Marilyn Monroe’s untimely death at just 36 has long been woven into her mystique, fuelling both fascination among fans and a proliferation of theories about its cause.
Monroe lived in the property for just six months. But as the home she died in, it has become a site of near-ritualised fan pilgrimage, much like her crypt at Westwood Village Memorial Park. That fascination has had tangible consequences. Earlier this year, the home’s current owners filed a lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles, arguing that its 2024 designation of the property as a historic-cultural monument unfairly prevents them from tearing down the house and redeveloping the site.
The city has argued that the owners were aware that “the property was a known destination for tourists and a candidate for future landmark status”. In other words, they knew that Monroe would always define the house. Her legacy is its destiny.
But if we understand Fifth Helena as a monument, then it is imperative to reflect on what exactly the house memorialises. In my recent research, I explored what the house meant to Monroe in her lifetime. I also traced how the very architectural design of the house raises issues around memory, place and the legends that emerge from both.
Troubled beginnings
Monroe was born in Los Angeles in 1926 and lived across various parts of the city throughout her unsettled childhood. 12305 was built just three years later in Brentwood, a sought-after neighbourhood developed in the early 1900s. Stars and studio executives alike made their homes there; but at around 2,000 square feet, standing on one of the Helena Drive culs-de-sac, 12305 was a comparatively unassuming property.
On the one hand, the homeliness of Fifth Helena and its privileged environs contrasted the domestic instability of Monroe’s early years. On the other, the Spanish-colonial revival design of 12305 – red tile roof, white stucco exterior and casement windows – tells its own story of a troubled past.
As architectural historians have established, the popularity of revival architecture from the late 19th century through the 1930s spoke to fantastic reimaginings of California’s history. Bell towers and arcades gestured artfully back to Spanish colonial missions, neglecting the violence such communities inflicted on indigenous people. The Mediterranean aesthetic of courtyards, tiling and stucco construction presented a racially charged privileging of European influences over Mexican tradition in southern California.
Postwar popular culture and tourism would go on, however, to position Mexico itself as a desirable, escapist landscape. By the time Monroe had purchased 12305 in 1962, she would describe it as “an authentic little Mexican house”.
In the less than 40 years since its construction, the house had shifted from a quintessential example of revival myths to an expression of once-denied Mexican heritage. Just as the single event of Monroe’s death has inspired endless speculation, this single dwelling on Fifth Helena attests to generations of romanticisation and disavowal.
A place of possibility
The house has also provided a concrete setting for tragic retellings of Monroe’s final months, though Monroe herself saw the house as a site of possibility.
In letters to family and comments to friends, Monroe praised the privacy gate, the security of thick walls and barred windows, and the manageable yard surrounding her pool. She travelled to Mexico to find furnishings for her new house and invited those closest to her to stay “as long as [they] wanted to”.
Monroe envisioned her home as a sanctuary “for any friends of mine who are in some kind of trouble”. She found the now-famous tile on the doorstep reading cursum perficio – journey’s end – to be a hopeful statement. Monroe wanted to live in this house.
Courtesy Everett Collection
The very features that Monroe admired would assume morbid connotations in the recollections of her intimate friends, one of whom described the house as “small, never-to-be-completed, [with] cold, uncertain, incomplete rooms”. Most damning was the fact that the house’s so-called “Mexican style” interior décor closely resembled that of Monroe’s psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson. Some of her inner circle found this to be a symptom of Monroe’s lack of personal taste and by extension a cohesive personal identity.
What this opinion neglects, though, is that Monroe had spent part of 1961 residing in one of singer Frank Sinatra’s homes. As a friend (and sometimes romantic partner), Sinatra had lent Monroe a house designed by architect Paul R. Williams.
Built in the mid-1950s, it presented a modernist alternative to the revival fancy of Fifth Helena Drive – East Asian-inspired décor; the latest sound and television technology; a black, grey, white and orange colour palette. In choosing 12305, then, Monroe was not simply mirroring her psychiatrist; she was making an informed choice between two different aesthetics. But over time, the effort to make the house fit posthumous grim narratives has obscured Monroe’s agency as homemaker.
The idea of Monroe’s private house as a public destination, much less a monument, would likely have unsettled the star. As she remarked in preparations for her final interview: “I don’t want everybody to see exactly where I live […] Do you know the [play] Everyman? Well, I want to stay just in the fantasy of Everyman.”
Monroe’s invocation of this allegorical figure has a resonance that she could not have anticipated. In the 16th-century morality play, Everyman faces death. In turn, the modern-day everyman finds Monroe’s death in the home that she wanted to protect to be a source of intrigue and mystery. But 12305 also invites us to consider the far more compelling mystery of what her life in that house could have been.
