GOODBYE NORMA JEANE'S HOME?

The modest LA hacienda where Marilyn Monroe was found dead may be facing the bulldozers after its new owners went to court to tear it down, in the latest twist of an increasingly bitter battle over a slice of Hollywood heritage...

- Peter Sheridan

SIX decades after her tragic death at the age of 36, legendary screen siren Marilyn Monroe still fascinates and captivates. Her pillowy red lips, pert nose and signature beauty spot on her left cheek, framed by a lustrous crown of honeyed blonde curls, peer from billboards, commercials and a seemingly endless supply of biographies, television dramas and movies.

Fans and tour buses make daily pilgrimages to the hacienda-style home in the Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood where she died of a drug overdose in August, 1962.

The star of Some Like It Hot, The Seven Year Itch and How To Marry A Millionaire is as much a part of the fabric of Tinseltown as the Hollywood sign and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where her hand-prints and footprints surprisingly small still attract thousands of tourists each day.

Yet the home where Monroe died is now at the centre of a toxic feud over its proposed demolition, raising difficult questions over the actress's cultural significance, the impor tance of Hollywood history and whether a celebrity's past should affect a home's future.

"It is the only place in the world that grounds Marilyn's myth into history, and the US and world's history," says art historian Jacques Le Roux, echoing words by legions of Monroe's fans, while making his plea for preserving the home to the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission.

"It is the only physical reminder that remains of the life and death of an extraordinary human being. Marilyn has become part of our the US and the world's - collective unconscious. Destroying the only place she owned while alive, and where her transition into a sacred figure started, would be a shame and irreparable error, an ignorant act against culture and history."