ORANGE COUNTY VOICES : A Face on TV’s Wall Stirs Childhood Memories

I saw her on cable last night, as ever was. Braided black hair, prim collar, the stern and tired face of a pioneer woman with a trace of 5 o’clock shadow.

You’ve seen her too, and never noticed her, in the occasional television drama and feature film. She never speaks, is rarely on for more than a few seconds and is not likely to figure in the credits.

The actors pass back and forth in front of her as if she were part of the scenery, which in fact she is. The woman hangs on the wall in a heavy gilt frame and oval-shaped matting, and is used to indicate that somebody in the cast had pioneer ancestors. She has been doing this for 35 years and is especially popular in Westerns. I recall that she was Burt Lancaster’s mother in “The Lawman.”

I never met this woman, but my acquaintance with her likeness goes back nearly 60 years. She is a Wisconsin woman, that I can say, and her portrait is not a painting but a tinted photograph. It may be one of the earliest photographs taken of a live person in the Great Plains.

That’s worth mentioning because dead people were the more usual subjects for photographers in rural communities before the Civil War. Photographers were called to the funeral to immortalize the departed, propped in an open coffin against a sawhorse or the side of a barn. I’ve seen a volume of such photographs, all taken in Wisconsin.

Live subjects were more difficult because they had more trouble holding still. But the matriarch in the portrait evidently took time from her chores and did. Whoever colorized the photo left her with a shading of beard, which was unkind, especially if she was destined for a screen career sometime in the next century.

Anyway, I can remember that she stared down at me with mild disapproval from my grandparents’ living-room wall in Wisconsin, and later at their home in California. I’m sure I was told why she was there and what her name was, but little boys ignore such information. And young men raising their own families take small interest in heirlooms.

So when my grandmother died in the 1950s, some of her belongings got scattered. The oval portrait with the gilt frame somehow landed in the prop room of CBS Television. I was jackknifed off the sofa when I first saw it in a production of “Playhouse 90.” That image had been stamped on my memory like the face on a coin; my surprise was total.

Since then the picture has passed from studio to studio, suffering near-overexposure at Republic when that lot was milling out Westerns. It is ageless, and more durable than any star. The woman in it has become a public figure whether or not the public knows it.

Who is she? Not my grandmother’s mother, who was an overpadded Victorian. The woman in the picture is a work-worn plainswoman. So she must be my grandmother’s mother’s mother. Which would make her, I suppose, my great-great-grandmother.