IN DECEMBER OF 1971, I paid my second and last visit to the set of The Last Picture Show. When I was stopped at the one traffic light—for most of my life the only traffic light in the county—Polly Platt came running into the street to inform me that Peter had left her for Cybill—then she turned away and went back to one or another of her several jobs on the picture.
I debated where to park, rarely a problem in Archer City unless a film is in production there. In Picture This, the excellent documentary George Hickenlooper made about the making of Picture Show and its woebegotten sequel, Texasville, a furious young cowboy reaches his flash point when some gofer from the film crew tries to tell him where he might or might not park during moviemaking time.
Anyway, I parked, and pondered this not particularly surprising information. Peter and Polly seemed pretty married to me, and they had two children now, a second daughter, Alexandra, having been born just before the film went into production. Alexandra, along with her sister, Antonia, had been placed for the time being with Peter’s parents, in Scottsdale.
I was not unaware, however, that moviemaking is hard on marriages. Pack a bunch of volatile people off to a bleak location for a month or two and romances blossom that wouldn’t if the various lovers were in the safety of the suburbs.
Later in the day I finally met Cybill. In fact we sat in the car on the bridge over the Red River near Burkburnett, Texas, while the setting for Jacy Farrow was being readied, Cybill, of course, being Jacy.
As I recall, we held hands, a sign, I later learned, that Cybill was feeling shaky, as well she might have been. She was young and in a bleak place, making her first film. It was a cold day and she may or may not have just broken up (or contributed to the breakup) of the director’s marriage. She would have held hands with a mule, but, no mule being available, she held hands with me.
Then the shot got set up to Peter’s satisfaction and I did not see Cybill Shepherd again until she was in Miami, Florida, being directed by Elaine May in The Heartbreak Kid. Or maybe I caught a brief glimpse of her in Hollywood, in the Sunset Tower apartments, where she and Peter lived for a time, once it became clear that his breakup with Polly was going to take.
The crew of The Last Picture Show was housed in a miserable motel in north Wichita Falls. The night I arrived there was a party—it may have been the wrap party. Neither Peter, nor Polly, nor Cybill was there. I don’t know where they were, but wherever it was, I think it’s safe to assume that they were as miserable as the rest of us.
The Last Picture Show soon went on to glory. Jack Kroll, then the powerful movie critic for Newsweek, said it might be the best American movie since Citizen Kane. Peter Bogdanovich was made, and stayed made for a long time. He did his best to make Cybill a star, but she eventually performed that chore for herself in the sitcom Moonlighting, which also elevated her co-star, Bruce Willis.