Marilyn Monroe's iconic house in Palm Springs is up for sale. Whether she actually lived there is an entirely different question

There are few towns of any significant size in the middle of the deserts of southern California. But there's one in particular that you'll have heard of, tucked in between the San Jacinto mountains and the Joshua Tree National Park.

Its name is Palm Springs, and it became one of the greatest A-lister hotspots of the 20th century. Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Cary Grant, Princess Margaret, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton are among those who flocked here at the height of their fame, and its reputation still rides high today.

It was Hollywood's stars that started the influx, in large part because Palm Springs promised endless sunshine, a refuge from press photographers, and (crucially) was close enough to Los Angeles to meet the requirements of the Two-Hour Rule, which required film stars to ensure they always stayed close enough to Hollywood to get back for re-shoots within a couple of hours. The movie stars may have started it, but the rest of the A-list came with them: anyone who was anyone in show business in the 1950s and 60s made Palm Springs part of their life.

With a list of former residents like that, it's pretty much impossible to pick out a name worthy of top billing. But what we can say for definite is that only one of Palm Springs's illustrious former residents has a 26ft statue in the town, and only one of those names recently had over 1,000 impersonators hit the streets of the town to celebrate what would have been their 100th birthday. That person is Marilyn Monroe.

Monroe's career was tied to Palm Springs almost since the start. She first came here in the late 1940s as a down-on-her-luck wannabe, with early promise turning into disappointment as a couple of her contracts were cancelled. And it was here that her luck changed, beginning her rise to become the biggest movie star in the world.

She didn't stop once she made it, coming back again and again, going to parties, rubbing shoulders with movie stars and presidents. And one of the homes she's said to have lived in, known locally as the Marilyn Monroe Doll House, is currently on the market at $3.3 million.

Palm Springs is full of interesting modern architecture, and while The Doll House isn't celebrated as the likes of Richard Neutra's Kaufmann house, or Frank Sinatra's house withs its legendary piano-shaped swimming pool, it's still a fine example of a classic mid-century home in this desert enclave.

It's generously-sized for a four-bedroom house, at just under 3,000 square feet, and the whole place seems flooded with light, thanks to a clean white interior scheme and the huge windows, which afford wonderful views of the nearby mountains.

Those features and its location in the sought-after Vista Las Palmas neighbourhood give the place an asking price of $3.3 million — around £2.5 million — which from what we can see looks entirely in keeping with similarly-sized hopes nearby. You can consider the Marilyn Monroe connection an added bonus, rather than something that has impacted the price.

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As for the strength of that connection? Well, stories of Monroe's days in Palm Springs are the stuff of legend. It's here that her career took off, thanks to a photoshoot by Bruno Bernard — the man dubbed 'Bernard of Hollywood' — at the legendary Palm Springs Racquet Club, which led to Monroe's career taking off just when it looked like it had stalled. The agent Johnny Hyde and the legendary film director Howard Hawks both met Monroe at the club, ending up with her breakthrough role in The Asphalt Jungle, and her iconic turn in Gentleman Prefer Blondes which made her the biggest female lead in Hollywood.

As ever with Monroe, however, unpicking fact from fiction isn't always easy. One of the tales told about the town is that it was here the actress had her fling with President John F. Kennedy — but it's a story that's hard to pin down, requiring a couple of big leaps of logic, timing and faith to extrapolate an illicit tryst from a phone call asking about a back massage. Did she have an affair with JFK, and for that matter his brother, Bobby Kennedy? Quite possibly, indeed quite probably, but nobody can prove it one way or the other, and nobody is worried about questioning it either way in 2026.

The same could be said for Monroe's life at the Doll House itself. An article in the Desert Sun in 2016 argued that Monroe never lived here, and couldn't possibly have done so while married to Joe DiMaggio (as several of the stories suggest) because the house wasn't even built until 1961. That's six years after Monroe had split from the her baseball-playing second husband, and just a year or so before her death.

None of that proves that Monroe didn't stay in the house, but the fascinating question is whether or not it really matters if she did or not. A decade on from what was a pretty well-sourced debunking of several Monroe-related myths, you'll still find plenty of sources referring to 1326 N Rose Avenue as Marilyn Monroe's Palm Springs home. One person who doesn't is David Emerson, the agent handling the sale, whose listing cleverly refers to it only as the 'internationally recognized [sic] architectural residence known as the Marilyn Monroe Doll House'.

The questions that swirl around Marilyn Monroe's life put me in mind of another iconic figure we recently featured in Country Life whose life entwines truth and fiction: Lawrence of Arabia. The celebrated soldier undoubtedly performed many heroic deeds, but — equally undoubtedly — much of what he's credited with is bolstered, embellished or entirely made up. Yet despite the fact that his more far-fetched claims have been repeatedly debunked for a century or so, Lawrence's star never really seems to fall.

One of the first writers to make Lawrence famous, the American reporter Lowell Thomas, once asked his subject outright about the veracity of some of his more fantastical exploits. Lawrence apparently 'laughed with glee', according to Richard Adlington's 1955 biography, 'and replied, "History isn't made up of truth anyway, so why worry?"'

The Marilyn Monroe Doll House at 1326 N. Rose Avenue, Palm Springs, is for sale through Coldwell Banker — see more details.