By the mid-50s, Robert Harrison's Confidential magazine was the scourge of Hollywood, naming names and dishing dirt, with its army of tipsters, private eyes, and libel lawyers. A 1957 court case–the “Trial of a Hundred Stars"–dismantled Harrison's gossip machine, but not before he'd redefined celebrity journalism.

The beginning of the end of the most terrifying force ever to hit Hollywood arrived on the night of November 5, 1954, on a dimly lit street in Los Angeles. Retired baseball great Joe DiMaggio was dining with pals at the Villa Capri restaurant and stewing over the demise of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, who had been granted an interlocutory decree for divorce just a week earlier. He was especially furious about rumors that Monroe had been seeing another man. Following the suggestion of one of his friends—Frank Sinatra—DiMaggio had hired a former cop named Barney Ruditsky to tail her. While DiMaggio was eating and grousing, one of Ruditsky's men, a private eye named Philip Wayne Irwin, spotted Monroe's car parked on Kilkea Drive in front of an apartment complex. He immediately phoned Ruditsky, who met him there for a stakeout. After about an hour, Ruditsky left to phone Sinatra, knowing that Sinatra, at that moment, was at the Villa Capri with DiMaggio.

By the time Ruditsky returned to the stakeout, DiMaggio and his associates were already circling the block in the ex-Yankee's Cadillac. Sinatra later said that he had tried to talk DiMaggio out of taking action but that DiMaggio insisted he was going to catch Monroe in flagrante. Sinatra reluctantly agreed to drive him, park the car a block away, and wait while DiMaggio and two companions launched their mission. Though Irwin and Ruditsky both tried to calm DiMaggio, he snapped, “I'm not fooling around here any longer.” So Ruditsky led the expedition to the back door of the apartment where Monroe was supposed to be visiting. The gang then kicked down the door—only it wasn't Monroe they found in the bed. She was upstairs in the apartment of a friend, a bit actress named Sheila Stewart. Instead, the men had invaded the apartment of a terrified middle-aged woman named Florence Kotz, who screamed as DiMaggio and his accomplices bolted.

The L.A.P.D. investigated the incident as a foiled burglary and, without suspects, the case faded. But someone sold the “wrong-door raid” story to Confidential magazine, where it appeared in the September 1955 issue. A year and a half later, when California state senator Fred Kraft went looking for a pretense to attack Confidential, he pounced on the story, citing the incident as an example of “strong-arm” tactics by private eyes in the service of the magazine.

At the time, Confidential, with its gaudy yellow, blue, and red covers, was the scourge of Hollywood. In Tom Wolfe's words, it was “the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world.” For years the motion-picture industry had controlled the flow of information about the stars by officially accrediting journalists. Confidential challenged all that. Bearing a tantalizing subtitle (“Tells the Facts and Names the Names”), Confidential specialized in Hollywood peccadilloes—in promiscuity, in bad behavior, in miscegenation (at a time when that was considered taboo), and, perhaps above all, in outing homosexual stars decades before there was even such a term as “outing.” “Confidential really started a reign of terror,” Leo Guild, a press agent at the time, once claimed. George Nader, an actor who acknowledged his homosexuality, confessed that “every month when Confidential came out, our stomachs began to turn. Which of us would be in it?” At one point Confidential began preparing a story about a wild party at the home of Rock Hudson's agent, Henry Willson—who happened to be gay. Because the piece was going to implicate Hudson as a guest, both the agent and the star went to see Hollywood attorney Jerry Giesler to try to stop it. Giesler said there was nothing he could do until publication. Not long after that, Hudson headed off the story, in part, by marrying Willson's unwitting secretary, Phyllis Gates, though Hudson would tell her that he had quashed it by hiring a gangster and having him threaten *Confidential'*s editor.