Audrey Munson

Audrey Munson was a model and actress who achieved fame in the early part of the 20th Century in the United States. Born on June 8, 1891, in Rochester, New York, Munson was the only child produced by the marriage of Edgar Munson and Katherine Mahoney Munson. After her parents divorced, Munson was raised by her mother. At age 17, she and her mother moved to New York City where she began modeling. By her early 20's, Munson had posed for numerous sculptures on display around New York, including the Firemen's Monument, the Pulitzer Memorial, and the Maine Monument in Central Park, commemorating the 260 American sailors who died in 1898 when the battleship Maine exploded in the harbor of Havana, Cuba. Then, in 1915, at age 23, her popularity grew when she was selected as "The Panama Girl" and posed for both sculptures and painting to be exhibited that year in San Francisco at the Panama-Pacific Exposition. During this time, newspapers erroneously reported Munson's birthplace as New York City. That year, her life story inspired a motion picture named Inspiration, loosely based on her own experiences as a professional model. The movie features full nudity, and led to a ban by some theaters before a screening and a prohibiting of a second screening once the nudity was discovered. Following its release, Munson expressed an interest in moving further into performance, naming vaudeville as a place to explore next. Movie audiences around the country would see her again in 1919 when Inspiration was adapted as The Perfect Model. Her work in film would be limited to a few roles, including posing in long shots as herself in the 1921 silent movie, Heedless Moths, loosely based on her life. Her personal life began to generate more interest than her professional work in 1919 when she was connected to a murder case involving a New York physician who was charged with killing his wife. Although she wasn't implicated in the crime, Munson pointed to its publicity in the newspapers as a reason for the downfall of her career. By late 1920, she had left New York and was living in Syracuse in what newspaper accounts characterize as "shabby" conditions, and attempted to earn an income making personal appearances in the region. Munson made an attempt to start over by requesting a New York newspaper falsely report her death so she could assume a new identity. The report of her request was published in October 1920, and Munson shared in the story how her film contract was ended and she was unable to secure a new one with other studios due to the negative publicity over the murder case. After considering other cities, she went home to Syracuse where she applied for numerous jobs, but claims no one would hire her. In 1921, Munson turned to writing as a means of sharing her story with an audience of newspaper readers. Starting in late January of that year and continuing into May, the New York American published her stories on consecutive Sundays. Munson used the medium as a way to tell the public about her experiences, misfortunes, and observations as a model and an actress. In the same year, Munson turned to the newspapers to publicize how she was looking for the "perfect" man to marry. In April 1922, she made headlines again when newspapers reported Munson had found a mate. Articles named an army aviator and electrical contractor from Ann Arbor, Michigan, as the man Munson would marry, but no marriage would take place. A month later, newspapers reported the former model survived a suicide attempt after ingesting poison. Munson remained in Central New York for many years, living in relative obscurity. Movie audiences nationwide continued to see her work on occasion when her films, including Heedless Moths, played at theaters well past their original release years. She returned to making headlines later in the decade when, in spring of 1926, newspapers reported Munson moved to a farm in Mexico, New York, to continue her private life and make a new home for her aging mother. Five years later, on Munson's 40th birthday, Munson's mother petitioned a judge in Oswego, New York, to commit her to an institution for treatment of depression and schizophrenia. She was sent to the St. Lawrence State Hospital in Ogdensburg, New York, later renamed the St. Lawrence Psychiatric Center, where she remained a patient until she died at age 104 on February 20, 1996. She's buried alongside her father, stepmother, and a half-sister at a family plot in New Haven Cemetery in New Haven, New York.