WHILE I was directing A Streetcar Named Desire, all hell broke loose at the Screen Directors Guild of America, my guild. I’d kept myself at the far edge of that organization for two reasons, the simplest being that meetings bore me. But an issue had come up that would involve me, like it or not. Cecil B. De Mille was going for throats, including mine. He’d gathered the most conservative directors on the guild’s national board to work with him to uncover and discredit left-wingers in the membership and make their continuing to work as directors impossible. He would do this by drawing up a list of those who refused to sign a loyalty oath, then delivering this list of undesirables, inside a guild-franked envelope, to the head of every studio in town. On this list would also appear the names of those about to be called to Washington for testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. I suspected I’d be one of the chosen, but I wasn’t sure.

This concern was the other reason I’d been trying to stay out of the industry’s politics. Even though I’d quit the Party more than sixteen years before, the men in Washington wanted names and they wanted publicity. For these purposes I might be thought useful. Those organizing the right-wing movement in the guild suspected anyone who was reported to have left the Party but continued to make the same kind of movies and had never, as evidence of patriotic good faith, spoken up against communism in their work. These men believed that the films I’d made and the plays I’d directed after I’d quit the Party in 1935 were “Communistic,” if not in literal content, by reason of their influence. Among these films were Pinky and Gentleman’s Agreement, but Zanuck was not vulnerable; I was. I knew what they’d think of The Hook and Zapata, and I prepared to fight them; no one was going to tell me what films or plays I could or could not do. I still felt safe in New York, but I knew I’d be an undefendable target in any investigation that “C.B.” and his posse of patriots made in California. (Darryl Zanuck, in a burst of friendly candor, had told me there was a general suspicion—and I couldn’t tell if he shared it—that I’d resigned from the Party only to throw people off my track, that I was in fact still a Communist.) If I was cornered, I decided, I would take a defiant position; I’d never bow to De Mille—or to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.