He was a young guy, no older than me, but he’d been around the movie business all his life. His dad had starred in about a hundred silents for Mojave Pictures, playing Dusty Jones, a square-jawed cowboy hero, Mojave’s version of William S. Hart. In a funny way Hollywood was a company town, a one-industry town. If True had been born in Detroit, he might have followed his dad onto an assembly line at General Motors or Ford, but in Hollywood he fell into the movie business. By the time I met him, True was driving all manner of rolling stock—horse-drawn wagons and stagecoaches, army ambulances, buckboards, Roman chariots, tallyhos. I’d been driving teams around the ranch since I was four or five years old, and I thought I knew how to handle the leathers, but True Riddle was another story: he seemed to just send his wishes out through the lines so the horses could read them like coded telegrams. He was one of a handful of movie people who could handle a six-up at a full gallop, along with the tricky, dangerous business of cutting the team loose and bailing off the seat as the wagon overturned, which was what they were filming that day in the Elliott picture.
