THE MAIN EXCEPTION to my Western seeking after heart surgery was Texasville, a sequel to Picture Show centered on the famous oil boom of the 70s, which described the excesses of human folly as I witnessed them in Archer City and the homes of my siblings as the irresistible notion of riches came to race through and desiccate the town, all despite that the history of booms is well known. All rational people know that booms end—they do not go rocketing on forever. Even the great investor Warren Buffett, the onetime Sage of Omaha, got caught out in the crash of the late 90s, losing some twenty-five billions, which he is already well on his way to making back.
What was different about the boom of the 70s was that my three siblings and their spouses were just of an age to be swept in, and were swept in, one by one, as were the siblings of pretty much everyone else in town.
People who were working-class—who didn’t need exercise machines or personal trainers because they worked all day and were not the least interested in working on weird machines throughout the evening—suddenly began to get tennis lessons at a facility in Wichita Falls. Some of them, God help us, even began to jog. My father had just passed away but if he had been alive he would probably have died laughing at this spectacle. It was a very hot summer, with a high of 116 degrees—hot enough to call off a planned marathon. Even the newly affluent aren’t crazy enough to jog at 116.
This boom soon passed and tennis faded from local view. The exercise machines ceased to get much use.
I thought the whole bust to boom and back to bust was hilarious and so described it in Texasville. I don’t think it’s much of a novel but that didn’t dissuade Peter Bogdanovich from dragging himself back to Archer City to make a film from it.
Scripts of Texasville circulate in the rare book market but not with my name on them. I had nothing to do with the film and never visited the set. (I think Peter’s assistant Iris Chester wrote most of the script.)
What Peter did in Texasville is make a Picture Show family reunion. In the Hickenlooper family reunion documentary there are some hilarious moments, my favorite being an outburst by Randy Quaid about his fantasies of finally sleeping with Cybill. I believe Timothy Bottoms said much the same. There is a clip of my mother, criticizing the vulgarisms in my profane book. But the sequence that makes the documentary nearly immortal is a talking heads scene in which Peter, Polly, and Cybill array themselves on chairs in front of the long-gone Royal Theatre, more or less like Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin at Yalta, and talk about their difficulties of long ago, in which Peter left Polly for Cybill, as if a movie set romance was of worldwide importance. I don’t remember what Peter contributed, but I do recall that Cybill expressed no regrets. Peter was visibly startled by the remark—by this time, having had a girlfriend, Dorothy Stratten, murdered, he knew something about regrets. None of them seemed to realize that the affair of long ago and the divorce that resulted were of no interest to anyone except themselves. It did alter their three lives forever, but Ol’ Man River, which is life, just kept rolling along.