99% Invisible - 200- Miss Manhattan Redux

Episode Date: March 14, 2018

All around the country, there stands a figure so much a part of historical architecture and urban landscapes that she is rarely noticed. She has gone by many names, from Star Maiden to Priestess of Culture, Spirit of Life to Mourning Victory. Now nearly forgotten, Audrey Munson was once the most famous artist’s model in the United States. In and beyond her time, she has represented many things, including truth, memory, seasons, the stars, and even the universe itself. Immortalized in iron, marble and gold, Audrey remains perched on high, quietly watching over cities from coast to coast. Miss Manhattan

As we are approaching our 300th episode of the show, the 9.9 PI crew took a couple days to go on a retreat up the coast and listen to the audio that inspires us and talk about the future of the show. Because of all the time it took to plan and execute the retreat, we have one of our rare re-broadcasts this week, and I'm happy to revisit it, because this is a pivotal episode for 9.9% invisible and one of my personal favorites. It was a really ambitious story for Avery at the time and we knew it was gonna be important. So we commissioned an original score for the first time

from Sean Rial who later came on staff to be our full-time composer. If you haven't heard this episode, you're in for a real treat. And if you have, you should listen again because I think it gets better each time. Stay tuned to the end because we have a brand new interview with Sean that I conducted late last night on the Foggy California coast about the score for this episode and the process of composing music for nerds to talk over.

Here we go. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. All over New York City, there are semi-clothes 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. On 59th and 5th, there's a statue of a woman holding a basket of fruit. On 107th Street in Broadway, there's a woman reclining on a bed.

That's former New Yorker Avery Troubleman. 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. And these women are actually the same woman. Audrey Munson was the most famous artist model in the United States. 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. She basically was the equivalent of a supermodel at the time.

This is Andrea Gyer, an artist herself, an author of Queen of the Artist Studios, the story of Audrey Munson. Everybody knew who she was, her picture was in the papers, and if one trusts legend, like all every boy had a crush on her, she was a very desired young woman. 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 is mostly forgotten, but she was a prolific writer and penned a series of articles telling

her life in her own words, sometimes an luthered person. 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 far-lorn? Her beauty gone, leaving only memories in the wake. Like so many supermodels that would come after her,

Audrey Marie Munson was scouted on the streets of New York City in 1906. 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 a photographer when she walked around with her mother. This photographer gave Audrey his card

and asked if she would pose for some portraits. Her mom was invited too, so intentions were good. These photos were fully clothed affairs. 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. This photographer recommended that Audrey meet a friend of his, the famous sculptor, Isador Conte.

At first Conte thought he didn't really need Audrey, but as Audrey herself later recalled, 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. Conti, you will have to pose in the altogether. Posing in the altogether meant posing naked. Audrey's mother consented. If they would have been wealthy people, I don't think her mother would have led her pose in the nude. 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 aster.

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 Isadora Conte. 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. 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. 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. Before it was easy for artists to snap a reference picture, Audrey could pose in a way that could evoke a mood. She must have been a very empathetic person, she could really translate emotion fully into her body.

Audrey can 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? Yes indeed I do. Every model who is a real success must study the work of the persons she is with. 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. Because the architecture that was in Vogue in the United States from the end of the 19th century through World War I was the Bozart style. And this style required a lot of sculptures and detailed ornamentation. It was a great time in many ways to be an artist. This is architectural historian Karen McNeil. Whether you an architect, a sculptor, a painter, a crafts person making lamps. You've seen Bowsart style architecture. Virtually all state capitals are in the style. That image of an authoritative building with columns and statues all around, maybe a big dome. That's Bozart's. The style is a cross between like

stately Greek Parthenon and flowery French Versailles. So a Bozart 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. An architecture and sculpture are really bound together in this movement. When you take the decorative elements off

of a Baux-Arre building, it looks weird. The dimensions don't quite work anymore. 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 there of harvest and eating for a government building, say San Francisco City Hall. It's all gonna tell us about this is the seat of government

in California so great and fabulous and but it's all gonna be allegorical. 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. Just women placed on this pedestal of virtue, morality, motherhood, nurturing, strength. Women decorated the seat of power.

They didn't sit on it. 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. And for several years, this pure,

uncorrupt symbol of virtue in the US 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. Her face and body appeared everywhere throughout the grounds. 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. In the quarter four season, she was the seasons. She was at the base of the fountain of energy. She was rain. She was the priestess of culture at the Palace of Fine Arts. She posed for 91 figures meant to represent the stars. She was all over the place. At about 24 years old, Miss Manhattan had won the West, and there was a new form of art entering the scene. Cinema. The obvious next stop for Audrey Munson was Hollywood. And Hollywood was, unfortunately, the beginning of the end for Audrey Munson.

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. Audrey was actually the first leading woman in Hollywood to appear naked on film. 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.

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. Audrey and her mother had an apartment in New York. And their landlord, Dr. Wilkins, fell in love with Audrey. Her landlord apparently became obsessed with her and killed his wife so that he could be with Audrey. Being with Audrey was a one-sided delusion.

Audrey had nothing to do with the murder or any kind of romance with Dr. Wilkins. 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. The so-called Wilkins case became a phenomenal media scandal, as Audrey told the daily variety in 1920. The Wilkins case ruined my career. I'll never account for anything again. From loving and admiring me, the public seems to have grown to hate me. Audrey couldn't find any work, in film or in artist studios. 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 Bowsart style wasn't very popular anymore. The Bowsart 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. Both European and American architects were trending towards modernism away from the old world BOSARTS precedents. Also the economics of BOSosedart style were impossible.

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. The architectural world didn't need Audrey like it used to, and also, at 30, she was aging out of the business. Audrey's 15-year career as an artist's model had come to an end, and her money started to run out. She moved up state 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. It's not an kind of open, easy-going place. Andrea Gyer went up there to talk to people about Audrey. Nobody was unfriendly to me, but there's something about these close-knit communities where as a stranger, you don't feel welcomed. 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. Well, she still had the clothes. 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, but it wasn't just Audrey's style that set her apart. 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 roll a skate on a country unpaid country road that was quite a scene. 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. 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. And on May 27th 1922, Audrey Munson attempted suicide by swallowing poison. 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. After her failed suicide attempt, several maybe it was just an expression of being somewhere at the end of her line. 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. On Audrey Munson's 40th birthday, June 8, 1931, her mother checked her into the state mental institution. 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. Audrey remained in the institution into her 90s. Then she was put in a nursing home about 30 miles up the road. But this home for the elderly was situated on this little forle in highway. And on the other side of the highway was a little strip mall, which had a bar. And she was known to sneak out of the home for the elderly

and sneak across the forle in highway to spend her evenings at the bar, ordering drinks and telling stories of her times as a model and as an actress. They could not stop this 90-something elegant older woman from running across four lanes of traffic to go to the bar. It's sadly meant that they put her back into the mental institution where she, you know, spent the rest of her life. 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. 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 a 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 far-lorn, her beauty gone, leaving only memories in the wake? In interview with 99% of his book composer, Sean Rial, right after this. As I mentioned earlier, Miss Manhattan was the first time we worked with our composer, Sean Rial, and during our retreat last weekend, I pulled Sean out of a rousing game of Dixit.

I think that's how you say it, Dixit, I guess, I don't know. Anyway, and asked them how that came about. I was in my car, I was walking dogs as a job, and I caught a text from Avery that just said, would you want to compose music for the show? And I like had to pull over because I was so excited. It felt like a dream come true. Do you remember anything specific about the music

from this episode, the Audrey Munson episode, in particular, that you were really proud of? 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. And one of the things that I felt really satisfied about was this one sound I got when I was trying to think like what is like 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 like a chimie kind of a sound and usually hit it.

You hear it in a lot of indie folk bands and stuff. So I like to get, and I've like done this before just taking a bow, like a cello bow and just seeing what it does with pretty much anything. And so I, so thinking of the like those kinds of exercises, I took the cello bow and I pulled it on the clock and spiel, and it had a very kind of like coarse texture to it while still like maintaining It's like beautiful tone like it had like a very like specific tone and so I like actually took two bows and I was able to like make harmonies There's one specifically that ends the piece before the credits come up That bit is the screechy, marbly part.

It's like probably one of the most amorphous things I've done for the show. I feel really good just to think that like, oh yeah, that's the Audrey Munson piece. That's like the sound of Audrey Munson. So what is the standard operating procedure for how you work on the show and where you fit into the production cycle? 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 like writing music as I'm reading it and trying to like get an idea of pacing. But it's really hard to lock that in. And I saw I make sketches basically, but it's hard to lock in like 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 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. When the pieces 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. Yeah, it's, 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 like just like do a big cluster of notes and then 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 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. I feel like it's like being in a band.

Like, it's hard to listen to music when everything is like 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 like the center of attention.

It's all working together. So we're going to end this. What would be the composition you'd like to go out on is 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. I've written so much music. One that I really, I feel really proud of is the credits music for Man's and R. It feels very sweet in this way that I don't always get to lock into quite the same way.

So I feel special to me. All right, so we're going to go out on Man's Narcredits, performed and composed by Sean Rial, and this is Roman Mars reporting from Dylan Beach at the 99% invisible retreat of 2018 this week by Avery Trouffleman, music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is our senior producer Kurt Colstay is the digital director. Delaney Hall is the senior editor. The rest of the team includes Sri Fusif,

Emmett Fitzgerald, Taren Mazza, and me, Roman Mars. All Audrey Munson quotes, and less 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 Cara Rose DeFambio. We are a project of 91.7K ALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California.

We are a part of Radio Topia from PRAX, 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 in the show at 99PI or work. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But we have more visual design stories and videos too at 99PI.org. Radio tapio.

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