Marilyn Monroe’s mystery house: reappraising Fifth Helena Drive

Abstract

Since Marilyn Monroe’s death in 1962, her final home has endured in popular culture as both a symbol of personal tragedy and a forensically analysed physical location. As the site of her passing, 12305 Fifth Helena Drive has attracted generations of tourists and has provided the backdrop for numerous theories related to her untimely end. This emphasis on Monroe’s death has, however, overshadowed the star’s experience of homemaking and habitation; so too has a strand of posthumous commentary from those close to Monroe set out that the very structure and décor of the house prefigured her demise. This article challenges the received wisdom around the house to assert its significance as a site of interrupted potential rather than existential failure. Bringing together urban history and environmental psychology, the article argues that a more comprehensive understanding of Fifth Helena’s place in an entire legacy of Los Angeles domesticity illuminates what Monroe – a native of the city – was actively seeking in a home in her final months. This, in turn, restores agency to the star in a period of her life long defined by fatalistic and pathologising rhetoric.