America's First Supermodel, Buried Without a Name
In the early 20th century, Audrey Munson was the face of beauty, virtue, and nationhood. Then America discarded her.
“From loving and admiring me, the public seemed to grow to hate me.”
— Audrey Munson, supermodel and actress
You'll find her in Wisconsin, perched atop the capitol dome in Madison, catching the first and last light of day.
You'll find her etched in stone in Massachusetts, behind a bust commemorating the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
You'll find her in Ohio, Connecticut, and California.
But mostly, you'll find her in New York City.
Her name is Audrey Munson and she was, for about a decade during the early 1900s, America’s muse — the model who sculptors turned to when they wished to create something that embodied beauty, grace, virtue, even nationhood itself.
Today, you can still see her likeness, gazing down from monuments and cornices, refashioned in marble, steele, granite and bronze — a one-time goddess of the Gilded Age.
Every day, in New York alone, millions pass by her. On Columbia University’s campus, at the Frick Collection, in Central Park, near City Hall, and at the Brooklyn entrance to the Manhattan Bridge. Maybe they’ll glance at her without really seeing her. Most never pause to wonder who she was.
Yet the woman behind the face lived a life marked by exploitation, disappointment, and profound tragedy. Her death in 1996, at the age of 104, attracted almost no attention at all, as if history forgot all that she had been and given. The statues remain, but she was buried in an unmarked grave in northern New York state.
Starting out as a chorus girl
Audrey Munson was born in Rochester, N.Y., in 1891, but moved to Manhattan as a child after her parents’ marriage collapsed. She hoped to study music and dance, and for a time she worked as a chorus girl, swept up in the swelling promise and excitement of turn-of-the-century New York.
At 17, a chance encounter changed the course of Audrey's life. While walking through the city with her mother, she was reportedly approached by Felix Benedict Herzog, an engineer, patent attorney and photographer who recognized something extraordinary in her face and asked her to pose for him.
Through him, Audrey entered the orbit of painters and sculptors. Almost overnight, she became one of the most sought-after artists’ models in America.
With her heart-shaped face, delicate features, haunting eyes and shapely body, Audrey possessed a beauty that seemed uncannily suited to the Beaux-Arts imagination. Sculptors cast her as goddesses, nymphs and angels; architects raised her likeness above avenues, fountains, and civic monuments.
Behind that beauty, Audrey was an early proponent of workplace equality. She believed models and actors were equal creative collaborators. They deserved fair pay and more recognition for their work, she argued. The model, she once asserted, "is the tool with which the artist works [...] She provides the inspiration for a masterpiece and is the direct cause of enriching the painter or sculptor.”
She was also a member of the Art Workers’ Club for Women, an organization not unlike a labor union, that was founded in 1898 with the mission of providing housing, food, and a placement bureau for models.
By the 1910s Audrey had become known as “Miss Manhattan” and “American Venus.” Her face was reproduced so often across New York that it seemed to have become the face of the city itself.
That decade, Audrey moved to Hollywood, where she played versions of herself in silent films, including “Inspiration,” in 1915 and “Purity,” in 1916. Assuming the role of an artist's model, she appeared naked in a film — a first for a woman in Hollywood. In doing so, writes Keren Ben-Horin, a curatorial scholar at the Center for Women's History, Audrey demonstrated “her bold agency as an active participant in the creation of the artwork.”
Josie Cox
A scandal most murderous
As it so often does, Audrey’s fame proved fragile.
In 1919, Dr. Walter Wilkins — a physician who had once provided lodging to Audrey and her mother and who had become infatuated with Audrey — murdered his wife after convincing himself that the young model would one day marry him.
Although Audrey had nothing to do with the crime, her name was suddenly linked to a scandal that captivated the public’s imagination. Dozens of newspapers across the U.S. reported that she was wanted for questioning in connection with the killing, and the episode blighted her career at a time when the opportunities that had once seemed limitless were just beginning to dry up.
Audrey and her mother temporarily moved to Canada with the hope of evading the unflattering press.
As for Wilkins, the doctor, he was eventually found guilty, and sentenced to death by electric chair. Two days after his sentencing, his lifeless body was — according to press accounts — found hanged with a rope from the shower nozzle in the prison bathroom.
Meanwhile, Audrey’s popularity waned, and her attempts to secure a future became both increasingly public and desperate. In 1921, now entering her 30s, she and her mother launched a nationwide search for a husband for Audrey, inviting men from across the country to apply as prospective suitors.
Newspapers eagerly covered the spectacle, and thousands of candidates reportedly responded. One prison inmate put his name forward offering to give Audrey a future as a rancher's wife. But it didn’t work out and behind the public show, a sobering reality was unfolding.
The woman who had given her likeness to some of the most enduring monuments across America, was discovering that society had long prized her beauty but only fleetingly valued who she was beneath it.
Emma Haslett
‘We just want to eat’
In October 1920, newspapers breathlessly reported that the woman who had once been “an idol of millions of movie fans throughout America” was now “destitute.”
“From loving and admiring me, the public seemed to grow to hate me,” Audrey, who was by now back in the U.S., told a reporter. “More than once lately, my mother and I have been hungry,” she added. “I tried in vain to get something to do in Chicago, Detroit [and] New York.” According to the paper, she was seeking work as a waitress. A month later, in a separate newspaper article she summed up her and her mother’s plight more succinctly: “We just want to eat.”
In a particularly unsettling attempt to reclaim control of her own story, Audrey penned a newspaper article that was interpreted by some as a form of obituary. In it, she asked what had become of the women whose faces and bodies had been immortalized in art once youth and beauty faded. The question was heartbreaking and, of course, partially autobiographical.
Struggling with poverty, disappointment, and deteriorating mental health, Audrey tried to kill herself in the early 1920s by swallowing a solution of bichloride of mercury. Although she survived, the life she was now living bore little resemblance to the one she had known at the height of her fame.
In July 1931, worried about her daughter’s mental state, Audrey’s mother arranged for her to be admitted to a state psychiatric hospital in Ogdensburg, a city in northern New York, bordering Canada. And there she remained for 65 years. When Audrey died in 1996 at the age of 104, her passing attracted little notice. The statues endured; the woman behind them had long faded from public attention.
Audrey’s ashes were initially buried in an unmarked grave in the New Haven Cemetery in New Haven, N.Y. Finally, on what would have been her 125th birthday, Audrey’s relatives installed a headstone for her.
Emma Haslett
Audrey, today
It is tempting to view Audrey Munson's story as a relic of another age: an artifact of Beaux-Arts sculpture, silent films, and Gilded Age notions of beauty. But the forces that shaped her life feel strikingly familiar.
Munson was celebrated as an image; not as a person. Her value lay in how convincingly she could embody an ideal — beauty, youth, purity, desire, nationhood. As long as she served that purpose, she was everywhere. Once she no longer did, she became disposable.
A century later, as marble fountains and silent films have given way to selfies, screens, and social media feeds, the media may have changed, but the dynamic remains the same. Women are still rewarded for performing versions of beauty that others wish to consume and emulate. Their images circulate widely, while their inner lives remain obscure.
Nowadays, they are admired, scrutinized, desired, criticized, and discarded with a speed that Audrey could scarcely have imagined, yet would almost certainly be able to identify with.
And that is exactly why her story should continue to resonate. Her life is not just the tragedy of a forgotten actress and model. It is a reminder of how readily a society can confuse a woman's appearance for her identity and how easily it can neglect the person behind the image.
