Audrey Munson was discovered by a photographer while window-shopping with her mother on Fifth Avenue. Audrey posed nude for the first time shortly thereafter, when she was still a teenager. She quickly became the model of choice for sculptors and painters of the time, all of whom obsessed over the shape of her body, over her breasts, even over the dimples on her lower back. （One sculptor warned her, “Guard those dimples, my girl. And if you ever see them going—cut out the apple pie.”） In 1913, the New York Sun wrote: “Over a hundred artists agree that if the name of Miss Manhattan belongs to anyone in particular it is to this young woman.”
Less than two decades later she attempted suicide. At the age of 40, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital. She lived out the rest of her life there, died at the age of 106, and was buried in an unmarked grave.
I suppose this is the life cycle of a muse: get discovered, be immortalized in art for which you’re never paid, and die in obscurity.
Audrey herself wrote, “What becomes of the artists’ models? I am wondering if many of my readers have not stood before a masterpiece of lovely sculpture or a remarkable painting of a young girl, her very abandonment of draperies accentuating rather than diminishing her modesty and purity, and asked themselves the question, ‘Where is she now, this model who was so beautiful?’”
I think of her and the other naked women who line the walls and fill the halls of museums, some so ancient the color has washed from their bodies and their marble heads have fallen off. It would be easy to mistake these displays for symbols of respect, for an honor. But what were their lives? And what were their names? No one remembers.
* * *
Did you think I’d never see the interviews you gave about me, Steve? Or did you think you’d never need anything more from me, so it didn’t matter? Perhaps you didn’t think of me at all. I suspect it was the latter.
It might surprise you that when I first read your remarks, I wasn’t angry. You made them five years after we’d met. I’d just turned twenty-five. I’d become famous, and the magazine you’d sold a house to fund was failing （Had the Winklevoss twins sued you yet? Or did that come later?）。 But things hadn’t really changed much. I was still a young woman who placed her self-worth in the hands of men like you.
I wasn’t angry, because I thought you were right: My shoes were embarrassing. I didn’t know how to dress. I’m short. I’m nothing special unless I’m naked. I should be grateful that you looked at me twice. Had you not, who knows what might have happened? As you said, “I certainly know where she would be, and it wouldn’t be where she is now.”
I was also ashamed. I hated myself for trying to impress you. It didn’t feel as if I’d hustled you to get on in life. Instead, it felt as if I’d betrayed and fetishized myself to be appealing to you. Even the way you called me “smart” stung. I hated that I’d used the things I loved to win your attention.
I kept your interviews to myself. I was too mortified to share what’d you said with people close to me. I didn’t want to run the risk that they might agree with you. I didn’t want them to see me as you did.
I didn’t have it in me to be angry.
Yet.
* * *
We’re going to do this model search, and I want to find another twelve Emilys and make them into stars and give them an amazing platform to have a career.… So if I can find some girl in Russia who’s picking potatoes and put her in this calendar and make her famous, that would be fantastic.
You held your casting. There is a video of it online, edited to an airy techno beat. Young women float by in bikinis, their hair flowing behind them while they arch their backs and blow kisses toward the camera you crouch behind. As each one poses, she holds a whiteboard with her name written plainly on it. Then the whiteboard is wiped clean and one young woman’s name is replaced by another’s.
I can’t stand the thought of you using my name to recruit these girls. I hate that you point to me as an example and say, Look at what you could have if you know how to catch my eye.
I am angry now, not only for myself but for “some girl in Russia” and all the young women and girls who see you as a gatekeeper, who line up before you to be judged as fuckable or not.
I want to tell those girls that I’m not sure it’s worth it—not the money or the attention. I’d be lying if I said that fame did not come with its gifts: Would anyone care to read what I write had I not impressed men like you?