In a new biography, “The Curse of Beauty,” journalist James Bone uncovers the rise and fall of Audrey Munson, a Gilded Age model and silent-film star whose graceful image is ever-entwined with the beaux-arts style.

Munson was the model for three-quarters of the sculptures in the San Francisco 1915 World's Fair in the Jewel City exhibit. Her Venus de Milo-like beauty inspired scores of American artists and sculptors in the neoclassical style for a decade, until tastes changed.

After dating America's richest bachelor and enjoying fame, but not fortune, Munson ended up waitressing in upstate New York. She spent 65 years in an asylum until her death in 1996 at age 104.

Her beauty still is seen across the country in public art, especially in New York, writes Brenda Conin in the NYT:

Audrey towers above fountain by the Plaza Hotel and is immortalized in the sculptures “Descending Night,” by Adolph Alexander Weinman, and “Memory,” by Daniel Chester French, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She holds up a crown in “Civic Fame,” an allegorical female figure that stands 25 feet tall on the Manhattan Municipal Building, surpassed in size as a female figure in the city only by the Statue of Liberty. Audrey graces the Manhattan Bridge as the “Spirit of Commerce” and modeled for figures outside the New York Public Library and the Brooklyn Museum. She presides over a corner of Central Park at Columbus Circle in a glittering bronze memorial to the dead in the explosion of the battleship Maine.