The first all-female audience ever at The Drew Barrymore Show cheered and cheered for guest of honor Kamala Harris in April when Barrymore’s buddy, Ross Matthews, threw a softball at the vice president.

“I heard a rumor you worked at McDonald’s?”

“I did. Yeah, I worked at McDonald’s,” Harris laughed. “When I was in school … I did fries. And then I worked the cash register.”

“I didn’t know that about you,” Barrymore gasped.

So did those who followed Harris’s long career in public life, until she ran for president in 2019 and made her job a central part of her biography.

Harris’s McDonald’s stint, which reportedly took place at a California Bay Area franchise the summer after her freshman year of college, is a recent addition to her carefully crafted life story. For years, Harris never mentioned it, not during the campaign, not in two books. It was absent from a cover letter and resume she submitted a year after graduating. Third-party biographers didn’t mention it. It wasn’t until Harris ran for president in 2019 and spoke at a labor rally in Las Vegas that she mentioned the job, telling the crowd that “I was a college student when I worked at a McDonald’s.”

McDonald’s boasts that one in eight Americans has worked at the fast food chain, and Harris, whose campaign is light on policy and heavy on image, has used her job in the fast food industry to show what the Washington PostIn a credulous piece this month about the Harris-McDonald’s connection, she described her as “her humble background.” (Harris is the daughter of a prominent cancer researcher, whom her campaign describes as “a working mother,” and a veteran Stanford economist, who split when Harris and her sister were children.)

Earlier this month, Harris’ campaign said she was using her McDonald’s salary to pay for college. “Vice President Harris is the daughter of a working mother and worked at a McDonald’s to pay for college,” campaign spokeswoman Lauren Hitt said this month. A pro-Harris super PAC ad said she “worked her way through school at McDonald’s.” And former President Bill Clinton joked at the Democratic National Convention that “she’s going to break my record as the president who’s spent the most time at McDonald’s.”

At the same time, however, Harris’s image makers have changed the story a little bit. According to an August 14 article in Politics, An earlier version of a Harris campaign ad said she was working at McDonald’s to “pay for college.” Aides changed the script to show that “she really only took the summer job to earn some extra spending money,” as Politics put it.

The Politics story, which only a few hours after the Washington Free Beacon contacted the Harris campaign with a series of detailed questions about Harris’ claims about her employment at McDonald’s, but did not say when exactly Harris worked at the restaurant, or where. The campaign did not respond to the Free beacon‘s questions.

It’s possible that Harris did indeed work at McDonald’s in the early 1980s. But the lack of that detail in public documents, and her campaign’s reticence and refusal to provide further details, raise questions about what is a foundational story.

Monday is the New York Times reported without attribution that Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, and moved to Montreal with her mother and younger sister at age 12, “returned to the Bay Area for a summer during college when she worked at a McDonald’s in Alameda, a city next to Oakland.” Harris attended Howard University in Washington, D.C.

If some details of the job have changed but others are unclear, it may be because Harris did not mention the McDonald’s job before the union meeting in Las Vegas in June 2019.

In her memoirs, published in July 2010 and January 2019, the job is not mentioned.

The truths we holdpublished prior to her first presidential bid, includes a passage about the “many jobs” she held in college, with no mention of McDonald’s. It also devotes a chapter to working-class struggles and attacks the “starvation wages” of the service sector. Harris’ McDonald’s job is also absent from her 2009 book, Dealing with crime smartly: a career prosecutor’s plan to make us safer.

Two biographies of Harris also make no mention of the job. A 2021 memoir by Stacey Johnson-Batiste, Harris’s lifelong friend who grew up with her in California, does not mention McDonald’s anywhere in the text. Dan Morain, who Kamala’s Way: An American Lifetold the Free beacon He was “unaware” of her employment at McDonald’s.

During Harris’ nomination speech at the Democratic National Committee earlier this month, which was billed as a “reintroduction” by multiple news outlets, she made no reference to McDonald’s. At a rally in Milwaukee that same week, Harris also omitted the Golden Arches.

The Free beacon also obtained a copy of Harris’ October 1987 application for a position as a law clerk in the Alameda County district attorney’s office. On that form, Harris, then a law student, listed several jobs, including a one-month clerical position at a brokerage firm, in a section asking her to list every position she had held in the past 10 years. McDonald’s is absent.

Harris lists three jobs on the application and a total of five on an attached resume, according to documents obtained through a public records request. Harris, who filed as a sophomore at what was then the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, listed detailed life experience on her resume — “extensive travel in India, Africa, (and) Europe” and “lived in Montreal, Canada for six years” — but not McDonald’s.

Politicians who worked in restaurants as teenagers often cite it as evidence of their working-class sincerity. President-elect Barack Obama said during his 2008 campaign that his first job as an ice cream scooper at a Baskin-Robbins in Honolulu taught him the virtues of responsibility and hard work.

But unlike Harris, there was no mystery surrounding Obama’s first job. News outlets published the restaurant’s address. Photographers posted pictures of the place online. Baskin-Robbins proudly boasts on its website that Obama used to scoop ice cream for the chain. The store’s manager joked after the 2008 election that she was some kind of media professional after she had to deal with reporters from Good morning AmericaCNN and a Norwegian television station ask questions about Obama.

“Now I’m used to talking to reporters,” Baskin-Robbins manager Sherill Fernandez told the Los Angeles Times in 2009. “It’s always the same question. And the same answers.”

The same cannot be said of Harris. Although the Times reported that she worked at a franchise in Alameda, her campaign did not provide further details to other news organizations. The previous owner of a McDonald’s in Alameda that opened in 1982, a year before Harris reportedly worked there, did not respond to a request for comment.

McDonald’s Corporation, which prides itself on its 84-year history and employs a full-time archivist as its official historian, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It did not comment on Harris’s claims that he made the fries.