Introduction

The tumultuous and heartbreaking life of a world-famous model whose riveting story of beauty, fame, passion, murder, and madness in the Gilded Age captivated a nation.

As America was stepping into the modern era, one great beauty became the artist’s model of choice. Her perfect form became the emblem of the Gilded Age and appears on the greatest monuments of New York and the nation. Supermodel, actress, icon—her beauty paved the way for a life of glamour, passion, and ultimately tragedy. She dated the millionaires of the fashionable Newport colony, became the first American movie star ever to appear naked in a film, but her promising film career collapsed, her doctor fell in love with her and killed his own wife, and on her fortieth birthday, her mother committed her to an insane asylum. She remained there until her death in 1996 at the age of 104 and is now buried in an unmarked grave. Her name is Audrey Munson.

Many readers will recognize Audrey Munson, and have walked by her in the street, without even knowing her name. She stands atop New York’s Municipal Building. She sits as “Miss Manhattan” and “Miss Brooklyn” outside the Brooklyn Museum, is immortalized on the Manhattan Bridge, the Frick Mansion, the New York Public Library, and the Pulitzer Fountain outside the Plaza Hotel. In gold, bronze, and stone, she still graces bridges, skyscrapers, fountains, churches, monuments, and public buildings across the nation, from Jacksonville to San Francisco, from Atlanta to the Wisconsin state capitol.

From James Bone, the former New York Bureau Chief of The Times of London, this brilliantly reported investigative biography reveals, for the first time, the riveting truth of the forgotten life of an iconic beauty. 

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Excerpt

When Audrey Munson was a girl of five, the Gypsy Queen Eliza came to the United States from England. Eliza Cooper was just eighteen but had reigned over 55,000 Roma since succeeding to the throne at the age of ten. Touring the country by train, Queen Eliza stopped in upstate New York to be hosted by Plato Buckland’s thirty-five-strong Gypsy band in East Syracuse. A colorfully painted wagon carried her from the railroad station to the camp on Eastwood Heights, and she was installed with her maidservant in a white tent filled with bright new rugs. In place of a crown, she wore an intricate lace cap on her head.

Bands of gypsies passed through East Syracuse each summer, be- fore their caravans headed south for the winter. They set up their tents on the heights outside the village or near the railroad freight yards. The Gypsy men, though renowned for thieving, earned an honest living from horse-trading and tied up their horses all around. The women sold basketwork and lace and read palms.

Queen Eliza’s presence provoked intense curiosity. Thousands of nearby residents turned up to catch a glimpse of Gypsy royalty. Many, believing superstitiously in the prophetic powers of the Romany women, “crossed their palms with silver” to have their fortunes told.

Audrey was taken to the Gypsy camp in East Syracuse by her mother as a child, possibly amid the excitement of the royal visit. She did not see the Gypsy queen. Queen Eliza stayed only thirty-six hours. Audrey was fascinated instead by the games the Gypsy children played amid the covered wagons. The tall, fierce men frightened her. But her mother insisted Audrey have her future read, and led her by the hand into the tent of a “bronze-faced seeress.”

Though still just “a slip of a girl,” Audrey was already possessed of a limber figure and long bones—she was to grow to 5 ?8 ? tall. Her features were perfectly symmetrical and sleek: a high brow, chiseled cheekbones, an almond jaw, and that perfectly straight neoclassical nose. Set like gemstones in her milky skin, she had questioning, slightly impertinent gray-blue eyes. The question lurking in those eyes was one she would come to wish she had never asked: “What does my future hold?”

The soothsayer looked on Audrey’s fresh beauty; then, mindful of her own sorrows and all the sorrows of the world, she spoke:

You shall be beloved and famous. But when you think that happiness is yours, its Dead Sea fruit shall turn to ashes in your mouth.

You, who shall throw away thousands of dollars as a caprice, shall want for a penny. You, who shall mock at love, shall seek love without finding.

Seven men shall love you. Seven times you shall be led by the man who loves you to the steps of the altar, but never shall you wed.

For the rest of her life, Audrey considered the prophecy a curse.

Audrey did indeed become beloved and famous. Her “most perfect form” still reigns over New York City and across the United States. You probably already know her, without even knowing you know her. You may have passed her on the street many times, unbeknownst. For she was America’s first supermodel. She is the second-largest female figure in New York after the Statue of Liberty. Her gilded form stands twenty-five feet tall, holding a crown aloft as the symbol of the city, atop the vast Municipal Building across the street from City Hall. She frolics in the Pulitzer Fountain outside the Plaza Hotel at the southeast entrance to Central Park, her celebrated dimples on full display to the shoppers at the Apple Store. Every day, office workers tramp past her as the centerpiece of the Maine Monument in Columbus Circle at the opposite corner of Central Park. She stands on the arch at the end of the Manhattan Bridge as the Spirit of Commerce, waving on commuters to their toil. She once also stood sentry at the Brooklyn entrance of the Manhattan Bridge as Miss Manhattan and Miss Brooklyn. But those colossal forms now flank the entrance to the Brooklyn Museum. Audrey is immortalized in stone at the New York Public Library and on the Frick House on Fifth Avenue. She is the reclining bronze figure of Memory on the Straus Memorial on the Upper West Side. She is the two grieving stone figures on the Fire- men’s Memorial on Riverside Drive. Wherever you go in New York City, Audrey is looking at you.

Across the nation, from Florida to California, Audrey remains in our everyday lives. She stands as Liberty and Sapienta (Wisdom) on the Wisconsin State Capitol. She can be seen as the nymphs on the James McMillan Memorial Fountain by the reservoir in Washington, DC. She was the model for Allen George Newman’s Monument to Women of the Con- federacy in Jacksonville, Florida, and for his Peace Monument in Piedmont Park, in Atlanta, Georgia. She posed for the figure of Evangeline inscribed on the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Memorial in the garden of the poet’s house by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She inspired three-quarters of the statuary of the Jewel City built in San Francisco for the 1915 World’s Fair. A famous bronze of one of those statues, Descending Night, was acquired by press baron William Randolph Hearst, and now resides at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, on the California coast. One of her surviving Star Maidens from the fair now stands in the courtyard of the Citigroup Center building in San Francisco.

It is even still possible to see Audrey in motion. She was the first movie star to go naked in an American film. Inspiration (1915) has been lost, but we can yet marvel at her in Purity (1916). Playing the scantily clad allegorical character Virtue, her breasts popping out of her robes at every opportunity, Audrey was quite literally a sex goddess.

This book is a biography of a naked woman, once the most famous nude in America. Of course, every woman is a naked woman, every man a naked man. Audrey herself once said: “If there is immorality in posing in the nude, anybody who takes a bath ought to be arrested.” But Audrey was known above all, in art and in movies, for her naked body—and her daring readiness to put it on show. She was advertised as “the world’s most perfectly formed woman.” Audrey’s defense of her public nudity, and some—but certainly not all—of her other views on women, made her an early feminist. Indeed, she once contributed five dollars to the suffrage movement pushing to get women the right to vote, which was finally achieved in her heyday, with the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Audrey strongly believed that women were naturally beautiful, and should cast aside corsets and high heels, yet she was never able to take full control of her own body. The facts suggest she was exploited at every turn. She was paid just fifty cents an hour to pose nude. Men besieged her. Hundreds of suitors tried to woo her by mail. Some who had seen her nude photos even wrote from faraway Japan. It was men who lavished her with rich rewards for her beauty; and it was men who made her pay the terrible price she did. This, perforce, is the story of those men— besotted, jealous, lustful, greedy men—as well as the biography of Audrey’s sometimes glamorous, often scandalous, and ultimately tragic life. Although Audrey lived a very long time and died in 1996, she was locked away for most of her life, her records sealed, and she was buried in an unmarked grave. A generation of her family even refused to utter her name. Her closest surviving relatives remain reluctant to speak openly about her to this day. The official historian of Oswego County, who got his hands on a treasure chest of Audrey’s old possessions, tried unsuccessfully to have your author arrested, claiming he was being “protective” of Audrey. But Audrey left an indelible trace: in letters, court documents, newspaper clippings, in the FBI archive, in photographs, in oil paint, on film, and, above all, in bronze and stone. Once a household name, Audrey was disappeared from history. The Curse of Beauty is not just a biography but also an investigation into how and why she was erased.

Although she was nameless in her many statues, she will be no more. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Audrey was haunted by the words of a Gypsy fortune-teller, who read her palm when she was just 5 years old and spoke the following prophecy:

“You shall be beloved and famous. But when you think that happiness is yours, its Dead Sea fruit shall turn to ashes in your mouth.
You, who shall throw away thousands of dollars as a caprice, shall want for a penny. You, who shall mock at love, shall seek love without finding.
Seven men shall love you. Seven times you shall be led by the man who loves you to the steps of the altar, but never shall you wed.”

Was the gypsy’s curse a self-fulfilling prophecy?

2. Is being beautiful always a blessing? Can you think of other women throughout history who may have been “cursed by beauty”?

3. Do you think Audrey was an early feminist? Why or why not?

4. What does Audrey’s life say about the way society treats women who do not conform to particular roles?

5. Audrey was committed to a mental asylum at the age of 40, and stayed there until her death at age 104. What does Audrey’s treatment tell us about the way mental illness was dealt with in the past, particularly for women? Do we deal with mental illness differently today?

6. Female celebrities today are scrutinized, celebrated and criticized for their physical appearance and the way they present themselves to the world. Can you see any similarities in the treatment of Audrey and the celebrities of today? Which contemporary celebrities in particular have to battle public opinion about their bodies?

7. Broadly.com said The Curse of Beauty is “a tale about the past, but it also reads as a cautionary tale for many of the stars of 2016.” Discuss.

8. What does Audrey’s interaction with the Oelrichs family tell us about American society in the 1920s?

9. How did being involved in the Dr. Wilkin’s scandal impact Audrey’s career? Can you find similarities with any modern day celebrities embroiled in scandal?

10. The Curse of Beauty follows the transformation of the American art world from the great Beaux Arts to the movement of Modernism. How did this change affect Audrey’s career? What does it say about the broader changes in American culture at this time?

11. What do the photos throughout the book tell us about the representation of women in art?

12. Reading Chapter 12, discuss the tension between ‘art’ and ‘pornography’ in the reception of the movie Purity. What other films can you think of that have similar tensions?

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»	Official web site for the book
»	WSJ Review
»	NYT Book Review
»	A.V. Club Book Review
»	Yahoo Book Review
»	Review from Broadly

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