Mini-Series Emphasizes Cycles, Director Says

Elizabeth Alcott Steed of Honey Grove, Texas, is a bride of 20 when her mother dies and leaves her a fortune.

What she didn’t know until then was that Mama was a wealthy woman in her own right, and that she wanted her daughter to be able to live the life she wants without relying on a husband’s income. Like Mama, Bess is now a woman of independent means.

Sally Field stars as Bess in “A Woman of Independent Means,” NBC’s three-night mini-series airing tonight, Monday and Wednesday.

As a young wife in 1907, it seems that Bess has it all: a husband she has loved since they met in the fourth grade, and the underpinnings of money. With an initial loan from his wife, Robert Steed becomes financially successful. Two sons and a daughter arrive in due time.

Life’s path is rarely smooth, however. Bess will face financial reversals; some of the people she loves suffer injury and death; some of her relationships will become strained through her own fault.

The cast includes Tony Goldwyn as Robert Steed, her husband; Brenda Fricker as his mother; Charles Durning as her father; Sheila McCarthy as her friend Totsie; Ron Silver as financier Arthur Fineman; Jack Thompson as second husband Sam Garner; and Christianne Mays as Annie, her maid.

But this is Field’s show, as the title character from Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey’s 1978 book, the strong-willed grandmother for whom Hailey is named. Field also reads the letters that connect the story as they did in the book.

Hailey has three other works of fiction on her resume, but it took the late playwright Oliver Hailey to point out to his wife that her relatives might make a good story. He saw them as characters in a play, she said, whereas she, a former reporter for the Dallas Morning News, had been accustomed to looking at fact.

“I thought my family was much too ordinary and mundane to be fictionworthy,” she said. “I took her (Bess) very much for granted. It was my husband who really made me appreciate her.”

Among the characters Hailey created was Totsie, Bess’s best friend from Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Va.

“One of the funniest phone calls I got after the book was published was from the college,” she said. “They said, `We’ve gone back in our alumni files and we’ve found (Bess), but we can’t find Totsie.’ But Totsie is everybody’s best friend.”

Hailey wrote the book in the form of fictionalized letters from Bess. The book became a best-seller and, in the mid-‘80s, a one-woman play starring Barbara Rush.

The screenplay is by Cindy Myers (“Incident in a Small Town”). Robert Greenwald, who directed Farrah Fawcett’s “Burning Bed,” is both director and coexecutive producer with Field.

Greenwald shot the three installments - covering 1907 to 1919, 1919 to the 1920s and the 1930s to the late-‘60s - in different styles, reflecting film-making of different eras. Among the props are Bess’s various cameras that also illustrate change. And there is a ring handed from mother to daughter on her wedding day.

“The aspect that I most wanted to emphasize is the sense of cycles of life, patterns repeated and patterns changed,” Greenwald said. “Each generation of women receives the same ring in a similar situation, and each wedding uses the same music, but adapted for the specific era.”

Most of the series was shot in Houston and Galveston, Texas, during 64 days in July, August and September. For the third episode, when Bess is an old woman, Field’s makeup took about five hours to apply.

“It’s extremely ambitious to pull off,” Field said, “not only because of the delicate nature of showing one person’s life of so many years, but pulling off the eras. You can see Bess and the eras - her clothes and her hair are different in the ‘20s,” Field said.

“To me, the older age was fascinating. It was much easier to play that than to play the really young years. The third night, the older age and the oldest age, are the most moving, because by then you’ve accumulated the most history. To me, it’s because old age is powerful without being maudlin or sentimental.”

Pleased with the mini-series as both executive producer and star, Field said, “For American television, it’s extremely delicate. It’s like literature on television.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with story: “A Woman Of Independent Means” airs on NBC (KHQ-Channel 6 from Spokane) from 9-11 p.m. tonight, Monday and Wednesday.