adding a texture to a surface

I have a graphic (title) that I imported in Illustrator 8 and applied an extrude nurb to make it 3d. The artist I am working with wants a texture (which is in fact a picture he has made a pct of) applied to *just the front* of this graphic without wrapping around the sides. The picture is the same shape as the graphic.

He (I get this alot btw) insists that in the past when he used 3d Studio Max he could just apply this picture as a bitmap and 3d Studio Max would just 'know' to put it only on the front face of the letters.

Whether or not that is true, I have not found a simple way to do this. Importing the pct into a material as a texture means the texture is applied to the entire 3d object. If I make the graphic into polygons (to just select the facing polygons) I get, well, a TON of polygons. Just the letter 'C' came out to about 700 polygons.

Any ideas welcome.