by Ian Telford

She's been dead for 42 years, yet Marilyn Monroe's allure survives virtually intact.

She was the most famous movie star in the world when in 1962, at the age of 36, she succumbed to an overdose of prescription drugs in Los Angeles in 1962.

To this day, lurid rumours and conspiracy theories swirl around her legend.

The thrice-married Marilyn left no note, unlike one of a record number of tortured souls who ended it all in California that week.

"If the most wonderful, beautiful thing in the world has nothing to live for," wrote one, "then neither must I."

But whatever the cause, her immortality was sealed.

Monroe was neither the most glamorous nor the most talented actress to make it big in Tinsel Town.

But she did radiate a special kind of beauty, best summed up by Billy Wilder, the director of her most celebrated movie, the gender-shifting comic masterpiece, Some Like it Hot.

"She has a certain undefinable magic ... which no other actress in the business has," he said.

"They've tried to manufacture other Marilyn Monroes, but it won't work - she's an original."

That she remains the brightest star in Tinsel Town's firmament of the Dearly Departed was validated on a recent motoring trip around southern California.

Marilyn was the common denominator linking all three stopovers - in Los Angeles, San Diego and Palm Springs.

Arriving in LA after a 15-hour flight from Sydney via Auckland, we checked into the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, a Spanish-style landmark with a cinematic pedigree.

A playground of the rich and pampered, it has stood at No 7000 Hollywood Boulevard since 1927, dominating the epicentre of the movie world's mecca. The Roosevelt hosted the first Academy Awards in 1929 and over the years has played host to a galaxy of Hollywood legends.

Marilyn lived there on and off for two years in the mid-1940s - earning her first modelling pay cheque posing on the hotel's diving board for a toothpaste ad.

Scores of Roosevelt visitors down the years claim to have seen her ghostly image in a full-length mirror that originally hung in the poolside apartment she always occupied, but has been relocated to a lower ground floor foyer near a bank of lifts.

Marilyn's first floor suite (No 229) overlooking the pool now costs from US$1299 ($2375) to US$2000 a night in peak season.

Many people also claim to have also seen her apparition dancing in the hotel ballroom.

But she always dances alone, and certainly never in the company of another of the Roosevelt's occasional spectral visitors - the notorious Aussie hellraiser Errol Flynn.

Our next Marilyn "experience" occurred the following day at Universal Studios - where Flynn, incidentally, made one of his better known movies, Istanbul, in 1956.

A tour of Universal's backlots took in the property department, a vast hangar-like building containing more than two million items - every conceivable prop needed to make any sort of movie.

And there occupying centre stage at the entrance to the main warehouse is a life-size wax model of Ms Monroe in a legendary pose from the movie The Seven Year Itch.

It's the one where she's standing over a grate on a New York sidewalk and a rush of subway air blows her skirt up.

Next stop San Diego, virtually on the border with Mexico and the setting for Marilyn's greatest cinematic triumph Some Like it Hot.

It was shot in and around the Victorian-era Hotel Del Coronado, which rises almost from the water's edge on Coronado Island, just across the bay from San Diego.

The Del has a resident ghost, but it isn't Marilyn. In 1892 a beautiful young woman named Kate Morgan checked into the hotel alone and under an alias over Thanksgiving weekend. She stayed only a few days and then killed herself on the steps of the hotel leading to the ocean.

She is said to be jealous of Marilyn - Kate's ghost was blamed for repeatedly sending Marilyn memorabilia flying off a special display shelf in the Del gift shop.

The final stop on our journey was the desert-edge resort of Palm Springs, where our accommodation has a far racier history than either of the first two grander establishments.

The Colony Palms was built by Purple Gang mobster Al Wertheimer, who reputedly planned - with crime czar Al Capone - the St Valentine's Day Massacre.

In far raunchier times, the Colony played host to a host of Hollywood heavy hitters such as the Marx Brothers, Clark Gable, Jack Benny, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.

Marilyn once owned a house in Palm Springs, but it was in Crosby's holiday pad that she and US President John F. Kennedy reportedly spent a weekend in March 1962. Two months later Marilyn orchestrated the most surreal episode in the annals of US Pop culture.

It happened at a sell-out Democratic Party fundraiser in New York's Madison Square Garden on President Kennedy's 45th birthday.

Suddenly Marilyn appeared on stage wearing a stunning white silk evening gown - encrusted with 6000 sequins and beads and so tight she had to be sewn into it.

Then, as the nation looked on, she broke into a sultry, yet wobbly and sometimes breathless version of Happy Birthday.

"I can now retire from politics after having Happy Birthday sung to me in such a sweet and wholesome way," said the President.

Three months later, Marilyn was dead.

And that dress? It was sold at auction by Christie's in 1999 for US$1.2 million.