The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code

8. Detective Story and A Streetcar Named Desire

8 Detective Story and A Streetcar Named Desire It was the stormiest meeting in the history of the Screen Directors Guild. For six and a half hours on the evening of October 22, 1950, Guild members hurled accusations at one another across the ballroom ofthe Beverly Hills Hotel. Then Cecil B. De Mille, a founding member and Hollywood's most successful money-director, denounced his subversive opponents and began to recite their names in a strange German-Yiddish accent that drew attention to their foreign origins- "Mr. Villy Vyler," "Mr. Fred S-s-s-inimon"-until boos and catcalls from the audience interrupted the performance. George Stevens rose to demand that the De Mille-dominated Board of Directors resign, and even such longtime conservatives as John Ford and Fritz Lang supported the move. De Mille sat down, defeated. The victor that Sunday evening was Guild president Joseph Mankiewicz. De Mille and his right-wing allies, mostly studio old-timers, sought the implementation of a Guild loyalty oath, and Mankiewicz and his liberal supporters (William Wyler, Fred Zinnemann, John Huston, Billy Wilder, and twenty-one other directors) called the meeting to prevent De Mille's aging cabal from taking control. "We saved the guild that night," Mankiewicz remembered. But at what price? To insure that their motives were not questioned, all twenty-five liberals signed an oath affirming that none was a member of the Communist party or supported any organization that advocated the violent overthrow of the government. It was a loyalty oath to fight a loyalty oath. 168 The Dame in the Kimono And it was a sign of the times. Ever since the Hollywood hearings ofOctober 1947 and theWaldorf-Astoria declaration the following December (pledging the studios to dismiss any employee who failed to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee ), the film community had nervously awaited the sound of that second shoe. By autumn 1950, even the most naive sensed the imminence of a jolting thump. In April, the Supreme Court had rejected the final appeal ofthe Hollywood Ten, leaving future Committee witnesses with the unenviable choice of taking the Fifth Amendment or naming names. That summer, the North Koreans had invaded South Korea, the Justice Department arrested Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on charges of espionage, and Congress passed the Internal Security Act requiring Communist organizations to register with the government . The anti-Communist compulsion had taken hold of American politics. How long would it be before the House Un-American Activities Committee booked a return engagement in southern California ? How long before that second shoe heralded a blacklist? Hollywood liberals like Elia Kazan saw their enemies "regrouping in the shadows." (Kazan chose not to attend the Guild meeting on October 22 because he feared that his past membership in the Communistparty would be used by De Mille to defeat Mankiewicz.) Fearful and helpless, the liberals reminded one reporter of"marooned sailors on a flat desert island watching the approach of a tidal wave." Their instincts told them to seek cover where they could find it. Some who had flirted with communism in their youth looked for lawyers and "fixers" who could arrange clearance for past sins. Others weighed the costs of abject surrender and naming names. Still others sought the security of loyalty oaths. Four days after putting down De Mille's putsch, Mankiewicz sent a letter to all Guild members advising them to set aside personal reservations about the organization's loyalty oath and "sign it now!" What Dalton Trumbo called the "time ofthe toad" had arrived in Hollywood. More than Washington witch-hunts and blacklists frightened Hollywood that fall. The movie industry faced its most severe economic crisis since 1933. Over the preceding four years, the net profits recorded by the major studios had declined by almost sixty percent. Production costs had nearly doubled, the divorcement decree had Detective Story and A Streetcar Named Desire 169 forced the studios to sell off their lucrative theater chains, and worst of all, domestic attendance had plummeted. From early in the war through 1946,American movie theaters sold between eighty and ninety million tickets per week. The sharp decline began in 1947, and by mid-1950, average sales had slipped to fifty-six million. During the first six months of that year, six hundred theaters permanently closed their doors. Industry analysts blamed the decline on everything from the growth of night baseball to the...