Where did Marilyn Monroe grow up and live?

📍Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, USA

1962

“I lived in a small guest house in Brentwood in the last years of my life — a modest Spanish-style house at Fifth Helena Drive that I bought in 1962, the first and only property I ever owned. I was thirty-five years old and I had finally bought something that was mine, and I planted a garden and hung a tile above the door reading Cursum Perficio — I complete my journey — which I had no way of knowing was prophecy. After years of studio-owned apartments and hotel rooms and other people's houses, having a home felt like becoming real. I died there on the 4th of August 1962. Brentwood was quiet and residential, removed from Hollywood's machinery, and I chose it deliberately for that quietness. The garden was where I felt most like myself — not Marilyn Monroe but Norma Jeane Baker, the girl from Los Angeles who had wanted, her whole life, simply to belong somewhere.”

👍 LovedThe first property I had ever owned — the sense of belonging somewhere that owning rather than renting created. The garden, which I tended myself. The quiet of Brentwood after years of noise.

👎 DislikedThe isolation that the quietness also brought. The difficulty of sleeping that never left me. The sense that the peace I had found had come too late.

Map showing where Marilyn Monroe lived — Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, USA

🗺️ Approximate location today

Street view of Marilyn Monroe's home at Brentwood, Los Angeles, California, USA

📍 Street view today

Sources: Spoto, D. Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (1993), HarperCollins; Leaming, B. Marilyn Monroe (1998), Crown Publishers