Marilyn Monroe in her iconic pink dress from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She bought the Los Angeles home six months before her death in 1962.
Marilyn Monroe’s last home faces the wrecking ball if its owners get their way this week in a court bid to overturn its designation as a historic landmark.
Brinah Milstein, daughter of a prominent Cleveland real estate developer, and Roy Bank, a reality TV producer, paid US$8.35 million (NZ$14.2m) in 2023 for the property in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, where the screen goddess known for Some Like it Hot and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes spent her final six months.
Shortly after the couple received a demolition permit, preservationists persuaded the city of Los Angeles to designate the house as a historic-cultural monument, sparing it from destruction. Milstein and Bank planned to combine the site with an adjacent lot, where they have lived since 2016, “to improve the property”, said Peter Sheridan, their lawyer, in an email.
“LA has thousands of celebrities who live and die here,” he said. “Is every house that those good folks lived in a ‘historic monument’? Not in the least.”
Celebrity homes are one of LA’s big tourist attractions, with buses clogging streets from Hollywood to the Pacific shores. Stopping places in Brentwood include the gates to the homes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kamala Harris and Harrison Ford.
Few stars match the allure and tragic glamour of Marilyn Monroe, but the historical value of her former home is dismissed by its current owners.
“There is not a single piece of the house that includes any physical evidence that Ms Monroe ever spent a day at the house, not a piece of furniture, not a paint chip, not a carpet, nothing,” a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court says.
The suit claims the city unconstitutionally abused its power by conspiring with tour operators and biased conservationists to deprive the owners of their vested rights.
Lawyers for the city argue that they followed proper procedures, including gathering evidence of the property’s significance in the life of a notable historical figure.
“Mere disagreement is not enough to overcome the city’s lawfully taken action that petitioners opposed at every hearing of the proceedings,” a team led by LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto wrote in a response to the lawsuit.
Monroe paid US$75,000 for the home six months before her death in 1962. It was the first home she bought on her own after marriages to baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller.
An inscription in tile near the front door reads Cursum Perficio, Latin for “Here Ends My Journey”. It likely predated Monroe’s purchase, said Heather Goers, a preservationist who prepared a report for the city’s Cultural Heritage Commission, but it added a poignant note to her death at the age of 36.
“Marilyn Monroe was quite possibly the most influential female entertainer of the 20th century,” Goers said. “Less than 3% of the 1300 historic properties in Los Angeles are dedicated to women’s history. If you can’t commemorate the history of Marilyn Monroe, what’s that tell us?”
Originally built in 1929, the two-bedroom, two-bathroom single-storey stucco house was designed in Spanish hacienda-style by an unknown architect.
“This house is unique and important to telling her story as an artist, celebrity, and iconic figure in Hollywood,” Andrew Salimian, director of advocacy for the Los Angeles Conservancy, a historical preservation group, said in an email. “It’s the only house she owned by herself as a single woman.”
The property has had 14 owners since Monroe’s death and has undergone numerous renovations and additions, including a detached recreation room and studio, the lawsuit says.
Sheridan said the house, on a cul-de-sac of four properties, was enclosed by a wall and dense foliage and was inaccessible to the public, unless they trespassed.
Aaron Kirman, chief executive of Christie’s International Real Estate, Southern California, said attempts to designate the house were “too little too late” because it had been so extensively changed since Monroe died there. “The city should’ve designated this as a historical site long ago.”
Bank and Milstein have suggested saving the structure by moving it to a more public site, so Monroe devotees can have access. Since the property dispute first made news two years ago, tour groups and fans had swarmed their quiet cul-de-sac, invading their privacy, Milstein said in testimony to the city last year.
“Our children have been buzzed by low-flying drones while playing in the backyard, running inside, crying in fear,” she said, choking back tears.
The brief period of Monroe’s life at the home is documented on an almost daily basis by her letters, chequebook payments and other records, according to Goers’ presentation.
In the months she lived there, she won a Golden Globe, sang Happy Birthday, Mr President at a gala for John F. Kennedy, was fired by 20th Century Fox for missing shooting days on a movie and posed for photographer Bert Stern in what became the basis of his book The Last Sitting.
Some of the most revealing documents were crime scene photographs taken for the coroner after Monroe’s death from a sleeping pill overdose, showing the house exterior much as it looked today, Goers said.
In July 1962, Monroe sat for an interview with Life reporter Richard Meryman that was published the week she died. She took pride in showing the largely unfurnished home, though she declined to allow photos, saying she didn’t want “everybody to see exactly where I live”.
Meryman described a profusion of flowers in the yard and construction under way of a side unit where her friends could stay in privacy.
“She exulted in it,” he wrote. “On a special trip to Mexico, she had carefully searched in roadside stands and shops and even factories to find just the right things to put in it. The large items had not arrived - nor was she ever to see them installed.
“As she led me through the rooms, bare and makeshift, as though someone lived there only temporarily, she described with loving excitement each couch and table and dresser, where it would go and what was special about it.”