It all began with a John Wayne movie.

While she herself has an exotic background—born in Kirkuk, Iraq, to a British father and a Lebanese mother, Madeleine Pickens grew up in various locales around the world—it was America’s Wild West heritage that captured her imagination. After going to the then-British Bahamas in 1966, she arrived in the United States in 1969 on a green card, later becoming an American citizen and eventually a resident of Dallas.