CASE INDEX
Browse Hollywood Case File investigations and their source notes.
CASE HCF-010
Guinness lists Marilyn Monroe's "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" dress as the most expensive dress sold at auction. We checked the auction records: like for like, her white Seven Year Itch dress sold for more.
CASE HCF-009
Harry Houdini died on Halloween 1926, a hundred years ago. We checked the punch, the insurance verdict, the 1953 Hollywood film and the séances against the record of the time.
CASE HCF-008
James Dean's Porsche is said to have been cursed. We looked for the earliest telling of each part of the story, and for what the papers said at the time.
CASE HCF-007
Eva Marie Saint died on 6 October 2026, at 102. We checked the stories her obituaries told against the record of their time and against her own words. The big stories hold. Some details drifted.
CASE HCF-006
One line is said to explain the 1956 Martin and Lewis breakup. We went back to the record: Dean Martin gave his reasons at the time, and the famous line is earliest found 26 years later.
CASE HCF-005
One story follows Frances Farmer's name. We went back to the record of her lifetime, then read the 1983 court ruling at the center of it. It says neither thing.
CASE HCF-004
One rumor has followed Clara Bow for nearly a century. We traced it through print: a 1927 tea party, fan-magazine jokes, her secretary's 1931 trial, a prosecuted tabloid, and the earliest explicitly sexual version we found, in 1965.
CASE HCF-003
Sweat stains, a reported $12 sale, a $310,000 bid in 2010 and a top that was never worn: what the record shows about Monroe's pink gown after Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and where it stops.
CASE HCF-002
How three scenes from an unacquired play led to an injunction against MGM's Letty Lynton, a profit accounting, and decades outside authorized circulation.
CASE HCF-001
How Olivia de Havilland challenged Warner Bros. over unpaid suspension time and California's seven-year limit on studio contracts.