While today’s supermodels are plastered all over social media, in a stream of selfies that will vanish as quickly as they appeared, the face of America’s first supermodel is still immortalized all over New York City — outside the New York Public Library, the Plaza Hotel, the Pulitzer Fountain — and across other major cities like Atlanta, San Francisco, and Madison.
Unlike Gigi and Kendall, however, you probably
don’t know the name Audrey Munson, whose life is chronicled in James Bone’s new
investigative biography The Curse of Beauty. The silently storied model died at
age 104, in 1996, at an Ogdensburg, New York, insane asylum where she spent the
last six decades of her life.
Bone, former New York bureau chief of The
Times of London, was introduced to Munson years ago while living in Soho. A
friend directed his attention to “Civic Fame,” the 25-foot statue of Munson
that sits atop the Municipal Building and is bested in size by only the Statue
of Liberty. “[My friend] lived near the building, on a high floor,” Bone tells
Yahoo Beauty. “He said, ‘Have you seen the statue?’ It’s 580 feet off the
ground, so it takes some effort to see it. But I started to look at her as a
model and look at the story — and it was this crazy story.”
Crazy indeed. Munson came to New York to be a
chorus girl, but was pulled from obscurity when photographer Felix Benedict
Herzog noticed the great beauty while window-shopping with her mother on Fifth
Avenue. Munson became an actress and a model under his tutelage and almost
accepted a marriage proposal from Herzog before he died suddenly in 1912. “By
then, she had artist friends, and she was sort of taken up by the scene,” Bone
says.
As an 18-year-old, Munson drew the attention of
noted artists for her idealistic physique — “The Most Perfectly Formed
Woman in the World,” said press at the time — a throwback to the Greek
goddessesque forms that captivated master painters Raphael and Botticelli. She
began posing nude for the likes of sculptor Isidore Konti in 1909 and
photographer Arnold Genthe shortly thereafter, soon becoming a favorite in New
York City artistic circles.
Munson was adored by men. But she was focused on
keeping her place atop the modeling world and turned away many suitors — like
smitten railway executive Paul Hardaway, to whom she was engaged for a time,
around 1914. According to Curse, Munson eventually realized she
“did not love this man enough to be his wife,” setting Hardaway up with another
model-friend of hers.
She continued to excel professionally when she
headed to the West Coast, where Munson caught the eye of movie producers. She
starred in commercial fashion shows and became the first American star to
appear fully nude on film. But trouble soon followed. “There, she started to
have psychological problems,” says Bone. “She was the most famous muse in
America, but was unfortunately swept up into a murder case.”
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