Gilding the Lily

A cowboy needs a cowboy name. That’s why the first cowboy movie star, Max Aronson, called himself Broncho Billy Anderson. Leonard Slye is not a cowboy name; Roy Rogers is. Rory Calhoun was Francis Durgin, Michael Landon was Eugene Orowitz. (Tom Mix was born Thomas Hezikiah Mix, which is so great I’m sort of bouncing in my chair here.) So anyway, there’s this cowboy actor named L. Q. Jones. You’d recognize his face in a second – he looks more like Sam Elliott or Dennis Weaver than they look like themselves. But get this. His birth name is Justus McQueen Jr.