1. Peter Lawford’s Former Beach Home (625 Pacific Coast Highway)
Park anywhere near Ocean Avenue and Alta Street. Walk across Palisades Park to the edge of the palisades overlooking Santa Monica Bay. Walk south until you see the house. It has a tile roof, a small, round tower and a six-car garage. (The house just south of it has a gray roof and two skylights.)
If you are at Alta you can also walk 60 paces south on the sidewalk. On your right you will see several picnic tables. Walk through them and to the edge of the palisades. The Lawford house will be below you.
The park’s tall palm trees are Washington robustas and the stouter, bushy ones Phoenix canariensis. Neither are native to Southern California.
This is a spectacular view of Santa Monica Bay and the famous Gold Coast.
Almost the entire history of Hollywood is represented in the homes just below where you are standing. L. B. Mayer, the head of MGM, lived previously in the Lawford house at 625. The first “screening” of Gone with the Wind (1939) took place there. Just to the south at 707, where the pedestrian walkway joins Palisades Park, is the neo-Elizabethan home built in 1931 by MGM’s wunderkind production head Irving Thalberg and his actress-wife Norma Shearer. Look for the two tall chimneys. Just to the right of the Lawford house at 605 and 607 was the home of Harry Warner, one of the four Warner brothers. The 607 residence was built by Jesse Lasky, one of the founders of Paramount. Movie mogul Sam Goldwyn lived in the house with three garages at 602 to the north. And the head of 20th-Century Fox and the last of the great movie moguls, Darryl F. Zanuck, lived further north at 546.
Celebrities who have had homes along the Gold Coast include actors Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks, Ben Lyon, and Randolph Scott, movie mogul Joe Schenck and his actress wife Norma Talmadge, directors Mervyn LeRoy (The Wizard of Oz, 1939), Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth, 1937), Mack Sennett (the Keystone Kops), and Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951), actress and scenarist Mae West, actress and companion to William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, author Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, 1953), composer Irving Berlin, billionaire J. Paul Getty, and comedians Harold Lloyd and George Jessel.
The highway is the famous Pacific Coast Highway (PCH in the local parlance). Marilyn often drove north on the PCH toward Malibu when she was depressed. Santa Monica Beach was also a favorite of Marilyn’s. She came here with her first husband Jim Dougherty. After their divorce, she often strolled the beach with Fred Karger, her lover and vocal teacher at Columbia. It was here also that photographer George Barris took his famous photos of Marilyn shortly before her death.
Marilyn was one of the first celebrities to wear jeans. She would wear surplus store jeans into the Santa Monica surf, sans panties, and allow them to form-fit dry on her body. (Her character in the 1952 film Clash By Night wears jeans.)
2. Eunice Murray Apartment Residence (933 Ocean Avenue)
The Spanish-style apartment building on your left at 933 was the home of Eunice Murray (1902-1995?) at the time of Marilyn’s death. In November of 1961, Murray was suggested to Marilyn as a “housekeeper” by Marilyn’s psychiatrist Dr. Ralph Greenson. Murray had sold her Mexican-style home to Greenson back in 1948. It was Murray who helped Marilyn find her Brentwood house in February of 1962.
Murray’s evasiveness and conflicting testimony regarding what happened on August 4, 1962 are largely responsible for many of the “theories” that have sprung up about how and why Marilyn died. She denied Bobby Kennedy was at the house that August afternoon yet on another occasion said that he was. One version has her discovering Marilyn’s body at 3:30 a.m. and another at around midnight and that rigor mortis had already set in. Jack Clemmons, the first police officer on the scene at 4:40 a.m., added more mystery when he said that Murray was washing clothes, cleaning out the refrigerator, and packing away items.
Murray never was called to testify under oath, because there has never been an official inquest into Marilyn Monroe’s death.
Continue a short distance down Ocean to the Miramar Hotel. You can turn left on California Avenue, just before the hotel, and go around the hotel, turning right on 2nd Street and then right on Wilshire Boulevard. Then you will take a left back onto Ocean.
3. Fairmont Miramar Hotel (101 Wilshire Boulevard)
John P. Jones (1834-89), the founder of Santa Monica, built his home on this site. He was a wealthy senator from Nevada who made his fortune in the Nevada Comstock Silver Lode. (In fact, the Santa Monica section of Wilshire Boulevard was formerly Nevada Avenue.) His house was later converted into the first version of the Miramar.
It used to be asked, "Why go to Hollywood when you can go to the Miramar?" At one time or another, Faye Dunaway, Susan Hayward, character actor Jack Holt, Louis Jourdan, and Jean Simmons lived at the hotel. Lana Turner married her fifth husband here.
Frequent guests of the hotel have been Marlon Brando, Humphrey Bogart, Claudette Colbert, Dick Van Dyke, Shirley Temple, and Anthony Quinn. Gloria Swanson came here regularly in the 1930s to listen to the big bands that were also broadcast over radio. Wallace Beery came to see Betty Grable sing. The Miramar was, in fact, where Grable was discovered.
Former President Bill Clinton has stayed here as did Eleanor Roosevelt and aviator Charles Lindbergh.
Novelists William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, eccentric aviation genius Howard Hughes and the "Blonde Bombshell" Jean Harlow lived for a short time in the pool side bungalows, now enlarged and made over.
The older brick portion of the hotel is called the Garbo Wing. A twenty-year old Greta Garbo, recently arrived from her native Sweden, lived here for almost three years beginning in September of 1925, her longest residence while in Hollywood.
On the south side of the hotel is a giant Moreton Bay fig tree. The only one larger is in Santa Barbara. Legend has it that around 1895 an Australian sailor, not having enough money to cover his drinks at a local watering hole, gave the bartender this tree, then a tiny sapling in a coffee can. The bartender, knowing that Mrs. John Jones loved plants, gave it to her. She planted it in the garden. And the rest is time and rain. For years the tree served as a landmark for horsemen and oxcarts headed for the ocean and the beach road to Rancho Mailbu to the north.
Marilyn was a sometime visitor to the hotel. Joe Dimaggio stayed here when in town for her funeral.