Marilyn Monroe at Home: 18 Rare Photos of the Hollywood Star Off Screen
As the golden age icon’s centenary is celebrated, revisit the hotels, apartments and homes Marilyn Monroe once called her own
Much has been written about Marilyn Monroe — from her enduring Hollywood image to her influence on fashion and pop culture — but there remains equal fascination with Marilyn Monroe at home and the private spaces she retreated to away from the spotlight.
Born Norma Jeane Baker in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926, Monroe’s early life was marked by instability, moving between foster homes throughout her childhood. Even after becoming one of Hollywood’s most recognisable stars, the search for a sense of home seemed to continue. Over the years, she lived across a series of apartments, hotels and houses, from the Beverly Carlton Hotel in Los Angeles to a penthouse in New York City, a countryside retreat in Connecticut shared with then-husband Arthur Miller, and even a brief stay in England.
Publicly, Monroe became synonymous with old Hollywood glamour through films such as All About Eve, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, The Seven Year Itch, and Some Like It Hot. But privately, she was sensitive, introspective, and often spent her free time alone at home. “When an actress is building her career in pictures, as I am, there is very little spare time,” she said in 1954. “What little there is I spend in reading and studying.”
As the world marks what would have been Monroe’s 100th birthday, revisit the many places she called home — and the everyday moments that revealed a far more private side to the screen legend.
Photo: Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images1/18Humble beginnings
In this 1926 photo, Monroe is seen as an infant with her mother, Gladys. In her posthumously published autobiography, My Story, coauthored with Ben Hecht, Monroe recalled her early memories of her mother. “My mother was married at 15,” she said. “She had two children (before me) and worked in a movie studio [Columbia Pictures] as a film cutter.” The future movie star didn’t spend much time living with her mother, though; in the 1974 tome, Monroe revealed details about her life in various foster homes. “The families with whom I lived had one thing in common – a need for $5,” she said. “I was also an asset to have in the house. I was strong and healthy and able to do almost as much work as a grown-up. And I had learned not to bother anyone by talking or crying.”
Photo: Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images2/18A room of her own
In this circa-1933 photo, Monroe is pictured next to a white house. In My Story, Monroe recounted a moment when her mother dreamed of setting the family up in such a dwelling. “I’m going to build a house for you and me to live in,” she remembered Gladys telling her. “It’s going to be painted white and have a backyard.” Monroe then said, “It was true. My mother managed it somehow, out of savings and a loan. She built a house…. It was small and empty but beautiful, and it was painted white.” The pair moved in alongside an English couple whom her mother paid $5 a week to take care of her. “The four of us moved in. I had a room to myself. The English couple didn’t have to pay rent, just take care of me as they had done before. I worked hard, but it didn’t matter. It was my first home. My mother bought furniture, a table with a white top and brown legs, chairs, beds, and curtains.”
Unfortunately, the fantasy was short-lived. Monroe’s mother was taken to a mental hospital shortly after, and the young girl’s idyllic homelife crumbled. “All the furniture disappeared,” she said. “The white table, the chairs, the beds, and white curtains melted away…. The English couple disappeared also. And I was taken from the newly painted house to an orphan asylum and given a blue dress and a white shirtwaist to wear and shoes with heavy soles.” Monroe did not specify how old she was when her mother built the white house, but reports indicate that Gladys was taken to the hospital in 1934, which would have made Monroe around eight years old.
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The Sound of Music
In this 1950 photo, Monroe is pictured beside a piano in her new apartment in Los Angeles. In My Story, she discussed her love of playing music and recalled that her mother bought her a secondhand grand piano when she was a child. Monroe had such fond memories of that piano that, as an adult, she tracked it down and bought it for her own home. “Years later, when I was beginning to earn some money modelling, I started looking for the Fredric March piano,” she shared in My Story. “After about a year, I found it in an old auction room and bought it. I have it in my home now in Hollywood…and [it] plays as wonderfully as any piano in the world.”
4/18The suite life
According to the 2023 biography Hello, Norma Jeane: The Marilyn Monroe You Didn’t Know, by Elisa Jordan, Monroe maintained a one-bedroom suite with a kitchenette at the Beverly Carlton Hotel in Beverly Hills to preserve the illusion that she lived alone and to receive her mail. At the time, she was actually living with her agent and lover, Johnny Hyde, in her rented Beverly Hills home, which she decorated with reproductions of artwork she observed from books, like Fra Angelico, Dürer, and Botticelli. She also kept a photo of the Italian actress Eleonora Duse at her bedside. “Johnny inspired me to read good books [and] to enjoy good music,” Monroe said.
In this 1951 photo, she’s pictured at the hotel, which was located a short distance from 20th Century Fox, where she was under contract. Here, she’s surrounded by books, including Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.
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Home away from home
Monroe is pictured here, in 1952, relaxing in her dressing room at 20th Century Fox. While under contract at the studio, she starred in hits like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire, and The Seven Year Itch. In My Story, Monroe recalled what she did with her money when she first began working for 20th Century Fox. “I spent my salary on dramatic lessons, on dancing lessons, and singing lessons,” she said. “I bought books to read. I sneaked scripts off the set and sat up alone in my room, reading them out loud in front of the mirror. And an odd thing happened to me. I fell in love with myself – not how I was but how I was going to be.”
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Mrs. DiMaggio
On January 14, 1954, Monroe married baseball star Joe DiMaggio. Here, she’s pictured in the garden of their Palm Springs getaway the same year. Per Elisa Jordan’s biography Hello, Norma Jeane: The Marilyn Monroe You Didn’t Know, the newlyweds mainly lived in their Beverly Hills home and paid $750 per month. “That was something I had never planned on or dreamed about—becoming the wife of a great man,” Monroe said in My Story. “Anymore than Joe had ever thought of marrying a woman who seemed eighty percent publicity. The truth is that we were very much alike. My publicity, like Joe’s greatness, is something on the outside. It has nothing to do with what we actually are.”
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Privacy, please!
Though she was one of the most famous women during her career, Monroe, here again in the Palm Springs garden she and DiMaggio enjoyed, didn’t like for the public to know where she resided. “I don’t want everybody to see exactly where I live, what my sofa or my fireplace looks like,” she said. “Do you know the book Everyman? Well, I want to stay just in the fantasy of Everyman.”
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Person to Person
DiMaggio and Monroe divorced nine months after marrying. From 1954 to 1956, Monroe spent some time living with her business partner and photographer, Milton H. Greene, and his wife in Connecticut. In this 1955 photo, she’s pictured at their home with journalist Edward R. Murrow, who was interviewing her for the television series Person to Person. According to Vanity Fair, Monroe stayed in a guest suite next to an old converted farmhouse, and she was regarded as another member of the family. “If you were famous, you had safe harbour in the Greene family,” said Greene’s son, Joshua, in 2017. “The house gave her a certain sense of comfort and privacy.”
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The hostess with the mostest
Back in LA, on March 3, 1956, Monroe hosted a press party in the lavishly wallpapered four-bedroom home she rented (along with the Greenes) at 595 North Beverly Glen Boulevard, in Los Angeles. Monroe had a complicated relationship with fame and the industry, as she said in My Story. “Hollywood parties not only confuse me, but they often disillusion me,” she confessed. “The disillusion comes when I meet a movie star I’ve been admiring since childhood. I always thought that movie stars were exciting and talented people full of special personality. Meeting one of them at a party, I discover usually that he (or she) is colourless and even frightened. I’ve often stood silent at a party for hours listening to my movie idols turn into dull and little people.”
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Prioritizing protein
Although she's shown here snacking on canapés at her party, alongside photographer Earl Lewis, Monroe normally kept a more quiet life at home. “My dinners at home are startlingly simple,” she told a fashion magazine in 1952. “Every night I stop at the market near my hotel and pick up a steak, lamb chops, or some liver, which I broil in the electric oven in my room. I usually eat four or five raw carrots with my meat, and that is all. I must be part rabbit; I never get bored with raw carrots.”
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Downtime
Here, Monroe is shown tuckered out by her party. “By nature, I suppose I have a languorous disposition,” she said in the same 1952 magazine interview. “I hate to do things in a hurried, tense atmosphere, and it is virtually impossible for me to spring out of bed in the morning. On Sunday, which is my one day of total leisure, I sometimes take two hours to wake up, luxuriating in every last moment of drowsiness. Depending upon my activities, I sleep between five and ten hours every night. I sleep in an extra-wide single bed, and I use only one heavy down comforter over me, summer or winter. I have never been able to wear pajamas or creepy nightgowns; they disturb my sleep.”
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Milton and Marilyn
Monroe is pictured here with her business partner, Milton H. Greene, outside of the Los Angeles home they rented in 1956, while she was filming Bus Stop. Per Hello, Norma Jeane: The Marilyn Monroe You Didn’t Know, the home rented for $995 per month, reportedly paid for by Monroe and Greene’s new production company, Marilyn Monroe Productions.
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At home with Arthur Miller
Monroe broke up the Greene roommate trio when she married playwright Arthur Miller. She reportedly met him at a party in 1950, and they began an affair in 1955, while he was still married to his wife, Mary Slattery. After his divorce, Monroe and Miller got married in 1956. Here, they are pictured together that year at Miller’s summer home on Tophet Road in Roxbury, Connecticut. Monroe enjoyed living off the beaten path, telling Miller at the time, “I hate Hollywood. I don’t want it anymore. I want to live quietly in the country and just be there when you need me.”
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Dog days
Monroe and Miller are photographed with their basset hound, Hugo, at their home in Connecticut. Architectural Digest previously reported that the nine-bedroom home sat on 250 acres and was a Revolutionary War-era farmhouse, and that the couple commissioned, and then rejected, a Frank Lloyd Wright remodel. According to Hello, Norma Jeane: The Marilyn Monroe You Didn’t Know, the Millers divided their time between the home in Connecticut and a penthouse in New York. When they got divorced, Miller retained the Roxbury home and the dog, while Monroe kept the place in New York City.
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Sunlit days
After marrying Miller, Monroe felt like she finally belonged. “All my life I’ve been alone,” she said. “Now for the first time, the really first time, I feel I’m not alone anymore. For the first time, I have a feeling of being sheltered. It’s as if I have come out of the cold.” Here, the pair are shown in their Roxbury, Connecticut, garden in 1956.
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In the country
Miller’s Roxbury two-story house was reportedly built in the 1700s and had stunning views of the hills. The home featured ceiling beams, fruit trees, and a swimming pond with potable water. Monroe took great pride in her many abodes and was once quoted as saying, “Anybody who likes my house, I’m sure I’ll get along with.” After Marilyn moved in, the pair – shown here in the garage – made a few updates, adding sliding glass doors and a separate one-room studio where Miller could work.
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Across the pond
Monroe and Miller spent their honeymoon at a mansion in Surrey, England, then extended their England trip to accommodate Monroe’s four-month filming schedule for The Prince and the Showgirl (directed by and starring Laurence Olivier). In this 1956 photo, Miller and Monroe, along with Olivier and his famous wife, Vivien Leigh, are pictured at Parkside House in Englefield Green, Surrey, where the visiting Americans lived during their stay. According to a BBC report, Monroe and Miller kept themselves busy in England with various social engagements, such as attending performances at the theatre, cycling in Windsor Great Park, watching polo matches, and going on shopping trips in London.
Photo: Bettmann/Getty Images18/18The end of a marriage
Sadly, Monroe and Miller’s marriage fell apart after their return to the United States from England, and the couple separated in 1960. Here, Monroe is seen leaving her New York City apartment following their split. In 1961, after they officially divorced, Monroe purchased a home in Brentwood for $77,000, according to J. Randy Taraborrelli’s The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe. That modest house – the only one Monroe ever bought on her own – had three bedrooms and two bathrooms. In a Life magazine article published in 1962, the home was described as “Mexican style.” The reporter Richard Meryman wrote, “On a special trip to Mexico, [Monroe] had carefully searched in roadside stands and shops and even factories to find just the right things to put in it…The few small Mexican things – a tin candelabra, folding stools ingeniously carved from single pieces of wood, a leather-covered coffee table, tiles on the kitchen walls – revealed her impetuous, charming taste.” The actress lived there until her tragic death in 1962. In 2023, the home was reportedly purchased for $8 million. Since then, the owners of the Brentwood property have been at odds with the city over their right to demolish the famous dwelling.
