How ‘America’s First Supermodel’ Died In A Mental Asylum
Public DomainAudrey Munson poses with a cat in 1915.
To refer to Audrey Munson as simply a supermodel would be dismissive. She was a renowned artist’s model and film actress whose interesting story stands out in a crowded field of women with similar tales.
Munson served as the model for some of the most iconic sculptures in New York City, including the 25-foot gilded bronze statue perched atop the Manhattan Municipal Building, Civic Fame. She also posed for dozens of other famous works of art around the world, from the Three Graces fountain in Washington, D.C., to a marble Venus de Milo sculpture at a royal palace in the Netherlands.
In addition, Munson acted in silent films and was one of the first women to appear nude in a non-pornographic movie. But despite her fame, Munson received little compensation, and she was not able to save enough money to support herself after her star had faded. In the 1920s, as her popularity decreased, she and her mother moved to upstate New York.
PortableNYCTours/Wikimedia CommonsCivic Fame, the statue atop the Manhattan Municipal Building that was sculpted using Audrey Munson as a model.
With no savings to speak of, Munson found a job as a waitress. It was during this time that she began to demonstrate signs of mental illness, such as her insistence on being known as “Baroness Audrey Meri Munson-Munson.”
She blamed her downfall on Jewish people, and her outspoken antisemitism led her so far as to contact the U.S. House of Representatives, insisting that they create a law that would protect her from “the Hebrews.”
At the age of 40, the woman known as “America’s first supermodel” was committed to a mental asylum. Aside from a few years at a nursing home in her mid-90s, she spent the rest of her life at the St. Lawrence State Hospital for the Insane, dying in 1996 at age 104.
