UPDATED: Inside Marilyn Monroe’s Dreamy Final Home in Brentwood
September 12, 2023 Update:
As most of you know now, Marilyn’s Brentwood home was scheduled for demolition but it has been reported by multiple outlets – The LA Times, Vanity Fair, People, The Guardian – that Marilyn’s final home has been saved. At least for now. Follow The Hollywood Home on Instagram for my latest updates on Marilyn. I will also update this post frequently in the coming weeks as we learn about what we can do to hopefully secure this home protected status as a Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Monument or a Mills Act property. Stay tuned!
Friday, April 21 2017 Update – Marilyn’s final home in Brentwood has returned to the market. Asking price is $6,900,000.
Original September 21, 2016 post below:
It was the first and last home legendary Hollywood bombshell Marilyn Monroe ever owned. 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood is a dreamy Spanish hacienda that still stands today. According to Monroe biographers, Marilyn was urged by her psychologist to “put down roots” after three failed marriages to James Dougherty, Joe DiMaggio, and Arthur Miller. It is rumored she fell in love with the garden and would often spend calming afternoons there with her poodle. She bought the home in 1962 for $75,000. It last sold in 2012 for $5.1 million.
Considered a modest home at the time, it was all Monroe could then afford, and, besides, she was enchanted with the vintage hacienda. According to the biography Goddess, Marilyn cried when signing the final papers because she never imagined she’d be purchasing a home without a husband. She paid a $40,000 deposit and began making $320 monthly mortgage payments in March. Eunice Murray, who was Marilyn’s live-in housekeeper, recalled that Monroe studied and memorized every detail of the home, brick by brick. She loved the house’s simplicity and its lived-in aura.
Before her untimely death she made a trip to Mexico to hand-pick authentic Mexican furniture, art, tapestries and tiles for her home. Some of the tiles are still in place today. When Marilyn bought the house, it had three bedrooms and two baths plus a detached guest house. Today, the guest house has been connected to the main house, the kitchen has been expanded and several rooms have been added to the back, expanding the home’s square footage considerably.
As you can see by the photos above and below the gorgeous Spanish tiles have remained while the dark wood paneling and wall-to-wall carpeting has been eliminated.
It is said Marilyn used one bedroom for herself, installed her housekeeper-companion in a second bedroom, and the third bedroom was used as a “telephone room,” a must-have, surely, for all girls in the 1960s.
Marilyn threw herself into making her house a home. Besides the trip to Mexico, she planted an herb garden with lemon trees and flowering plants and the last check she ever wrote was for a white chest of drawers. She installed a plaque on the doorway of the house with the Latin phrase, “Cursum Perficio” which translates to “My Journey Ends Here.”
Marilyn’s sunroom remains nearly untouched besides an added bookshelf.
Her bedroom opened right onto the backyard and the kidney-shaped swimming pool, which her biographers claim she never used.
Five months after purchasing the home, the Los Angeles Times ran the headline: “Marilyn Monroe Found Dead. Sleeping Pill Overdose Blamed.” Marilyn Monroe was dead at 36. On the day after she died, it is said her estate received a half-dozen offers to purchase the home which resulted in a bidding war. 
Although her life was tragically cut short, Marilyn had at last landed in a place where she could feel at home. Many of the lemon trees and herb gardens Marilyn planted are said to still be thriving on the property.
Marilyn Monroe at home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in 1962.
For entertainment purposes only. All photos are in the public domain, used under fair use law, and for non-commercial purposes unless otherwise noted.
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Pretty! This has been a really wonderful post. Thank you for supplying this info.
$75,000 in 1962 money translates to $642,435 in 2020 money
Cursum Perficio was part of the property when she purchased it in 1961.
She spent a considerable amount of time updating the kitchen, which then had a copper hood, and copper pots and pans.
The hood on her bedroom fireplace was also copper.
Her bedroom shower was opposite of the windows where the sink once stood and her door would have been parallel to the showerhead wall.
The last photo shows her being playful, on the Spanish style chair with the lime green felt, during an interview, she reluctantly agreed to.
On the morning of her death, she had been planting in the garden.
When the house was remodeled; circa the 1970s, by Hill Street Blues Actress, “owner at the time”, an elaborate surveillance system was uncovered consisting of devices far advanced for the 1960s, correlation to the governments high tech systems of that time.
Ms. Monroe was in fact Murdered.
No evidence of her prints or any prints were ever found in her own home, an indication of CIA cleanup and coverup.
Thank you for sharing.
Gorgeous photos! So happy her beautiful, sweet and innocent soul is being remembered for what she always wanted. Which was a home and to be loved. Thrilled to hear her lemon trees and herb garden are thriving today.
There’s always evidence that they don’t think about. Or else they would open up the house for me to investigate AND get out. They obviously think that the right to bear witness doesn’t apply to them. Gives the plausible cause of felony tresspassing to cover up what’s been solved. Still, there’s who, why, and how still waiting to come out.
Thank you for showing Marilyn’s last home, a personal look to a cosy perfect Home …She was a amazing complicated person due to her insecurity from her childhood and to see and imagine her in her calm Garden on her last day, is a slight joy! She may have had an intuition of her future as somebody wrote these words above QUOTE … She installed a plaque on the doorway of the house with the Latin phrase, “Cursum Perficio” which translates to “My Journey Ends Here.” So Appt! Marilyn RIP
Monroe was not murdered; she died because of miscommunication between her physician and her psychiatrist. She was never murdered – by anyone – and after 60 years, there is no proof and never will there be proof – of any murder.
She accidentally overdosed on barbiturates including chloral hydrate which should not have been taken with the Nembutals. She accidentally swallowed too many and died over a period of time.