“I wish I had one tenth of Marilyn’s cleverness,” said acting coach Natasha Lytess. “Whenever I arrived at her Doheny Drive apartment, she was studying.”

Monroe in her last photo session, for LIFE magazine, a month before she died. She cared little for things and owned no jewelry. “I’m not interested in money,” Monroe once told an agent. “I just want to be wonderful.”

Eight months before her death Marilyn Monroe discovered a Spanish-style house in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. She traveled to Mexico in February 1962, enthusiastically searching shops in Cuernavaca, Taxco, Toluca and Acapulco for fabrics, furniture and tiles for her new home.