The final home of Marilyn Monroe – and the only residence she ever owned independently – will remain standing for now after Los Angeles officials intervened to block the property’s demolition.
The news that the new owners of 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, where Monroe died at age 36, filed for demolition permits had attracted widespread outrage. Los Angeles city councilwoman Traci Park said she received hundreds of calls urging her to save the Spanish colonial-style house in the city’s Brentwood neighborhood.
“Unfortunately, the department of building and safety issued a demolition permit before my team and I could fully intervene and get this issue resolved,” Park said at a news conference last week, adding that there was a need for “urgent action”.
I don’t get it either. She was pretty and blonde. Are we gonna upkeep all the houses of tiktok celebrities when they die?
She was pretty, blonde, typecast, potentially murdered (I’m not a conspiracy theorist but some point to her relationship with the president), a feminism icon for her push to end the ‘ditzy blonde’ that stapled and pinholed her career.
She’s often listed as one of the most prominent figures in feminism due to her treatment of Joe Dimaggio, who she left after he got abusive with her and tried to restrict what roles and photoshoots she took… Joe loved her the rest of his life and begged for her back, and she made a point to say she’d never go back to a man who treated her that way, important for the 60s if you didn’t know about domestic abuse rates.
A critically intelligent woman who was taken into the world of show business for her looks and her brains intentionally ignored, and then media campaigns to push that she’s just “pretty and blonde” still succeed to the modern day.
I don’t deeply care about the woman, I liked some of her movies, some like it hot is a top tier film. But I’m also against preserving most people’s legacy, because ‘why care?’. Regardless of her impact, and the fact that that’s her only self-owned home, it’s land and stuff and we don’t need to be reserving any more land and stuff that isn’t significant. Expand public and national parks. Take good pictures of Lincolns childhood home and tear it out, people get one monument at the most, he can have his big stone chair or he can have his cabin.