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MArilyn Monroe is said to have had more than 50 addresses in her life, but only once, in the last months before her death from drug addiction at the age of 36, did she have a home she could call her own.
A Hollywood star, burned by the failure of his love for playwright Arthur Miller and due to health problems that kept him from acting for a year, he bought himself a Spanish hacienda-style house with a pool at the foot of the Santa Monica Mountains in February 1962.
At that time, it was almost unheard of for one wife to have property. For this reason, cultural historians and conservationists associate this building with the same spirit that led Monroe to help break the studio system and establish her freedom – from the film industry and the men who used and abused her on her journey.
He didn’t stay long in the house, in the affluent Brentwood neighborhood on the west side Los Angeles. And she didn’t have time to decorate with a few tiles and fabrics that she bought on a trip to Mexico.
But, defenders say, that doesn’t diminish its symbolic importance — or its central place among many conspiracy beliefs of his death there in August 1962. “He spoke about this house and was photographed in this house. It was where he was starting a new chapter of his independence, and it tells an important, sad story about him,” says Adrian Scott Fine, president and CEO of the nonprofit LA Conservancy.
The owners of the site beg to differ, however. Brinah Milstein, an heiress, and Roy Bank, her reality TV producer husband, paid $8.35m in 2023 with the intention of demolishing the original house and annexing the adjacent half-acre property where they have lived for ten years.
To them, the house was empty. As they later explained in court filings, they saw no reason to take serious action because there had been no opposition to more than 22 previous applications to change the site. He applied for – and initially received – a demolition permit.
Word of the permit spread quickly, however, and led to a public campaign to have the building declared a “historical monument”, protections being completed. in 2024. Demolition began, and Milstein and Bank are now suing the city for damages for what they say is a violation of their constitutional rights and for millions of dollars in damages.
The designation empowers city officials to ensure that a landmark building is destroyed or altered to avoid public notice, and that building owners are not forced to open their doors to the public. However, the homeowner’s attorney general, speaking on behalf of the couple, said Milstein and Bank were obligated to “maintain and preserve the monument at their own cost for public enjoyment”.
It is not an argument that has carried much legal weight so far. A federal judge this week removed alleging that the city wrongfully seized private property, although they left room for Milstein and Bank to file amended complaints with stronger arguments. Attempts to tamper with archived records, at this point, have not been found in federal court.
However, both sides agree that the conditions are not unusual. Buyers often know about a home’s historic preservation in advance, and existing homeowners often have a home they can sell if they don’t want to work with the city to preserve its history.
“The purpose of this ordinance is to have all parties participate willingly,” said Pete Brown, a spokesman for the city council office ahead of the campaign to save Monroe’s building. “But that’s not what we have in this case.”
Regardless of the outcome of the legal battles, the city still faces a serious problem because the building has not been maintained since it was last occupied in 2019 and it is not clear how the owners can be persuaded to repair what they did not want in the first place.
Some preservationists worry that the building is “deteriorating through neglect” — a gradual erasure of the history connecting the building to Monroe that the city’s name, by itself, cannot stop or stop. The house has been renovated several times since 1962, and the current owners say the Monroe Mexican tiles and other details are gone.
The staff of the city’s office of property history and cultural inheritance committee has not gone since 2023, but according to the photos and booking the court a large part of the roof is up to and exposed to things, the heating and piping systems do not work well, and there are leaks and possible mold infestations.
Three years ago, the city found that “significant public expression features” still remain, but the planning office says it can’t confirm whether that’s still true. The owners of the house, for their part, argue their case that “many things in the house (are) dilapidated and not working”.
There are also questions about how the name supports public interest since the building is not visible from the street and there is no right of entry. People living nearby said so he complained of the busloads of celebrities and other tourists that have blocked the neighborhood, where there are few to see beyond the narrow alley lined with whitewashed walls and fences. Some of the guests were caught on security cameras trying to jump over the building’s wall and check further, raising public safety concerns.
The Los Angeles city planning office has said it has the power to order if it deems the existing site to be unacceptable, dangerous or “disturbing”. The building and security department can have the building “immediately closed and secured” and make all the necessary repairs, with the landlord paying a large portion of the cost.
David Breemer, a senior attorney representing the landlords, said he is not afraid of such enforcement and expects any requests from the city to be made for settlement. He declined to explain what such a settlement would look like, saying his clients only wanted “compensation for the lost value of their property”.
“Selling is not a real option … and they don’t want to be homeowners,” he said. “What tenant would want to rent a house with wall breakers walking on the wall?”
Any individual or foundation that would want to take over the land would probably be looking for millions of dollars to buy the land and renovate it – and no such organization has come forward. The city, for its part, was not happy that it could buy the building, or any other old building in distress.
“The city does not have the money to buy more than 1,300 cultural monuments,” said a spokesperson for the planning office.
Traci Park, a councilwoman who represents the district where the building is located and advocated for the preservation of the building in 2023, said there is “no one else or a place in the city of Los Angeles as famous as Marilyn Monroe’s home in Brentwood.” But Brown, his spokesman, said there are limits to what the city can do and the council had no game plan to offer while the lawsuits are pending.
“It’s tough,” Brown said.
