ON THE SET WITH THE AUTHOR

Back when Al Jolson sang “Mammy” in the first talking picture, the Ross Shaw Sterling House was the biggest residence in Texas. In the shimmering summer Texas heat, the home with 15 bathrooms, seven fireplaces and a dining room that seats 300 is a set for NBC’s six-hour miniseries “A Woman of Independent Means” with Sally Field.

Located on what used to be the residential “Gold Coast” between La Porte and Morgan’s Point, the scaled-down replica of the White House overlooks Galveston Bay.

When Elizabeth Forsythe Hailey heard that her 1978 bestseller would hit the small screen, she begged producers to shoot in her hometown of Dallas. But for the portrait of a woman that spans seven decades, they opted for the grandeur of old homes in Houston, Courtland, Waller, Galveston and La Porte.

And in the crazy way of television, this palatial Georgian Revival on the coast is supposed to be a house in Dallas. That city, of course, is landlocked on the prairie, far from any shining sea. So to hide the sunlit waters of the bay, blackout curtains hang at the windows.

Right after its publication, the monumental bestseller was optioned by CBS. A year later, a change in network brass doomed the period project. Universal then optioned the book. Turned off by the studio’s script, Hailey, a sunny but decidedly independent woman herself, did not renew the option.

Instead, she adapted the story told in 264 letters and a dozen cablegrams into a one-woman play. Barbara Rush performed the show at Broadway’s Biltmore Theatre in 1984. Hoping to see the play produced on PBS or cable, she turned down film and other TV offers.

But when executive producer-director Robert Greenwald called in the spring of 1993, she surrendered. The time had come to put Bess Steed Garner, with all her strengths, frailty and courage, on the screen.

Hailey, who once served as creative consultant for the zany syndicated TV series “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” even agreed to play an extra. But she had a vested interest. The free spirit of the title is a fictionalized version of her grandmother Bess Kendall Jones of Honey Grove, Tex.

“The day of our big wedding scene, there was immense biblical flooding in Houston,” says the author, who served as a “dress extra” in the reception scene. “They had to move it indoors, but the set decorator did an amazing job garlanding the inside of the mansion. You’d never have known it was Plan B.”

Director Greenwald was a stickler for authenticity, she says. Once, he went to astonishing lengths for a scene where the father of the bride is watching home movies of his daughter as the toddler learns to walk.

“I sent them copies of old home movies of my learning to walk that my grandfather had taken,” Hailey says. “In the library on the day of the wedding, the father of the bride is drinking and watching the movies. They planted me as an extra in an armchair so he could do his monologue to me while I sat staring at the screen. I got cut, but I had a wonderful time.”

In the script, a gazebo is what the author calls “this continuing emblematic thing.” It’s in a gazebo in her mother’s rose garden that Bess the bride receives a garnet ring from her mom. It’s the same ring her grandmother had given her mom on her wedding day.

“Every woman should get married with two rings--one from her mother and one from her husband,” Hailey says. “That becomes a tradition. When daughter Eleanor marries, there’s the same scene in a gazebo with Bess. And when the granddaughter Betsy (played by Hailey’s daughter Brooke) gets married, she, too, receives the ring in a gazebo.”

For Christmas, the author says, Greenwald sent her the peripatetic garnet ring. “He said that as the grandmother of this production I should have the ring that was passed from mother to daughter in each generation. So I quickly rewrapped it with his note and added a note of my own to Brooke, saying, ‘As the daughter who played me, I think the ring should be passed on to you.’ ”

For the bridal scene as her mother, Brooke is dressed in mock-hippie style with lace up to her chin. “The costumer did a wonderful thing,” her mother says. “She used a dress that Sally had worn in the proper period in an earlier scene.” And for cinema verite, the bridegroom is Abraham Willock, Brooke’s sweetheart in real life.

“Even though I’d read every version of the script and watched rehearsals and seen dailies, I really wasn’t prepared for the impact of seeing it all put together,” says Hailey. “It goes like a house afire. I was thrilled at how it moves.”

Asked about a sequel, the local resident won’t say yes or no. Right now, she’s involved in the world premiere of her late husband Oliver’s play “Round Trip” at Ventura Court Theatre in Studio City.

“It was never produced in his lifetime. After he died, I read various drafts and put together what I thought was the strongest version. By some miracle of timing, the play opens the weekend of Feb. 17 and 18. The miniseries airs Feb. 19, 21 and 22. There’s some kind of wonderful confluence there.”