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SPEAKER_01: This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. All over New York City, there are semi-clothed or nude women. And they are so baked into architecture that we don't even see them. For example, when you enter the New York Public Library on the left hand side, there's a sculpture of a young woman leaning against a horse.
SPEAKER_07: On 59th and 5th, there's a statue of a woman holding a basket of fruit. On 107th Street and Broadway, there's a woman reclining on a bed.
SPEAKER_01: It's former New Yorker Avery Truffleman.
SPEAKER_07: At 100th and Riverside Drive, a stone woman sits in a chair with a child. And on the very top of the New York Municipal Building, there's a golden woman holding a crown.
SPEAKER_01: And these women are actually the same woman.
SPEAKER_07: Audrey Munson was the most famous artist model in the United States.
SPEAKER_01: Over 30 statues at the Met are made in her likeness and she adorns dozens of memorials and bridges and regal buildings all over New York City.
SPEAKER_03: She basically was the equivalent of a supermodel at the time.
SPEAKER_07: This is Andrea Geyer, an artist herself and author of Queen of the Artist Studios, the story of Audrey Munson.
SPEAKER_03: Everybody knew who she was. Her picture was in the papers. And if one trusts legend, like every boy had a crush on her. She was a very desired young woman.
SPEAKER_07: In her lifetime, she would go on to decorate buildings and memorials all over the United States before becoming a movie star and eventually getting embroiled in a sensational murder scandal. And although Audrey Munson's body has been immortalized in iron and marble, her name
SPEAKER_01: is mostly forgotten. But she was a prolific writer and penned a series of articles telling her life in her own words, sometimes in the third person.
SPEAKER_00: Where is she now? This model who was so beautiful. What has been her reward? Is she happy and prosperous or is she sad and forlorn? Her beauty gone, leaving only memories in the wake.
SPEAKER_07: Like so many supermodels that would come after her, Audrey Marie Munson was scouted on the streets of New York City in 1906.
SPEAKER_01: Audrey's mother and father were divorced, which was very unusual at the time, and her mother decided to get a fresh start in the big city. Audrey was 15, enrolled in music school, and one day, she was picked up on the street by
SPEAKER_03: a photographer when she walked around with her mother.
SPEAKER_07: This photographer gave Audrey his card and asked if she would pose for some portraits. Her mom was invited to, so intentions were good. These photos were fully clothed affairs.
SPEAKER_03: Audrey by chance was picked up as a model and then in the studio proved that she was somebody who was very good with the camera, very good in creating and generating poses.
SPEAKER_01: This photographer recommended that Audrey meet a friend of his, the famous sculptor Isidore Conte.
SPEAKER_07: At first Conte thought he didn't really need Audrey, but as Audrey herself later recalled,
SPEAKER_00: Suddenly he rose from the table, walked about me, asked me to stand and walk, and then said that he thought he could use me. But, said Mr. Conte, you will have to pose in the all together.
SPEAKER_01: Posing in the all together meant posing naked. Audrey's mother consented.
SPEAKER_03: If they would have been wealthy people, I don't think her mother would have let her pose in the nude.
SPEAKER_07: From that encounter, the resulting sculpture was the three muses, three nude women with their arms around each other, all three modeled after Audrey. For decades, the sculpture was in the lobby of the Hotel Astor.
SPEAKER_01: Audrey called this statue, quote, a souvenir of my mother's consent. And this was the first of many sculptures that she would model for Isidore Conte.
SPEAKER_07: Audrey began to work for many other famous artists in New York. As her reputation grew, she was recommended from studio to studio and slowly her likeness appeared mostly naked or half naked all over the city. In 1913, the New York Sun dubbed her Miss Manhattan.
SPEAKER_01: But Audrey is not always recognizable in sculpture. Her figure is different in different artists eyes. Sometimes she's live, sometimes she's fuller. From sculpture to sculpture, there are no obvious giveaways that you're looking at Audrey's body. The clues are in her face.
SPEAKER_03: It's the expressions of the eyes and the mouth and the nose. Like once you know how she looks, you can see her everywhere. It's really fascinating. I would like look at sculptures in the mat and be like, that looks like her and then research and be, yeah, be right. That was her.
SPEAKER_07: Before it was easy for artists to snap a reference picture, Audrey could pose in a way that could evoke a mood.
SPEAKER_03: She must have been a very empathetic person. She could really translate emotion fully into her body.
SPEAKER_01: Audrey could hold the same pose for hours, sometimes for an entire day. And she worked closely with the artists, learning their temperaments, familiarizing herself with their past work. She thought of herself as a collaborator, as she told the New York Herald in 1915. Study?
SPEAKER_00: Yes, indeed I do. Every model who is a real success must study the work of the persons she is with.
SPEAKER_07: Audrey's unique set of skills earned her a decent salary, about $35 a week, which today would be like $800 a week. She made enough to give a day's salary to the suffragist movement, which was in full swing around her. Audrey was an independent, confident woman at a good time to be a sculpture model.
SPEAKER_01: Because the architecture that was in vogue in the United States from the end of the 19th century through World War I was the Beaux-Arts style. And this style required a lot of sculptures and detailed ornamentation.
SPEAKER_08: It was a great time in many ways to be an artist. This is architectural historian Karen McNeil.
SPEAKER_07: Whether you were an architect, a sculptor, a painter, a craftsperson making lamps.
SPEAKER_01: You've seen Beaux-Arts style architecture. Virtually all state capitals are in this style. That image of an authoritative building with columns and statues all around, maybe a big dome, that's Beaux-Arts.
SPEAKER_07: The style is a cross between stately Greek Parthenon and flowery French Versailles.
SPEAKER_08: So a Beaux-Arts building, it's a Greek temple but then you do have the sculptures on it. You do have the frieze work. You do have all of this ornamental detail that is integral to the building.
SPEAKER_07: And architecture and sculpture are really bound together in this movement.
SPEAKER_08: When you take the decorative elements off of a Beaux-Arts building, it looks weird. The dimensions don't quite work anymore.
SPEAKER_07: But also the sculptures are signs of the building's purpose. They're very overtly representational. Like in a private home the statues are of domestic scenes, or on a market they're of harvest and eating. For a government building, say San Francisco City Hall, it's all going to tell us about
SPEAKER_08: this is the seat of government and California is so great and fabulous, but it's all going to be allegorical.
SPEAKER_07: In a government building, you might find a statue of a woman holding an olive branch or the scales of justice representing the state, liberty, truth, you name it.
SPEAKER_08: Just women placed on this pedestal of virtue, morality, motherhood, nurturing, strength.
SPEAKER_01: Women decorated the seat of power. They didn't sit in it.
SPEAKER_08: Why's it gotta be a lady? Because women are pure. You know a woman with a spear? She would only use that spear to really defend her kids. Right? So it has to be, it has to be female.
SPEAKER_01: And for several years this pure, uncorrupt symbol of virtue in the U.S. was Audrey Munson. She was everywhere. At the World's Fair in 1915, held in San Francisco, Audrey posed for three quarters of the statues on the premises.
SPEAKER_09: Her face and body appeared everywhere throughout the grounds.
SPEAKER_07: That's Erin Garcia of the California Historical Society. She curated an exhibit about the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, where Audrey Munson was dubbed the Exposition Girl.
SPEAKER_09: In the quarter four season, she was the seasons.
SPEAKER_01: She was at the base of the fountain of energy.
SPEAKER_09: She was rain. She was the priestess of culture at the Palace of Fine Arts.
SPEAKER_07: She posed for 91 figures meant to represent the stars.
SPEAKER_09: She was all over the place. At about 24 years old, Miss Manhattan had won the West, and there was a new form of
SPEAKER_01: art entering the scene, cinema. The obvious next stop for Audrey Munson was Hollywood.
SPEAKER_07: And Hollywood was, unfortunately, the beginning of the end for Audrey Munson.
SPEAKER_09: She is cast in a few films after the Exposition, but in every case she is cast as a nude model, as an artist model, and she appears nude.
SPEAKER_01: Audrey was actually the first leading woman in Hollywood to appear naked on film.
SPEAKER_07: And Audrey may have been a good model, but she honestly wasn't much of an actress. In a few of her films, she actually had an acting double who would basically do everything except the naked posing. And the movies didn't end up really being worth it for her financially. She was paid very little.
SPEAKER_09: And none of them seemed to have been critical successes. That might have been okay for her. Her career might have survived that. But then, unfortunately, she was involved in a murder scandal.
SPEAKER_07: Audrey and her mother had an apartment in New York, and their landlord, Dr. Wilkins, fell in love with Audrey.
SPEAKER_09: Her landlord apparently became obsessed with her and killed his wife so that he could be with Audrey.
SPEAKER_01: Being with Audrey was a one-sided delusion. Audrey had nothing to do with the murder or any kind of romance with Dr. Wilkins.
SPEAKER_09: She and her mother had actually moved out of the home before this happened, but they were questioned, they had to testify in court, and they were sort of dragged through the mud in the press.
SPEAKER_07: The so-called Wilkins case became a phenomenal media scandal. As Audrey told The Daily Variety in 1920, The Wilkins case ruined my career.
SPEAKER_00: I'll never account for anything again. From loving and admiring me, the public seems to have grown to hate me.
SPEAKER_01: Audrey couldn't find any work, in film or in artist studios.
SPEAKER_07: But the decline of Audrey's career wasn't just because of the Wilkins scandal. She was, after all, totally innocent. There were just a lot of factors changing in the culture around her. For one, the Beaux-Arts style wasn't very popular anymore.
SPEAKER_08: The Beaux-Arts style came out of Europe, and there was this thing called World War I, where Western Europe kind of fell apart. And so there was a questioning about whether or not we want to be using that kind of symbolism.
SPEAKER_07: Both European and American architects were trending towards modernism, away from the old world Beaux-Arts' precedents.
SPEAKER_01: Also the economics of Beaux-Arts style were impossible.
SPEAKER_08: It became increasingly expensive to construct these buildings and pay for all of the artists and artisans to design all of the elements of the building and install it.
SPEAKER_07: The architectural world didn't need Audrey like it used to. And also, at 30, she was aging out of the business.
SPEAKER_01: Audrey's 15-year career as an artist model had come to an end, and her money started to run out.
SPEAKER_07: She moved upstate with her mother, who cleaned homes to support them both as they tried to carve out a place for themselves in the small rural town of Mexico, New York.
SPEAKER_03: It's not an open, easygoing place.
SPEAKER_01: Andrea Geyer went up there to talk to people about Audrey.
SPEAKER_03: Nobody was unfriendly to me, but there's something about these close-knit communities where, as a stranger, you don't feel welcomed.
SPEAKER_07: Audrey could not get used to small-town life. Her whole adulthood, she had been traveling around the country, studying art, working with artists, engaging in intellectual discussions, and wearing fine clothes. And suddenly she lost it all.
SPEAKER_01: Well, she still had the clothes.
SPEAKER_03: People told me that she was very flamboyant. She liked to dress up in colorful garments. I mean, I'm sure she had a pretty impressive wardrobe that was very outlandish for a small community.
SPEAKER_07: It was just Audrey's style that set her apart.
SPEAKER_03: She would dress up on that, and then part of her workout routine in the city was roller skating. So, you know, you can imagine a beautiful woman with long hair and a turban on her head, you know, trying to roller skate on a country, unpaved country road. That was quite a scene.
SPEAKER_01: The town knew Audrey as that crazy woman who used to get naked for money. Parents would close their windows whenever she came roller skating by.
SPEAKER_03: The kids, of course, were totally fascinated with her. But there was a general consensus that she was crazy just because she was different. So it's not hard to imagine why she would have fallen into a depression.
SPEAKER_01: And on May 27th, 1922, Audrey Munson attempted suicide by swallowing poison.
SPEAKER_03: I don't know how committed her suicide attempt was. Maybe it was just an expression of being somewhere at the end of her line.
SPEAKER_07: After her failed suicide attempt, several years went by, and Audrey's mother was struggling to provide for her depressed daughter. And she just couldn't do it anymore.
SPEAKER_01: On Audrey Munson's 40th birthday, June 8th, 1931, her mother checked her into the state mental institution.
SPEAKER_03: At that time, it was extremely common for families to put relatives into these institutions in moments of financial hardship where they felt they couldn't care for a person.
SPEAKER_07: Audrey remained in the institution into her 90s. Then she was put in a nursing home about 30 miles up the road.
SPEAKER_03: But this home for the elderly was situated on this little four-lane highway.
SPEAKER_01: And on the other side of the highway was a little strip mall, which had a bar.
SPEAKER_03: And she was known to sneak out of the home for the elderly and sneak across the four-lane highway to spend her evenings at the bar ordering drinks and telling stories of her times as a model and as an actress.
SPEAKER_07: They could not stop this 90-something elegant older woman from running across four lanes of traffic to go to the bar.
SPEAKER_03: It sadly meant that they put her back into the mental institution where she, you know, spent the rest of her life.
SPEAKER_01: Audrey Munson lived just short of her 105th birthday. She died in 1996. This public body that once represented truth, civic fame, memory, the universe, and the stars was hidden away for nearly two-thirds of her life. But that one-third, that glorious third, immortalized her and placed her all over American cities, perched high, quietly, out of sight, staring down at us.
SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering if many of my readers have not stood before a masterpiece of lovely sculpture or a remarkable painting of a young girl and asked themselves the question, where is she now? This model who was so beautiful, what has been her reward? Is she happy and prosperous or is she sad and forlorn, her beauty gone, leaving only memories in the wake?
SPEAKER_01: An interview with 99% invisible composer, Sean Riel, right after this. If you need to design visuals for your brand, you know how important it is to stay on brand. You just need to use their logos, colors, and fonts in order to stay consistent. It's what makes them stand out. The online design platform Canva makes it easy for everyone to stay on brand. With Canva, you can keep your brand's fonts, logos, colors, and graphics right where you design presentations, websites, videos, and more. Drag and drop your logo into a website design or click to get your social post colors on brand. Create brand templates to give anyone on your team a design head start. You can save time resizing social posts with Canva magic resize. If your company decides to rebrand, replace your logo and other brand imagery across all your designs in just a few clicks. If you're a designer, Canva will save you time on the repetitive tasks. And if you don't have a design resource at your fingertips, just design it yourself. With Canva, you don't need to be a designer to design visuals that stand out and stay on brand. Start designing today at canva.com, the home for every brand. Article believes in delightful design for every home and thanks to their online only model, they have some really delightful prices too. Their curated assortment of mid-century modern coastal industrial and Scandinavian designs make furniture shopping simple. Article's team of designers are all about finding the perfect balance between style, quality, and price. They're dedicated to thoughtful craftsmanship that stands the test of time and looks good doing it. Article's knowledgeable customer care team is there when you need them to make sure your experience is smooth and stress-free. I think my favorite piece of furniture in my house is the geome sideboard. Maslow picked it out. Remember Maslow? And I keep my vinyl records and CDs in it. It just is awesome. I love the way it looks. Article is offering 99% invisible listeners $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more. To claim, visit article.com slash 99 and the discount will be automatically applied at checkout. That's article.com slash 99 for $50 off your first purchase of $100 or more.
SPEAKER_01: This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever find that just as you're trying to fall asleep, your brain suddenly won't stop talking? Your thoughts are just racing around? I call this just going to bed. That basically happens every night. It turns out one great way to make those racing thoughts go away is to talk them through. Therapy gives you a place to do that so you can get out of your negative thought cycles and find some mental and emotional peace. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp. Visit BetterHelp.com slash invisible today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P dot com slash invisible. As I mentioned earlier, Miss Manhattan was the first time we worked with our composer Shawn Rial, and during our retreat last weekend, I pulled Shawn out of a rousing game of Dixit. I think that's how you say it, Dixit? I guess. I guess. And asked them how that came about.
SPEAKER_02: I was in my car. I was walking dogs as a job, and I got a text from Avery that just said, would you want to compose music for the show? And I had to pull over because I was so excited. It felt like a dream come true.
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember anything specific about the music from this episode, the Audrey Munson episode in particular, that you were really proud of?
SPEAKER_02: One of the challenges I was having was I really wanted to get the right textures for it because it felt like such a special story, and it felt like it was this architecture that was coming to life that had life in it, Audrey Munson's personality that was infused in these sculptures. One of the things that I felt really satisfied about was this one sound I got when I was trying to think, what is stone and marble and those kinds of things, what kind of texture would feel representative of that? And I have this thing called the glockenspiel. It's like a little xylophone that's made of metal, and it's more of a chimey kind of a sound. And you usually hit it, and you hear it in a lot of indie folk bands and stuff. So I took it, and I've done this before, just taking a bow, like a cello bow, and just seeing what it does with pretty much anything. And so thinking of those kinds of exercises, I took the cello bow, and I pulled it on the glockenspiel, and it had a very coarse texture to it while still maintaining its beautiful tone. It had a very specific tone, and so I actually took two bows, and I was able to make harmonies. There's one specifically that ends the piece before the credits come up. That bit is the screechy, marbly part. It's probably one of the most amorphous things I've done for the show. It feels really good just to think that, oh yeah, that's the Audrey Munson piece. That's the sound of Audrey Munson.
SPEAKER_01: So what is the standard operating procedure for how you work on the show and where you fit into the production cycle?
SPEAKER_02: So it starts out with me talking with the producers about the stories that they're working on. They're giving me the personalities of the people they're interviewing and the bigger picture ideas of what they want to convey. And then when there's a first draft, I'm reading it, and I'm kind of writing music as I'm reading it and trying to get an idea of pacing. But it's really hard to lock that in. So I make sketches, basically, but it's hard to lock in the timing and stuff until we have our read-through edit, where we all sit and we read through the script and play tape. And then I record that, and when I have that, I can actually do my recording and make drafts of my songs to score the piece with. And then from there, we make a rough mix with the music, with the music drafts, and everybody gives notes on that. And then from there, I make any changes that we want and then do the final mixes.
SPEAKER_01: When the piece is played out for the first time, what is the most common piece of feedback that you get from the producers of the show? The things are too busy.
SPEAKER_02: I have a very dense sense of rhythm. It's just kind of the way that my head works. I can't do anything simply. And it's really helpful, actually, to sketch things out with MIDI, because I can just do a big cluster of notes and then kind of just go in and individually pick this one out, pick this one out, pick this one out, and create a rhythm that feels effectively the same but isn't going to be grabbing for your attention constantly when people are talking and trying to explain stuff. One of the funny things about working with musicians for scoring is that some of the
SPEAKER_01: most interesting stuff that's going on in the music is in that same zone as the narrator's voice, and you have to kind of scoop that out so that it doesn't compete.
SPEAKER_02: I feel like it's a lot like being in a band. It's hard to listen to music when everything is really active and competing. And it's just, I think of it like, whatever's happening in the story right now is the lead instrument and I'm there to support it. The other instruments aren't less important for not being the center of attention. It's all working together. So if we're going to end this, what would be the composition you'd like to go out on
SPEAKER_01: as a proud moment from everything that happened from episode 200 up to now, which is we're getting very close to episode 300? Oh, that's a really wide spectrum.
SPEAKER_02: I've written so much music. One that I really, I feel really proud of is the credits music for Manzanar. It feels very sweet in this way that I don't always get to lock into quite the same way. So it feels special to me.
SPEAKER_01: All right, so we're going to go out on Manzanar credits, performed and composed by Sean Real. And this is Roman Mars reporting from Dylan Beach at the 99% Invisible Retreat of 2018. Good night, everybody. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Avery Truffleman, music by Sean Real. Katie Mingle is our senior producer. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. Delaney Hall is the senior editor. The rest of the team includes Sree Fusif, Emmett Fitzgerald, Taron Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. All Audrey Munson quotes, unless otherwise noted, were taken from a tell-all series called Queen of the Artist Studios that Munson wrote for the New York American in 1921. Audrey Munson was voiced by Kara Rose Dofabio. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are part of Radio-Topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by our listeners, just like you. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me, at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr and Reddit too. But we have more visual design stories and videos too at 99pi.org.
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SPEAKER_05: In the weather app says rain, the McDonald's app says McDelivery. Order McDelivery in the McDonald's app. I participate in McDonald's, delivery prices may be higher than at restaurants, delivery fees may apply. Welcome back to our studio where we have a special guest with us today, Toucan Sam from Fruit Loops. Toucan Sam, welcome.
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SPEAKER_04: Fruit Loops, find the loopy side.
