Home——History——Remnants——Appendix——Acknowledgements——Coming——Contact——Links
Opening Day The Jeweled City The Zone Lincoln Beachey Audrey Munson

Appendix

Audrey Munson, the “Exposition Girl”
At the height of her fame, Audrey Munson's face — along with the rest of her shapely body— was easily recognizable to a vast number of Americans, especially American males over the age of 12. Until her parents’ divorce when she was 15, she lived in Providence, Rhode Island, where she had lessons in music and dance. After her parents’ divorce, Audrey's mother moved her comely teenage daughter to New York City, which appears to have been a very strategic decision. As Audrey told the story in a series of newspaper articles devoted to her career as an artist’s model, it wasn't long before she was “discovered.”

“Mother and I were walking downtown shopping. A man kept following me and annoying me, not by anything he said but by looking at me.... finally Mother stopped, turned to him and asked him what he wanted. He explained... that he was a photographer and said my face was one he longed to photograph. He asked mother if she would not bring me to his studio.... We went; he took many pictures. Then he called one day and asked if he might show them to an artist friend.... the artist then asked me to pose, and that was the beginning.”

All this occurred in 1906 before Audrey had reached her sixteenth birthday. The photographer’s “artist friend” who wanted her to pose for him was the Hungarian born sculptor Isidor Konti. With her mother in attendance, she was persuaded to pose nude for a sculptural composition that Konti was preparing to start work on. The result of this collaboration was his beautiful Three Graces which became the focal point for the lobby of the luxurious Hotel Astor in New York City. Audrey later referred to this work as "a souvenir of my mother's consent", but one suspects that her mother actually promoted the idea of her under age daughter posing in the nude rather than merely acquiescing to Konti’s proposal.

In the years leading up to the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915, Audrey became the Queen of the Artist’s Studios finding work with most of the sculptors and many of the painters at work in New York City. As a result of having posed for more than 75% of the female figures sculpted to decorate the PPIE as well as for a majority of the women appearing in its mural decorations, Audrey Munson was christened The Exposition Girl.

She managed to parlay this popularity into a short lived film career becoming the first women to shed her clothes (tastefully, of course) on screen. This landmark event took place in 1915 in the aptly titled, Inspiration which opened at the Portola Theatre in San Francisco during the waning days of the Exposition. Before her silent film career ended in 1920, she found reasons to get undressed in three more movies said to be completely unmemorable except for her delectable nude body.

In 1919, her name became inextricably linked to a murder scandal. Dr. Walter Wilkins, a former landlord who had developed a fixation on the lovely young woman, bludgeoned his wife to death in order, he claimed, to be free to marry Audrey. Though Audrey stated she new nothing of his intentions the fact that the murdered woman had ordered Audrey and her mother out of the Manhattan apartment they were renting from the Wilkins several weeks before the murder, raised a question of impropriety which was played up by the yellow press. Though Audrey and her mother were immediately cleared of any involvement, the negative press which the affair generated had a devastating affect on Audrey’s career. Many of her former employers chose to look elsewhere for a model rather than run the risk of having their reputations damaged by having their names associated with hers. This, together with the decline in popularity of the Beaux Arts style of representational sculpture, combined to end Audrey’s career, and by the fall of 1920 she and her mother, Katherine, were living in abject poverty in Syracuse, New York.