Happy Birthday, Marilyn. West Hollywood Claims You as Its Own

Everyone wants to claim Marilyn Monroe, especially on what would have been her 100th birthday – today, June 1st. The Academy Museum opened an exhibition about her yesterday. In Palm Springs on Saturday, 1,037 people dressed as her in the same white halter dress and platinum wig, shattering a Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of Monroe impersonators ever assembled. The previous record was 254.

West Hollywood doesn’t need a costume party, we were her home. 

Before it was a city, before 1984 when this stretch of unincorporated Los Angeles County was just a place where people in the movie business found cheap apartments near the studios, she kept coming back. Different addresses, different years, different versions of the woman who was still becoming Marilyn Monroe. The myth. The legend. The enduring icon.

The Normandie Towers

The earliest confirmed West Hollywood address is 7219 Hampton Ave., one block north of Santa Monica Boulevard. The Normandie Towers was built in 1924 as a cluster of six Tudor Revival cottages, designed specifically to house people working in the motion picture industry. It sat one block from the Pickford-Fairbanks Studios, the lot that would eventually become the Samuel Goldwyn Studios and is now The Lot at Formosa. Jean Harlow reportedly lived there. James Dean too. Monroe was among them, early in her career, before anyone outside Hollywood knew her name.

The Romanesque Villa

By 1950 she was around the corner at 1309 N. Harper Ave., living on and off with her acting coach, Natasha Lytess. The building is called the Romanesque Villa Apartments, a three-story Spanish Colonial Revival on the corner of Harper and Fountain, designed by architect Leland Bryant in 1928 and now on the National Register of Historic Places. Monroe had been studying with Lytess since 1948. When her agent Johnny Hyde died in December 1950, she moved in with her coach full-time. She wrote a check to Barney’s Beanery that month listing 1309 N. Harper as her return address. A Beverly Hills auction house later sold that check for $2,000. WEHOonline covered the building in 2014 when a unit in it hit Craigslist for $3,500 a month.

Doheny Drive

By 1953 she had moved to 882 N. Doheny Drive, Apartment 3, in the Norma Triangle. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes came out in July. How to Marry a Millionaire opened in November. She was about to marry Joe DiMaggio. The gated compound on Doheny would later also house Frank Sinatra, separately. Different eras, same block.

The Lot

Down Santa Monica, past the Romanesque Villa, at the end of the block that houses the Normandie Towers, sat the Samuel Goldwyn Studios, the same corner where Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford had built their studio in 1919. Monroe filmed most of Some Like It Hot there in 1958 and 1959, on the soundstages that had been running for four decades. Billy Wilder directed. She played Sugar Kane. During the shoot she was a regular at Barney’s Beanery on Santa Monica, where her chili order was well-known enough that the restaurant eventually noted it on the menu. Some Like It Hot was primarily filmed at the studio where the 1929 Chicago scenes were constructed. The Academy exhibition that opened yesterday includes two Orry-Kelly costumes she wore in the film. The lot is now called The Lot at Formosa.

The Formosa Cafe

Directly across Santa Monica Boulevard from the studio sat the Formosa Cafe, open since 1925 in a repurposed Pacific Electric Red Car trolley. Monroe was a regular. She favored the red vinyl booths and a side entrance on Formosa Avenue that let her come and go without the paparazzi. Her favorite booth is still part of the restaurant’s legacy. WEHOonline has covered the Formosa’s deep history going back to its founding across the street from the studio Monroe filmed in. This week the restaurant is running a tribute called “Our Week With Marilyn,” June 1 through 7, with themed cocktails, film screenings, live performances, and costume events marking her centennial.

The Granville Towers

The DiMaggio marriage ended in October 1954. Monroe moved into the penthouse at 1424 N. Crescent Heights Blvd., a 1930 French Normandy building then known as the Voltaire Apartments. The two-story unit at the top had floor-to-ceiling windows and mountain views. Architects Leland Bryant and Samuel Coine designed it, the same Bryant who had designed the Romanesque Villa on Harper. Rock Hudson lived in the building. David Bowie and Nora Ephron would too, later. It’s called Granville Towers now. Monroe stayed about a year. It was the last apartment she ever rented. She bought the house in Brentwood in 1962 where her body was found that August.

7936 Santa Monica Blvd.

Monroe met Lee Strasberg in New York in early 1955, introduced through the Actors Studio. Strasberg said publicly that the two greatest acting talents he ever worked with were Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe. When she died in August 1962, she left 75 percent of her estate, her physical property and her intellectual property rights, to Strasberg. He died in 1982. His widow Anna inherited everything and later sold the estate to a branding company for a reported $50 million.

Anna co-founded the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute and ran it until her death in January 2024. The Los Angeles campus has been at 7936 Santa Monica Blvd. in West Hollywood since the 1970s, in a former bank building between Fairfax and the Strip. Al Pacino trained there. Robert De Niro. Alec Baldwin. Angelina Jolie. The school named its performance space the Marilyn Monroe Theatre.

Monroe never set foot in the building. It opened six years after she died. But the theater on Santa Monica named for her sits less than a mile from the apartments where she used to live, in the neighborhood that was hers before it was anyone’s city.

A hundred years in, she’s still the most famous person who ever lived on our blocks. What an honor it is to call her one of our own.

Happy Birthday, Marilyn.

Love,

West Hollywood