M arilyn Monroe is said to have had more than 50 addresses in her lifetime, but only once, in the final months before she died from a drug overdose at the age of 36, did she have a house she could call fully her own. The Hollywood star, burned out by the failure of her marriage to the playwright Arthur Miller and by health problems that prompted a year-long hiatus from acting, bought herself a quintessential hacienda-style Spanish bungalow with a pool at the foot of the Santa Monica mountains in February 1962. At the time, it was almost unheard of for a single woman to own property. For that reason, cultural historians and preservationists associate the house with the same trail-blazing spirit that spurred Monroe to help break the studio system and establish her independence – from the movie industry and from the men who used and abused her on her way up. She did not spend long at the house, in the affluent Brentwood neighborhood in west Los Angeles .…