Audrey Munson: The Rise and Fall of Americas First Supermodel
- Daniel Holland
- 15 minutes ago
- 8 min read
If you have ever wandered through New York and looked up at the statues scattered across its grand buildings and plazas, there is a fair chance you have already seen Audrey Munson. You may not have realised it, because her name faded out of public memory decades ago, but her face is everywhere. It gazes down from fountains, arches, domes and state halls. At one time, before fame took a strange and painful turn, she was described as the most recognisable woman in America. People saw her far more often in stone than in the flesh.
Today we might call her the original supermodel. She worked before the word existed, before the fashion world had any real structure, and before Hollywood fully understood what glamour could be. Audrey Munson lived at a time when artists elevated their muses to near mythic status. What makes her story so compelling is not just her beauty or her fame, but the sheer contrast between the life she lived in public and the life she endured in private.
Her rise was remarkable. Her fall was devastating. Yet her legacy is one of the most quietly enduring in American culture. Her photographs and films have faded, but the statues remain.
This is her life in all its complexity.
A Childhood That Gave No Hint of What Was Coming
Audrey was born on June 8, 1891, in Rochester, New York. Her family background was fairly ordinary. Her father Edgar worked as a streetcar conductor and dabbled in real estate. Her mother Katherine came from an Irish immigrant family and was the more stable parent as Audrey grew up. When the marriage collapsed, Katherine took her daughter to Providence, Rhode Island, and later to New York City. They lived modestly and moved often, as many single mothers did in that era.
Nothing in Audrey’s early life suggested artistic fame. There were no dramatic accounts of childhood talent or precocious beauty. Instead, there was simply a hard working mother and a young girl looking for a way into the world.
At seventeen she joined the chorus line on Broadway. She appeared in shows like The Boy and the Girl, The Girl and the Wizard, Girlies and La Belle Parée. She was competent, energetic and hopeful. But she was also one girl in a very large crowd.
Her life changed one afternoon while she and her mother were window shopping on Fifth Avenue. It was as simple as someone seeing her at the right moment. Photographer Felix Benedict Herzog approached her and asked her to pose for him.
It was the kind of chance encounter that alters a life completely. Audrey said yes.
Becoming an Artist’s Muse
Her work with Herzog introduced her to a web of artists who were shaping American public sculpture. She modelled initially for muralist William de Leftwich Dodge, who wrote her a letter of introduction to sculptor Isidore Konti. Konti was the first to ask her to pose nude, something she accepted with a mix of fear, professionalism and curiosity.
From that point forward, she was in constant demand.
She posed for painters, illustrators, photographers and sculptors. But sculpture was the medium that truly made her famous. The sculptors of the early twentieth century were fascinated by creating idealised figures representing virtues, myths and allegories. Audrey embodied their vision of classical beauty: serene, symmetrical and quietly expressive.
Her likeness appeared everywhere. One of her earliest major credits was Konti’s Three Graces at the Hotel Astor in 1909. After that, her work snowballed. She stood for dozens of artists working on public monuments, state buildings, memorial fountains and civic art.
In 1913 The Sun declared:
“Over a hundred artists agree that if the name of Miss Manhattan belongs to anyone in particular it is to this young woman.”
By now, her mother was often described as fiercely protective and very involved in her daughter’s career. The pair lived in modest rented rooms, but Audrey’s reputation inside the art world was enormous. She was dependable, she could hold a pose for long periods without rest, and she had the rare ability to remain emotionally present even while still. Sculptors said she was a natural.
The Panama Pacific International Exposition
By 1915 Audrey’s fame had spread across the United States. When the Panama Pacific International Exposition opened in San Francisco, she became the primary muse for its Director of Sculpture, Alexander Stirling Calder. Her figure appeared repeatedly in the Court of the Universe, on columns, domes and entryways.
One newspaper captured the sense of awe surrounding her contributions:
“Long after she and everyone else of this generation shall have become dust, Audrey Munson, who posed for three-fifths of all the statuary of the Panama Pacific exposition, will live in the bronzes and canvasses of the art centers of the world.”
Audrey appeared roughly ninety times on one building alone. She became known as the Panama Pacific Girl.
Her fame felt almost classical. She was not a celebrity in the modern sense. People did not stop her in the street or ask for autographs. Instead, her beauty circulated through artistic spaces. She was present everywhere but also strangely absent.
The statues lasted longer than her fame ever would. In fact, they have lasted far longer than her life.
Hollywood Takes Notice
With the silent film industry growing, Audrey’s fame naturally attracted interest from studios. They recognised that people were curious about the woman behind so many statues. There was something magnetic about seeing someone known for stillness suddenly move on screen.
Her first film, Inspiration (1915), was a sensation because it featured her nude. This was not pornographic. Instead, the film used her as a sculptor’s model, presenting her body as a form of art. Studio executives were nervous. Censors did not quite know what to do. Yet there was no law against depicting nudity in a non sexual context. The alternative would have been banning classical artworks themselves.
Audrey performed the nude scenes while a body double, Jane Thomas, handled the acting portions. It was a solution that said more about Hollywood’s discomfort than about Audrey’s ability.
Purity followed in 1916. Today, it is her only surviving film. It was rediscovered decades later in a French archive filed mistakenly among adult materials. In it, Audrey continues the role of an idealised model, a kind of living statue. Even as cinema expanded, filmmakers struggled to imagine her outside this mould.
Her other films, The Girl o Dreams and Heedless Moths, are lost or partially mythic. Heedless Moths was said to be based on her autobiographical series, By the Queen of the Artists Studios, but its backstory was tangled in publicity stunts, lawsuits and ghostwritten scripts.
In truth, Audrey was never fully embraced by Hollywood. They wanted her image, not her personality. She was valuable only as an embodiment of beauty, and that was not something she could control.
The Scandal That Broke Her Career
In 1919, Audrey and her mother were living in a boarding house owned by Dr Walter Wilkins. Wilkins fell obsessively in love with her. On February 27 he murdered his wife Julia, apparently believing that removing his spouse might clear the way for a relationship with Audrey.
The case was sensational, lurid and deeply tragic. Detectives wanted to question Audrey, who had already left New York, and a nationwide hunt followed. She and her mother were found in Canada and questioned by private detectives.
Audrey always insisted she had never reciprocated Wilkins’ feelings and had no involvement in the murder. Dr Wilkins was convicted and sentenced to the electric chair. Before his execution he committed suicide in prison.
The scandal destroyed her career. Even though she had nothing to do with the crime, the aura of tragedy surrounding the case clung to her. Studios distanced themselves. Sculptors stopped calling. The press began framing her as a woman whose beauty had led men to ruin.
In reality, her fame had made her vulnerable. The public loved the idea of a muse but not the reality of a woman with boundaries.
Attempts to Reclaim Her Image
By 1920 Audrey struggled to find work. She moved frequently. Newspapers reported her living in Syracuse and later working as a ticket taker in a dime museum.
That same year a series of twenty articles appeared under her name in Hearst’s Sunday Magazine. These pieces were reflective, melancholy and full of cautionary advice to young models. One of the most quoted sections asked:
“What becomes of the artists’ models? I am wondering if many of my readers have not stood before a masterpiece of lovely sculpture or a remarkable painting of a young girl, her very abandonment of draperies accentuating rather than diminishing her modesty and purity, and asked themselves the question, ‘Where is she now, this model who was so beautiful?’”
The articles were popular but later revealed to be ghostwritten by journalist Henry Leyford Gates. This made Audrey furious. It was yet another example of someone else speaking through her image.
Throughout 1921 she continued appearing in public, often recreating poses from well known sculptures. She also involved herself in a surreal publicity stunt seeking the perfect man to marry. She later announced she no longer wanted marriage at all.
The year ended with another scandal when she was arrested in St Louis on a morals charge related to her film Purity. Though acquitted, the experience further chipped away at her dignity.
In 1922, overwhelmed and exhausted, Audrey attempted suicide.
Life Inside the Asylum
By the 1930s Audrey’s mental health had deteriorated significantly. On her fortieth birthday, her mother petitioned a court to have her committed to a psychiatric institution. Audrey was admitted to St Lawrence State Hospital in Ogdensburg, where she would live for more than sixty four years.
Her life there was quiet, repetitive and largely undocumented. For decades she received no visitors. Her mother died in 1958 and Audrey slipped into near total obscurity.
In the 1980s a half niece rediscovered her, astonished to find the legendary Miss Manhattan still alive. By then Audrey was in her nineties, frail yet remarkably resilient. Though she struggled with hearing loss and had lost her teeth, she remained physically robust.
There were stories of her occasionally escaping the nursing home to visit a bar down the road. Staff would have to escort her back, a small echo of the independence she had once known.
Audrey died on February 20, 1996 at the age of 104. Only one small local newspaper reported her death. Her grave remained unmarked until 2016.
A Legacy Carved in Stone
What remains of Audrey Munson today is not fame in the usual sense. She left no autobiography and almost no records of her own voice. But her body of work is unusual because it is literally carved into the cultural landscape.
Her face adorns fountains in San Francisco. Her form crowns municipal buildings in New York. She is the figure of memory and liberty on public monuments. She is part of the architecture of a nation.
Her life was full of shadows. Her fame vanished. Her career evaporated. Her final decades were spent in quiet institutional rooms. Yet the art she contributed to has endured in ways she herself may never have imagined.
She succeeded in the strange promise artists once made about her:
Long after she and everyone else of this generation shall have become dust, Audrey Munson, who posed for three-fifths of all the statuary of the Panama–Pacific exposition, will live in the bronzes and canvasses of the art centers of the world.
— Richmond (Virginia) Times-Dispatch, August 1, 1915
Sources
The New York Times
“Audrey Munson, 104, Dies; Model for U.S. Statues”
by Robert McFadden
Smithsonian Magazine
“America’s First Supermodel”
by Roxana Robinson
The New Yorker
“The Original American Supermodel”
by Margaret Talbot
Library of Congress
Panama Pacific International Exposition Records
(General reference collection on artists and models of the 1915 Exposition)
Thanhouser Film Corporation Archives
“Inspiration (1915) Production Notes”
American Film Institute
AFI Catalog Entry: Purity (1916) and The Girl o Dreams (1916)
Historic Newspapers Database
Various articles from 1913 to 1922 quoting period commentary on Audrey Munson
