What,” asked Jacqueline Onassis, “are we going to do next?” It was September 1993. She had just edited Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow, in which I solved the long-standing mystery of how Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s beloved Blonde Bombshell died suddenly and inexplicably at 26. (Unbeknownst even to herself, Harlow had been suffering from kidney failure since she was 15.) Now, over lunch at the Peninsula hotel in Manhattan, I told Jackie of an intriguing topic I’d stumbled onto in my Harlow research. A month before the star’s death, in 1937, a dancer named Patricia Douglas had been raped at a wild MGM party thrown by Louis B. Mayer. Instead of bartering her silence for a studio contract or cash, Douglas went public with her story and filed a landmark lawsuit. One person I interviewed told me, “They had her killed.”

I didn’t believe that, I told Jackie, because, though MGM was then the world’s most powerful movie studio, with its own railroad and in-house police force, it would never have gone to such an extreme. Jackie smiled and said, “Well, why don’t you find out what did happen? You’re the only person who can, David.”

It has taken a decade, but the story is astounding. Absent from all reference works, presumed by participants to be buried forever, the Patricia Douglas case is probably the biggest, best-suppressed scandal in Hollywood history. However, I managed to find old newspaper coverage, previously unseen photos, damning studio documentation, long-forgotten legal records, privately shot cinematographic evidence hidden in an MGM film vault, and, most amazing, Patricia Douglas herself. I tracked the reclusive invalid down and eventually persuaded her to break her 65-year silence.

In the spring of 1937, Patricia Douglas was a chunky, chestnut-haired 20-year-old with porcelain skin and perfect teeth. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, she had migrated to Hollywood with her mother, Mildred Mitchell, who was determined to design gowns for screen queens. Instead, she became a couturière for high-end call girls; in the meantime, she neglected her teenage daughter. Patricia dropped out of convent school at 14; she did not drink, date, or dream of film fame—an appealing rarity for the half-dozen male stars for whom she soon became a platonic mascot. She had lemon Cokes at drive-ins with Dick Powell (“When the waitress saw him, she almost fainted”), barhopped with Bing Crosby and pre–I Love Lucy Bill Frawley (“The three of us used to go to this dive on Sunset Boulevard; Bing would sing, and the drunks didn’t even care”), dined at the Brown Derby with Jimmy Durante (“His daddy wanted him to marry me, and I was all of 15”), played kid-sister confessor to George Raft (“He couldn’t get it up, but he had to keep that manly reputation, so the studio manufactured a big romance with Betty Grable”), and learned “truckin’,” the Cotton Club’s latest hep step, from Larry Fine, one of the Three Stooges (“What a blue tongue! Even at the dinner table, you should’ve heard him: ‘Pass the fucking potatoes!’”). A natural-born dancer, Douglas drifted into movies “just for something to do.” By 15 she had already appeared in two classics: So This Is Africa, a pre–Production Code comedy that climaxed with the wedding of its two leading men, Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey, and Gold Diggers of 1933, a Busby Berkeley extravaganza, in which Douglas hoofed behind Ginger Rogers.

Since she was supported by her mother, Douglas had no need to work. So when a casting call came on the afternoon of Sunday, May 2, 1937, she demurred at first, but later agreed to show up. “They never mentioned it was for a party,” she recalls. “Ever. I wouldn’t have gone! Oh God, oh God, I wouldn’t have gone.”