Marilyn Monroe’s Los Angeles home had an inscription inscribed in tiles on its front porch: “Cursum Perficio”: Here ends my journey. And this June the journey of the only home that belonged to the movie star, who died in August 1962, at just 36 years old, has definitively ended. This Wednesday the Los Angeles City Council voted on the designation of the actress’s residence as a Los Angeles Historical-Cultural Monument (HCM), and unanimously decided that it should remain standing.
It was last summer of 2023 when a millionaire couple – in fact, the owners of the house next door – took over the house, as well as the adjoining land, and tried to demolish it to expand their own. When it became known on September 7 that they intended to demolish it, both the residents of the neighborhood and the organization that ensures the conservation and declaration of buildings as historical and cultural heritage (called the LA Conservancy) and some city institutions organized to keep it in place. foot. Thanks to their efforts, just 24 hours later, the Citizen Council voted for its nomination as a Historical-Cultural Monument, which meant a temporary stoppage for this possible demolition. The vote was going to take place on June 12 at City Hall, and then half a dozen speakers were heard, but the vote was postponed until June 26 because the councilor of the district to which the construction belongs, Traci Park, explained that I wanted to continue talking with the owners.
This Wednesday, the matter was the seventh of the day to be discussed and the 10 local representatives have voted to convert it into a protected historical-cultural point and thus protect it. Park – who has demanded that tourist buses be banned in the area – has explained that he is still talking to the current owners to try to move the entire house to another area. That would be practical for them, who could use the land they bought, and for the city, which could protect it and also allow tourists to visit it.
“Comrades, today we have the opportunity to do something that should have been done 60 years ago. There is no one more iconic in the city of Los Angeles than Marilyn Monroe and her house in Brentwood,” Park said in the City Hall hearing room. “Losing this piece of history, the only home Marilyn Monroe ever owned, would be a devastating blow to the city’s historic preservation and to a city where less than 3% of designated historic sites are associated with women’s heritage.”
Monroe purchased 12305 West Fifth Helena Drive in early 1962. The house is located in the Brentwood neighborhood, today one of the most exclusive in the city, and was her first and only home, which she enjoyed for just a few months. It was not a luxurious mansion like those that actors boast about today, but a small house of less than 300 square meters, with four bedrooms, three bathrooms, a pool in which, apparently, she never swam, and a small orchard of fruit and citrus trees. Built in the so-called Spanish or colonial style, it has only one floor, exposed wooden beams, whitewashed walls and terrazzo floors. It was in the master bedroom where she was found dead from an overdose on August 4 of that year.
At that time, the house cost the already very famous actress about 77,500 dollars at the time (about 805,000 dollars with inflation, around 740,000 euros). After her death, it passed from hand to hand: if the first year, in 1963, it was sold for $87,500, in 2017 a couple bought it for between seven and eight million dollars. They sold it last August, and that’s when the problems came. The house was bought by the millionaire couple formed by heiress Brinah Milstein and producer Roy Bank for around $8.5 million. From the beginning their intention was to tear it down, thus ending one of the city’s historical jewels, one more loss of the city’s immense cultural and cinematographic heritage. In fact, in April this general unrest grew when it was learned that actors Chris Pratt and Katherine Schwarzenegger had demolished a historic 1950s house, with a garden that was a pioneer of modern landscaping, to build a mansion. It happened in the same neighborhood, Brentwood.
On May 6, the Milstein-Bank couple sued the city for not allowing them to demolish the house. As they argued, the place had had up to 14 owners in the long half-century since Monroe died, and none of them had respected the original construction or been forced to do so, granting a dozen permits for renovations. For them, it does not deserve to be considered a monument—it cannot even be seen from the street, in fact, nor does it allow visits for now as it is in private hands—and they believe that the city’s action was unconstitutional and a posteriori, since they sought to protect the home once purchased. In fact, they accuse them of plotting “covert machinations” to preserve it.
The couple decided to take legal action, so they sought a court order to block the designation of the house as a monument and thus move forward with the demolition and expansion of their own. However, on June 4, Judge James C. Chalfant of the Los Angeles Superior Court of Justice was inclined not to grant these preliminary measures, which for him were “a poorly disguised motion to win and be able to demolish the house and eliminate the question of the historical cultural monument.”
Now that the city has protected it, it remains to be seen what they will do with it: whether they will keep it closed, open it to visitors, decide to preserve it, use it as a museum… And in fact, it remains to be seen even if it will be removed in its entirety and will move to another place. The journey of Marilyn Monroe’s house is not over yet.
