On Oct. 22, 1950, over 300 Guild members gathered for seven hours to fend off a political crisis that threatened to destroy their governing body, turn union brother against brother and undermine the Guild’s own long-term survival.

The setting was Hollywood’s anti-communist purge, when the winds of “witch hunts” and “red-baitings” were catching the industry in the crosscurrents of creeping panic and intolerance.

The plot turned on a mandatory loyalty oath: Would the Screen Directors Guild, as it was then called, risk a rupture by voting to adopt one for its members? More to the point, would it sack its own president as a necessary sacrifice to vanquish the Red threat?

Among the cast of characters who had staked their reputations, even their careers, on the outcome that night was a marquee of cinematic giants: DeMille, Ford, Mankiewicz, Huston, Stevens, Lang, Capra, Zinnemann, Wyler, Mamoulian, Kazan.

In a bizarre role switch, these directors had arrived at the meeting to direct themselves out of a scenario that was as dramatic as any they had set before a camera.

Before the Storm: President George Stevens (behind desk) presides over a board meeting in January 1949 with many of the players in the later drama present. (clockwise from right) William Wyler, Frank Capra, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, George Sidney, Irving Pichel, [executive secretary] J.P. McGowan, Tay Garnett and King Vidor.

By 1950, fear of an impending, far-reaching industry blacklist was palpable. Washington’s own posse of anti-communist bloodhounds, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), had begun in 1947 to hunt down and punish anyone who bore even a suspicion of communist sympathizer. Hungry to feed off the headlines their Hollywood house-cleaning would generate for their cause, Washington’s witch hunters had already interrogated and locked up the “Unfriendly Ten”—a band of writers, directors and producers who had refused to testify to the HUAC whether or not they were communists. In Hollywood, many working professionals were bracing for another venomous round of red-baiting by the demagogic Senator Joseph McCarthy and his Capitol Hill gang. Overseas, the Korean War further fueled the climate of tension and uncertainty across the country.

Thanks to the Red Scare, the Guild’s board of directors was a house deeply divided. On one side was the faction of the SDG’s most famous and powerful member, the arch-conservative Cecil B. DeMille. An unwavering ideologue, the revered 69 year old was also the Guild’s self-appointed watchdog who had gained control of the organization through seniority, and by maneuvering to install equally right-wing elders onto the board. DeMille also headed the DeMille Foundation, which was dedicated to compiling files on the leftist affiliations of all screen directors—files that would ultimately be spoon-fed to HUAC.

On the other side were the supporters of the Guild’s brilliant and successful young president, the 41-year-old Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Marginally a Republican, “Mank” was a man of liberal leanings who had just won two Oscars for writing and directing A Letter to Three Wives and was about to win two more for his recently wrapped picture, All About Eve. He was nobody’s fool, but a political tyro compared to DeMille.

DeMille and his backers on the Guild’s board—namely 1st Vice President Albert S. Rogell and George Marshall—had concocted a patriotic plan for the Guild to become the first Hollywood union to institute a membership loyalty oath. The Taft-Hartley Labor Relations Act had already mandated that all union officers sign anti-communist affidavits, which the Guild’s board members, as well as President Mankiewicz, had certainly done. But union members themselves remained exempt from any oath. And that was an oversight which DeMille and his fellow ideologues supporters intended to change.

The single obstacle in their path was the Guild’s liberal-minded president, who had publicly rebuffed the idea of a mandatory membership oath. If their scheme were to succeed, they would have to push it through behind Mankiewicz’s back, while the director was away on a two-month European vacation following the completion of post-production on Eve.

On Aug. 18, when Mankiewicz and his wife were sailing from France and couldn’t easily be reached by phone, DeMille and his faction decided to strike.

It may be helpful here to consider how the Guild’s own internal genetics could, at that time, allow such an in-house conspiracy to grow. The real power of the SDG then resided not with its president, nor with membership, but with its self-perpetuating 15-member board. DeMille had endorsed Mankiewicz’s installation as president in early 1950, shrewdly figuring that the young director’s Oscar-laden credentials, along with his well-known distaste for political activism, would stifle any risk of troublemaking and render him malleable to his grand seigneur’s guidance.

As Mankiewicz put it in a filmed interview years later, “It became clear that I was the front that Mr. DeMille needed and wanted.”

To Mankiewicz, the board’s all-encompassing power was a structural weakness that became a key enabler in the blacklist drama. “The board literally ran the Guild,” he noted. “[It] was accountable to no one…and was as close to being a gentleman’s club as is possible to have created…I had no power whatsoever.” Essentially, he saw his presidency as a setup, a stage with a trapdoor operated by DeMille.

Meanwhile, on that day in August when Mankiewicz was conveniently at sea, DeMille called an emergency meeting of the board. The purpose was to draft a new bylaw making it mandatory that all current and prospective Guild members, and not just the board itself, sign a non-communist loyalty oath.

Strategically, they mailed out numbered, open ballots, virtually assuring that the vast majority of the 618 recipients would be too fearful of identifying themselves as opponents not to vote “yes.” Not surprisingly, the bylaw was passed by an overwhelming margin—547 to 14, with 57 unreturned. No one, it seemed, wanted the threat of blacklisting to jeopardize his career, since Guild rules mandated that the names of those refusing to sign be delivered to the studios.

Unaware of DeMille’s machinations, Mankiewicz sailed into New York City from his vacation on Aug. 23 and found himself greeted at the dock by a hoard of 50 reporters. What was his explanation, they wanted to know, for the Guild passing a compulsory loyalty oath? Stunned by the news, Mankiewicz returned to his hotel room to find it flooded with hundreds of letters, telegrams and phone calls from Guild members. Nearly all protested what they saw as an attempt to railroad directors into signing an oath without calling a membership meeting to explain its reasons.

Mankiewicz immediately challenged both the legality and morality of such a move and called a board meeting for Sept. 5. There, the DeMille faction let loose the board’s pretext for the vote: Since all Hollywood unions and guilds, they insisted, were inevitably going to adopt a compulsory membership oath, they wanted the SDG to be the union to lead the way. (In actuality, only the Producers Guild also adopted the oath.) “It is a wonderful thing, the Directors Guild leading the procession of planting the stars and stripes on [this industry],” DeMille proclaimed.

It was only the opening volley in DeMille’s orchestrated anti-communist campaign. First, the director screened several of Mankiewicz’s movies to check for signs of communist propaganda. When he found none, DeMille instructed Rogell to contact the press and openly accuse Variety of being “anti-American” for printing one of Mankiewicz’s previous anti-oath statements.

Now Hear This: Guild president Joseph Mankiewicz had just won two Oscars and was about to win two more when recall proceedings were started by Cecil B. DeMille in August 1950.

But Mankiewicz wasn’t buying that argument. “This guy’s un-American but you can hire him—that’s a blacklist,” he protested at a heated board meeting on Oct. 9. Like George Stevens, his only open ally on the board, Mankiewicz was deeply disturbed by the open balloting that had effectively scared up a victory for the far right DeMille faction. “I said, ‘It seems to me that kind of thing only happens in Moscow,’” Mankiewicz later recalled. “And [DeMille] said, ‘Well, maybe we need a little of that here.’”

While Mankiewicz won the support of several board members, including the conservative John Ford, he was still outmaneuvered by DeMille’s clan; the board formally endorsed the bylaw with its “blacklist” provision.

That left Mankiewicz only one card to play. He insisted that, as president, he would call a general membership meeting to discuss the balloting. DeMille decried the idea, claiming it would only serve to air the Guild’s “dirty laundry” in the papers.

Indeed, the media was having a field day with the story. Hedda Hopper wrote that she supported the industry-wide oath and insisted “those who aren’t loyal should be put in concentration camps before it’s too late.” Hearst Publications’ Louella Parsons had a personal ax to grind with both Mankiewicz and his brother Herman, ever since the latter modeled his scabrous screenplay for Citizen Kane after her employer. Indeed, so much venom was hurled at Mankiewicz for refusing to support an industry-wide oath that his own sons complained of being taunted as “commies” by their grade school peers.

Meanwhile, DeMille and his cohorts were preparing to detonate their biggest land mine in their Hollywood anti-communist crusade.

Two days after the Oct. 9 board meeting, DeMille convened a secret meeting of the anti-Mankiewicz supporters at his Paramount offices. Their plan? To oust their president by means of a cleverly orchestrated recall movement. With only one loyalist breaking rank—Frank Capra walked out of the meeting in disgust, soon to resign from the board—the group voted to move ahead. But DeMille’s “putsch in the night,” as John Huston dubbed it, would have to be engineered hurriedly and stealthily before Mankiewicz could have a chance to stop it—certainly before the Sunday membership meeting. And it would legally need the support of 60 percent of the Guild’s membership, or 167 votes.

On Thursday, the Guild’s executive secretary and DeMille’s former assistant director, Vernon Keays, worked overtime with the Guild’s staff to mimeograph the ballots on anonymous stationery. The entire text read as follows: “This is a ballot to recall Joe Mankiewicz. Sign here—Yes.”

There was no space for a “no” vote, and the ballots were numbered so that each voter’s identity could be traced. The return address was the Guild’s Hollywood office, a ruse leading most recipients to assume, mistakenly, that it was a matter of official board business.

Paper Tiger: After his power play to oust Mankiewicz from the presidency failed, Cecil B. DeMille’s influence in the Guild faded.

Over on the Fox lot, Mankiewicz was in a screening room when he received a phone call at 11 p.m. from his brother Herman, who had been tipped off to the nascent coup by a very upset Capra. “So what do you have in common with Andrew Johnson?” Herman blurted out, hardly waiting for a reply. “You’re being impeached, my boy.”

The next evening, while All About Eve and its own backstage shenanigans were drawing raves at its premiere in New York, Mankiewicz launched his counter-strike. He called a meeting of supporters in a back room at Chasen’s restaurant, where Oscar winners Billy Wilder, William Wyler, Elia Kazan and John Huston were among many in attendance.

Mankiewicz’s lawyer Martin Gang started off by predicting that if the recall movement succeeded, Mankiewicz’s filmmaking career would be ruined. He suggested two immediate actions: a legal injunction to stop the balloting, and a petition for a general membership meeting to inform everyone of Mankiewicz’s side of the story.

John Huston immediately volunteered to sponsor the injunction. But it would take 25 signatures to call a meeting, and the group worked feverishly through the night to track down the necessary quorum, knowing full well any signatory would risk the wrath of DeMille. Richard Brooks, Nicholas Ray, Robert Wise and Fred Zinnemann were among those affixing their names, and at 2 a.m. a limo was directed to Walter Reich’s home to secure the 25th signature. The document was “our declaration of independence,” Mankiewicz would say, later mailing out framed copies to the signers as a reminder of their courage.

But when a small delegation marched over to file the petition at the Guild’s offices at 9 a.m. on Saturday (a normal workday for the Guild), they were shocked to find the offices closed. Keays later admitted to ordering it shuttered in a move to sabotage the petition’s chances. As Mankiewicz’s forces raced to the phones to lobby members against signing their recall ballots, DeMille’s faction fired up their final sally to justify the recall and squeeze out their quota of votes.

A four-page telegram was sent to all 278 senior members alleging that Mankiewicz had “repudiated the democratic vote of its membership,” “pitted himself against its board of directors,” and had made “untrue and incendiary” accusations of a “blacklist.”

DeMille’s forces, however, couldn’t stop the petition, which was served Monday morning. Now the board was obliged to hold an assembly of the membership, which was called for Sunday evening, Oct. 22.

As John Huston put it, “The fat was on the fire.”

The Last Word: The dignified George Stevens stunned the meeting by resigning from the board . - photo ©1978 Sid Avery/MPTV.net

“It was the most incredible…and emotional meeting I have ever experienced, and ever will,” Mankiewicz told George Stevens Jr. in a 1982 film the latter made about his father, George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey. A chapter in the Mankiewicz biography, Pictures Will Talk, dubs the meeting “The Night They Drove Old C.B. Down.” To Stevens Jr., who was 18 at the time his father played a leading role in the drama, it was simply “the night the Guild rallied to save its soul.”

In the packed Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel, the crowd was primed for a fight. The board of directors and President Mankiewicz held court on the dais, where DeMille, ever the showman, had directed a special pink spotlight be installed to bathe his bald pate.

Mankiewicz opened the proceedings with a straightforward synopsis of the events leading up to that night. DeMille took the floor and offered what seemed an olive branch: he would be willing to burn, uncounted, all the recall ballots. But he would not back down on the loyalty oath.

Then DeMille made his first strategic blunder. Eager to show the foreign influences at work in the Guild, he read off a list of presumed “Red front” organizations to which the 25 signatories belonged, suggesting that if Mankiewicz remained as president, his left-wing supporters would take over the Guild.

That triggered a torrent of boos and catcalls from the packed hall, leaving DeMille clearly shaken as he sat down. “I resent paper-hat patriots who stand up and holler, ‘I am an American’ and contend that no one else is,” exclaimed Don Hartman.

Some stammered with outrage as they stood up to speak. “I resent beyond belief the things you said as you summarized the 25 men,” said Delmar Daves. “I think it was disgraceful…this…disunity that has been fostered upon us.”

Others, like Rouben Mamoulian, were nearly in tears. The Russian-born director rose to make what Richard Brooks remembered as the most “heart-wrenching” address of the night.

“I have an accent,” Mamoulian offered painfully, sharing that for the first time in his American life he had become afraid of having one (a fear echoed later that evening by Fritz Lang). He, too, deplored the way members needed to trace their heritage to prove their Americanism. “I feel I have more reason to stand on my being a good American because I chose it. I wanted to become an American.”

John Huston was “trembling with anger,” according to one report, when he demanded of DeMille: “In your tabulation of the 25 men…how many were in uniform when you were wrapping yourself in the flag?”

As George Stevens Jr. would later observe, many of the Guild’s most respected men, including William Wyler, Huston, Ford and Anatol Litvak “had served in World War II and resented the fact that some of those that stayed home, for whatever reasons—Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Adolph Menjou and DeMille among them—had now become the judges of who were patriots or not.”

But it was Stevens himself—the dignified and much-revered director who had served three times as Guild president—who delivered what Mankiewicz termed the coup de grace of the evening. Seated at a little table crowned by his bulging red loose-leaf notebook, he proceeded to read from an exhaustive report he had compiled from Guild staff interviews, unloading his case against DeMille and his cohorts’ “illegal takeover” of the Guild.

“It was rigged,” Stevens said of the recall. “It was organized…and if there hadn’t been a slip-up somewhere…Mr. Mankiewicz would have been out. He would just have been smeared and out…in 36 hours, if you please.” The Guild office staff, he added, “said they couldn’t sleep at night with a conspiracy like this going on.”

Stevens then stunned the audience by resigning from the board of directors, “because [of those] who are trying to split up this Guild.” It was a performance, Mankiewicz later remembered, “worthy of Clarence Darrow.” That night, Stevens concluded it to thunderous applause.

A signed copy of the petition calling for the meeting to block Mankiewicz’s recall.

Wyler could hardly contain his anger. “I am sick and tired of people…questioning my loyalty to my country,” he exclaimed, noting he had signed a loyalty oath twice. “The next time I hear somebody do it, I am going to kick the hell out of him. I don’t care how old he is or how big.”

Turning to confront DeMille, Hartman delivered the evening’s most audacious sally: “Mr. DeMille, I have charges against you…I accuse you of misconduct in the Guild, and I ask for your resignation.” His words met with cheers. Though the motion was seconded, it would later be withdrawn in a bid for Guild unity.

Sitting quietly for the past five hours in the center of the dais, sporting his trademark tennis shoes and pipe and chewing on a handkerchief, was John Ford. One of the Guild’s original founders, Ford was idolized by its members. Mankiewicz knew that whichever way Ford swayed in the controversy, the membership would doubtless follow—and with them, Mankiewicz’s fate.

Finally, after midnight, Ford raised his hand.

“I have been sick and tired and ashamed of this whole goddamn thing—I don’t care which side it is,” Ford told the crowd. “If they intend to break up the Guild, they’ve pretty well done it tonight.”

Playing the conciliator, he added, “I don’t agree with C.B. DeMille. I admire him, but I don’t like him...You know when you get the two blackest Republicans I know, Joseph Mankiewicz and C.B. DeMille, and they start a fight over communism, it is getting laughable to me.”

The Guild, Ford said, was in crisis and needed to clean house. Then he dropped his bombshell: “There is only one alternative, and that is for the board of directors to resign and elect a new board.” His words were greeted with a roar of applause and cheers.

Ford’s proposal offered a way out, and the bleary-eyed membership, some of whom were due on their sets in only a few hours, voted on the motion by ballot. The announcement by Mankiewicz of its passage earned the night’s final ovation, whereupon each of the board members rose to offer his resignation. The image of a battered, humiliated DeMille descending from the podium and withdrawing defiantly to the back of the hall was a memory few would forget.

The only piece of business left was to approve a five-man independent committee to investigate the entire recall affair, and to pass another motion praising the 25 petition signers who had called the meeting. Then the emotionally wrung membership adjourned. It was 2:20 a.m.

Looking back, it might seem that not much of any real consequence was actually accomplished that night. The Guild, after all, still instituted a loyalty oath for its members, which remained on the books until the end of the ’50s. In

the coming days, Ford backpedaled and wrote a conciliatory letter to DeMille, hailing him for his “courage…and magnificent performance…so far above that goddamn pack of rats.” Nonetheless, DeMille found his influence in the Guild permanently diminished.

As for Mankiewicz, only four days after the meeting he penned a letter to the full membership asking them to sign the loyalty oath after all. He never really explained his capitulation, but to many it suggested he cared less about that oath itself than the undemocratic way the board pushed it through. He left the presidency the following spring, having served only a single one-year term.

Conciliator: Introducing himself as “a maker of Westerns,” John Ford confronted DeMille and said the Guild was in crisis and needed to clean house.

Ultimately, the legacy of this episode in Guild history resonates more strongly on how the DGA operates today, than it did during its own tumultuous times. As if to answer Mankiewicz’s expressed concerns, the board was now empowered to represent the goals of directors, and not merely its own self-interest. Consequently, the membership would become more engaged and active than it had ever been before. Among the members present that night, George Sidney, Del Mann and Robert Wise would go on to serve as Guild presidents. Personal political agendas would no longer determine the workings of the Guild at the expense of representing and protecting the collective rights of directors to pursue their craft.

It’s no wonder, then, that many directors left the meeting that night invested with a renewed sense of purpose. Among them was Stevens, whose extraordinary presentation, many believed, had persuaded Ford and the membership to bury the recall. Experiencing a mixture of exhaustion and exhilaration, he was unable to sleep. He hopped into his car and drove 50 miles up the coast to Ventura and back, not returning until four in the morning. Like Ford, he had lamented that the Guild’s obsession with fighting communism had trumped its commitment to making movies. Now it was back on track.