It was the sound of someone taking an ax to the back door of her apartment that awoke Florence Kotz around 11 p.m. on Friday night, Nov. 5, 1954. Kotz — a 39-year-old secretary who lived alone on a quiet, West Hollywood-adjacent street — heard the wood splinter and the window shatter as the door gave way, but before she could get up, turn on a light or do anything except scream for help, her inner sanctum had been breached.

“I was terrified,” Kotz recalled later. “The place was full of men. They were making a lot of noise and lights flashed on. I saw one of them holding something up toward me, and I thought it was a weapon.”

It wasn’t a weapon. It was a camera. And what the lights revealed to the intruders was that they had made a spectacular blunder. The woman in the bed was not the sexy blond actress they had hoped to catch in the naked throes of passion with her paramour — it was poor old Florence in her curlers.

“We’ve got the wrong place!” one of them shouted. And then, in a barely suppressed panic, the raiders beat a hasty retreat.

“They broke a lot of glasses in the kitchen getting out of there,” Florence recalled later.

The LAPD investigated the incident as an attempted burglary — a home-invasion robbery, so to speak. But because the room was dark, except when she’d been blinded by the camera lights, Florence Kotz was unable to identify the suspects. There were no other leads, and no arrests were made. Nothing came of it for almost a year.

Just a few months later, in September 1955, Florence Kotz was in for another big surprise. An account of the raid appeared in the lurid, best-selling gossip magazine Confidential. The cover featured a photo of Marilyn Monroe caught in an odd expression, a mix of both sexiness and surprise. The tag line with the photo promised to reveal the “real reason” Marilyn had divorced baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. It was in that story that the world first learned the details about what came to be known as the “Wrong Door Raid” — a celebrity scandal that involved three of the most famous people on the planet: Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra — and poor old Florence Kotz.

In the weeks and months after Confidential published its version of the raid, the events that led up to the incident gradually came to light. The raid itself was precipitated by Marilyn Monroe’s decision to divorce Joe DiMaggio — their divorce was granted on Oct. 27, 1954, just nine days before the raid. DiMaggio did not cope at all well with the rejection. Rather than face facts about her real reasons for leaving him, he convinced himself she had left him for someone else.

It was, in fact, Joe’s insane jealousy that had driven a wedge between them. He was jealous of her career — he wanted her to give it and settle down with him. He was also jealous of any attention Marilyn received from other men — a rather astounding thing considering he knew she was the world’s top movie sex goddess when her married her. According to J. Randy Taraborrelli, in his book, “The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe,” DiMaggio’s jealousy sometimes led to physical abuse:

“He was smacking her around,” said one of his closest friends. “He didn’t seem too ashamed of it, either. He said that she brought the worst out in him, that he wasn’t usually that kind of man. He said she was spoiled and very self-centred and it drove him crazy.”

The final straw for Marilyn came when Joe beat her up in their hotel after he became incensed at the sexy, skirt-flying shoot for “The Seven Year Itch.”

Five thousand onlookers watched the filming of that shot, at one in the morning, with Marilyn standing over a subway grate, her accordion-pleated skirt flying. Unfortunately, DiMaggio was one of them.

Director Billy Wilder described the expression on DiMaggio’s face as “the look of death.” Even though Marilyn wore two pairs of pants for modesty, under the powerful Klieg lights the material became quite see-through.

He rushed back to their hotel and waited for his wife. Then he took out his rage on her, slapping her around the room. The noise was so great that other hotel guests reported it to the hotel’s management, afraid that someone was getting badly hurt.

The bruises on Marilyn’s shoulders had to be hidden with makeup on the set the next day. When filming was complete, Marilyn returned to Beverly Hills. In early October, her attorney called a press conference outside the rented home the couple shared at 508 Palm Dr., in Beverly Hills. As the attorney informed the gaggle about the impending divorce, Marilyn appeared, dressed in black, even more stunningly — luminously — beautiful, than usual. But when asked to comment herself, she could barely speak. The divorce was granted on Oct. 27. The raid took place just nine days later.

The divorce did nothing to put a damper on DiMaggio’s jealousy. He was convinced Marilyn was seeing someone else, and on a recommendation from Sinatra, he hired Barney Ruditsky, a renown Hollywood private eye, to track Marilyn’s every move. Ruditsky, a retired New York City cop.

(A decade earlier, Ruditsky had played minor roles in a pair of concurrent crime scandals on the Sunset Strip. In the late 1940s, he owned Sherry’s nightclub, the Strip hotspot that was the scene of the shotgun attack on Mickey Cohen in July 1949 that shocked the nation. He also played a supporting role in the corruption scandal that centered on A-list Hollywood madam Brenda Allen, who ratted out a protection racket that included top brass at the LAPD after she was arrested in 1948.)

At the time of the Wrong Door Raid, Marilyn Monroe was renting an apartment off the Strip at 8336 De Longpre Ave. In the early evening on Nov. 5, she drove to see her actor friend Sheila Stewart, who lived eight or so blocks south, at 8120 Waring Ave. Marilyn parked her white convertible Cadillac at the curb and went inside.

In his book about Confidential Magazine, “Shocking True Story,” Henry E. Scott writes that DiMaggio believed Marilyn was having an affair with her vocal coach, Hal Schaefer — and that Sheila Stewart, who was also student of Schaefer’s, had been allowing the two lovebirds to tryst in her apartment.

Joe DiMaggio was hanging out with Sinatra at Villa Capri, an Italian restaurant in Hollywood, that night when a call came in from Barney Ruditsky. One of his associates, a 21-year-old rookie private eye named Phil Irwin, had spotted Marilyn’s Caddy parked on Waring. Convinced they’d caught her in flagrante, DiMaggio ordered Ruditsky to meet him at the place on Waring to stage the raid in order to get compromising photographs of Marilyn with Schaefer.

To underscore how misguided the whole enterprise was it’s important to remember that DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were no longer married. Even if he’d gotten the embarrassing photograph he wanted, while it would have been scandalous and certainly could have damaged her career — which had taken a hit in December 1953 when Hugh Hefner published a nude photograph of her taken many years earlier as the inaugural centerfold in Playboy — but it wouldn’t have been proof, per se, that she left him for someone else, and it certainly would have done nothing to repair their marriage. Quite to the contrary.

Within the hour, DiMaggio and Sinatra had assembled a small crowd at the corner of Waring and Kilkea Dr. There were conflicting stories about who was in that small crowd. Villa Capri’s maitre d’, Billy Karen, was there, but his boss, Villa Capri’s owner, Pasquale “Patsy” D’Amore later denied he’d gone along for the ride. Sinatra’s friend John Seminola and manager Henry Sanicola may have also been on hand. The private eyes, Ruditsky and Irwin were definitely there, as were — oddly enough — their wives.

In any case, thus assembled, the raiding party found itself faced with a quandary. The two-story at the corner of Waring and Kilkea Ave. housed three apartments. Two units, 8120 and 8122, fronted Waring. The third unit, 754 Kilkea Dr., faced the side.

The odds were one-in-three. They chose the wrong door. Waddaya gonna do?

No one involved in the shenanigans on Waring Ave. that November night could have predicted the firestorm to come, that three years later DiMaggio and Sinatra would be humiliated by their role in the escapades, that teams of investigators would be deployed — not to look into the particulars of the raid itself, but, ostensibly at least, to track down who sold the story to Confidential — that there would be multiple hearings and even a libel trial, or especially that the end result of it all would do to Confidential what Hollywood stars and their studios had tried to do from the first minute it hit the stands: bring its wildly successful run to an end.

Tom Wolfe once called Confidential “the most scandalous scandal magazine in the history of the world.” Launched in 1952, it came along at the precise moment that the Hollywood studio system was beginning to unravel. For more than 30 years, the studios had kept tight control over the way the press portrayed their contract players. After all, it was the stars who attracted audiences to theatres, which generated profits for the studios through ticket sales. Similarly, the Hollywood press played along because stories about the stars drove circulation. As a result of this cozy relationship, studio publicity offices traded reporters access to the stars for the right to censor items that might put their actors in a bad light. Confidential changed all that seemingly overnight.

In Neal Gabler’s article on the meteoric rise and fall of Confidential, in the April 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, he wrote that with its “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.’”

According to Gabler, what made Confidential a threat to the studios was its success. “Circulation during its heyday, in the mid-1950s, hit 4.6 million, which was greater than that of Time. Its publisher was profiled in Time, Newsweek, and The Wall Street Journal, and on The Tonight Show [with Jack Parr] he even stared down columnist Max Lerner, who said, ‘You leave no dignity, no shred of privacy, in the life of a person.’”

The studios saw their investments in the stars — their profit centers — threatened by the salacious revelations. As dominant players in the California economy, the studio owners called on the government for help. In 1957, the call was answered. Three separate investigations were launched into Confidential and the hordes of imitators its success had spawned. As a way around making it appear the government was attempting to censor the “peep hole” magazines, lawmakers focused on the role played by private detectives, who were licensed by the state, in rooting out and feeding stories to the scandal press.

Because two of the men involved in the Wrong Door Raid were private detectives — Barney Ruditsky and Phil Irwin — the scandal figured prominently in hearings that began simultaneously in late February 1957. A state senate committee — the Special State Senate Interim Committee on Collections Agencies, Private Investigators and Adjusters, which was informally known as the Kraft Committee, because it was chaired by Republican Sen. Fred Kraft of San Diego — held hearings for a couple of days in Los Angeles, staring on Feb. 27. That same day, a Los Angeles County grand jury was convened to look into the matter, and its hearings went on well into March.

California Attorney General Pat Brown — the future governor and father of the state’s former and in-coming Gov. Jerry Brown — led the third investigation. It culminated in a dramatic, criminal libel conspiracy trial against Confidential’s West Coast representatives in August 1957.

In early 1957, at four in the morning, two uniformed LAPD officers burst into Frank Sinatra’s house uninvited, woke up the famous crooner and served him with a subpoena ordering him to appear before the Los Angeles County grand jury investigating the Wrong Door Raid. Sinatra was furious. Through his attorney, he accused famed LAPD Chief William Parker, on whose personal instructions the officers had acted, of violating his civil rights.

Sinatra, DiMaggio, Ruditsky and the others faced legal jeopardy over the raid. The case was no longer categorized as a burglary, but was being investigated instead as a conspiracy to commit malicious mischief. (Presumably breaking and entering charges were also applicable.) However, the key players changed their stories a few times, and by the time the facts came out, Sinatra and others were also threatened with perjury charges as well.

At first, Barney Ruditsky flatly denied his agency was involved in the raid. When that fell apart, Sinatra testified under oath that, yes, he’d been on the scene but neither he nor DiMaggio had entered Kotz’ apartment after the door had been bashed open. Ruditsky and DiMaggio backed Sinatra up on this, however neither of them testified under oath. Ruditsky was recovering from a heart attack. DiMaggio claimed he had urgent business back east.

(Marilyn Monroe was invited to attend a hearing by the Kraft Committee. She was married to playwright Arthur Miller then and working in London (on “The Prince and the Showgirl”) and New York around that time, and did not respond.)

But not everyone involved chose to cover for Sinatra. When it was his turn to testify, Phil Irwin, Ruditsky’s former associate — Irwin was working for another detective agency by then — chose to tell the truth as he knew it, and his truth directly contradicted Sinatra’s testimony.

“Almost all of Mr. Sinatra’s statements were false,” Irwin said. The only people who stayed in the car that night, according to Irwin, were his wife and Mrs. Ruditsky.

Irwin’s version was supported by the Waring Ave. building’s landlady, Mrs. Virginia E. Blagsen, who presumably lived upstairs in the Kilkea Dr. apartment. She told the grand jury she was “reasonably certain” she saw Frank Sinatra when the DiMaggio gang was beating a retreat off her property that night.

Sheila Stewart, whose married name was Renour, testified that she saw the men running away. “I didn’t know any of them because I was looking down on them, but I would have recognized that little pipsqueak Sinatra.”

The hearings were not really about all the salacious details, however. The real question was who fed the story to Confidential. According to Phil Irwin, DiMaggio refused to pay the Ruditsky agency its $800 fee — which seems justifiable considering how badly they had botched the job. Sinatra eventually covered the bill, but it may have been too late.

“There were only four people alive who knew all about the details of the raid that appeared in Confidential,” Irwin testified, according to the Los Angeles Times in February 1957. “That was me, Ruditsky, Sinatra and DiMaggio. I didn’t tell and Sinatra and DiMaggio wouldn’t. That leaves Ruditsky.”

Or maybe not. In “Shocking True Incidents,” Henry Scott says it was Irwin himself who tipped Confidential.

Perhaps because it had played itself out, the Wrong Door Raid figured less prominently in the state of California’s libel trial against Confidential in Los Angeles, in August. The magazine’s defense team issued over 100 subpoenas, one for every big star who’d been featured in the magazine. Only a few actually showed up — notably Maureen O’Hara, Dorothy Dandridge and Tab Hunter. The media circus around the proceedings in would be familiar to us today and there were more than a few dramatic moments — Marjorie Mead, known as “Miss Dee,” head of Confidential’s West Coast operations and hands-down the most feared and hated woman in Hollywood, fainted at the defense table after the producer Paul Gregory accused her of trying to extort money from him in return for killing a story about his friend, the actor Charles Laughton.

The jury deliberated for 14 days, which was a record then in California. Even so, the jurors were split and couldn’t agree on a verdict. Publicly, Confidential celebrated the hung jury as a victory, but behind the scenes its publisher cut a deal with Attorney General Brown. The state agreed not to retry the case, for which Confidential essentially surrendered. The publisher agreed to stop reporting the intimate secrets of Hollywood stars. With the salaciousness gone, sales sputtered. Confidential hung around for a few years, a shadow of its former self, before being sold and eventually going out of business. Its spirit survives today, though muted, in the National Enquirer and other supermarket tabloids.

Florence Kotz, who married after the incident, becoming Florence Ross, sued Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra and the rest of the raiding party for $200,000 — about $1.4 million today. She eventually settled for $7,500, or about $53,000 today.

Marilyn Monroe did not live in the De Longpre Ave. apartment very long. Remarkably, when she moved out, it was the fourth time she changed addresses that year — three of her homes that year were along the Strip — and she would move two more times before the year ended:

1. In January 1954, she was living at 882 N. Doheny Dr., two blocks south of the Strip, when she and DiMaggio decided to tie the knot.
2. She moved in with Joe in San Francisco, his hometown, at 2150 Beach St., after were married there on Jan. 14.
3. They moved south and set up housekeeping on Palm Dr. in Beverly Hills that spring — and then immediately flew to New York for the filming of “Seven Year Itch.”
4. 8336 De Longpre Ave., the Brandon Arms Apartments.
5. Her next move after De Longpre Ave. was into an apartment at the Voltaire, a high-rise at 1424 N. Crescent Heights, which is still standing (Now it has shopping centers next door to the north and across the street to the west; back then Schwab’s Drug Store was next door and the Garden of Allah Hotel was across the street).
6. She was there just a few weeks before she moved east to live with her [agent?] Milton Greene and his family in Weston, Conn.

To his credit, Joe DiMaggio sought counseling to help him deal with his jealousy and abusiveness. Joe and Marilyn eventually reconciled and some accounts say they made plans to remarry — on Aug. 8, 1962. As the big day approached, the sources say, Marilyn was fitted for her wedding gown and was said to be very happy. Tragically, her death from a drug overdose three days before the wedding, on Aug. 5, 1962 — which the Los Angeles County coroner ruled a suicide — would become one of the biggest celebrity scandals of the 1960s. Because of her connections with the Kennedys and unresolved questions about events that night, her death also became a conspiracy scandal that endures to this day.

Joe DiMaggio never remarried. For the rest of his life, he had roses placed on her grave in Westwood every week. He died on March 8, 1999.