By John Gittelsohn | Bloomberg
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, the daughter of a prominent Cleveland real estate developer, and Roy Bank, a reality TV producer, paid $8.35 million in 2023 for the Brentwood area property where the screen goddess known for Some Like it Hot and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes spent her final six months.
ALSO SEE: LA City Council saves Marilyn Monroe’s Brentwood home from demolition
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, their residence since 2016, “to improve the property,” Peter Sheridan, their attorney, said in an email.
“LA has thousands of celebrities who live and die here,” Sheridan said. “Is every house that those good folks lived in a ‘historic monument’? Not in the least.”
Celebrity homes are one of LA’s major tourist attractions, with star-tour buses clogging streets from Hollywood to the Pacific shores. Stopping places in Brentwood include the gates of the manors of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kamala Harris and Harrison Ford.
Few stars match the allure and tragic glamor 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,” according to the lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court.
The suit claims the city unconstitutionally abused its power by conspiring with for-profit tour operators and biased conservationists to deprive the owners’ vested rights.
Attorneys for the city argued 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 $75,000 for the home six months before her death, the first residence she bought on her own after marriages to baseball star Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller.
An inscription in tile near the home’s front door threshold reads Cursum Perficio, Latin for “The Journey Ends Here.” It likely predates Monroe’s purchase, said Heather Goers, a preservationist who prepared a report for the city Cultural Heritage Commission, but adds a poignant note to her death at age 36.
“Marilyn Monroe was quite possibly the most influential female entertainer of the 20th century,” Goers said. “Less than 3% of the 1,300 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-story 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 undergone numerous renovations and additions including a detached recreation room and studio, the lawsuit says. The house, on a cul-de-sac of four properties, is enclosed by a wall and dense foliage and inaccessible to the public, unless they trespass, Sheridan said.
“In this particular case, it’s too little too late,” because the property has been so extensively changed since Monroe died there, Aaron Kirman, chief executive of Christie’s International Real Estate, Southern California, said in an interview. “The city should’ve designated this as a historical site long ago.”
Bank and Milstein have suggested saving the structure by relocating 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 have 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 correspondences, checkbook payments and other records, according to Goers’ presentation. In the months she lived there, Monroe won a Golden Globe Award, 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 are crime scene photographs taken for the coroner after Monroe’s death by a sleeping pill overdose, showing the house exterior much as it looks today, Goers said.
In July 1962, Monroe sat for an interview with Life magazine reporter Richard Meryman that was published the week she died. She took pride showing the largely unfurnished home, though she declined to allow photos, saying she didn’t want “everybody to see exactly where I live.” He described a profusion of flowers in the yard and construction underway of a side unit where her friends could stay in privacy.
“She exulted in it,” Meryman 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.”
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