Twilight Cowboy Or (Why Michael Keaton Would Rather Be a Dog)

WHEN HE WAS 3 OR 4 YEARS OLD, MICHAEL DOUGLAS, AS HE WAS THEN known, liked playing cowboy.

- Belinda Luscombe

The youngest of seven siblings, he would amble into his family’s Pittsburgh garden with his guns and hat and chaps, and get himself into an epic gunfight. His brothers and sisters would sneak up to the windows to watch. “He would act out both roles—the hero and the bad guy—all of the dialogue,” says his oldest brother, Robert. The young cowboy even had an alias: he asked to be called Richard McCunion, and his family obliged. Later he would find fame under a third name, Michael Keaton.

Now Keaton has a new good-guy, bad-guy in his sights: Ray Kroc, the subject of his latest film, The Founder. Kroc is widely (and erroneously) believed to be the person who started McDonald’s. But in fact, the first McDonald’s was opened by two small-time California hamburger disrupters, brothers Mac and Dick McDonald, who figured out how to make good food more efficiently. No plates, a nifty burger assembly system, lots of quality assurance.

Kroc ran across them in 1954, when he was a 50-something traveling milkshake machine salesman trailing a string of failed businesses like cement balloons. After the first McDonald’s ordered a half dozen of his otherwise unpopular devices, Kroc persuaded the brothers to be his partners in a franchise. (He told them they should do it “for America.”) But when they proved unwilling to embrace his cost shaving shortcuts, he destroyed them, using the platform that has propelled so many unlikely characters to power: real estate. Keaton is quick to point out that the movie is not really a biopic about Kroc. It’s a biopic about the U.S. and its economy. “Kroc’s representative of a time and of America and of the free enterprise system and of capitalism,” he says. “McDonald’s changed how we live.”