crazy Horse. Half a million dollars each to two groups in San Diego that helped AIDS patients: Mama’s Kitchen, a meal delivery service for those with the disease, and Auntie Helen’s Fluff n Fold, a laundry service for the afflicted.
In all, about $2.7 billion—the lion’s share of the fortune.
—
Joan’s first husband, Rollie, preceded her in death by just three weeks. He was killed in a car accident on September 23, 2003. A recreation center, Smith Youth Sports Complex, stands in Whitefish, Montana, a gift made by his daughter before his passing.
As for the rat pack: Mercedes McCambridge died five months after Joan, on March 2, 2004. Helen died six months later, on August 25, 2004.
Newspaper reports pointed to these losses as a reason for the troubling decline of Mayor Mo. In 2013, Maureen O’Connor pleaded not guilty to a charge of money laundering and admitted to taking $2.1 million out of her late husband’s charitable foundation to support her gambling addiction, making more than a billion dollars in bets and losing around $13 million. She blamed the problem on a brain tumor. That her good friend Joan was herself a high roller was never mentioned. In exchange for having the charges dropped, Maureen promised to pay back the money.
—
Mac McDonald died on December 11, 1971, in Palm Springs. In 1964, Dick McDonald married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy, and returned to their native New Hampshire. After Ray’s death launched a flurry of tributes to the “founder” of McDonald’s, Dick waged a campaign to ensure his and his brother’s contributions as the true founders were acknowledged. In August 1991, The Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined: “McDonald’s Pickle: He Began Fast Food but Gets No Credit. History according to Kroc Irks Dick McDonald, Who Rid the World of Carhops.” It spawned, as high-profile news articles often do, a flurry of interest and other interviews. It also inspired longtime PR man Al Golin to write an impassioned response in support of Ray’s legacy: “When a baby is left on a doorstep of a home—the true father is the one who raised and educated that baby to maturity. The McDonald’s Restaurant’s father is Ray Kroc.” Were that true, wags noted, the famous sandwich would be called not a “Big Mac” but a “Big Kroc.”
