The Three Graces

Joe points toward a statue of three joined entities.
“The Three Graces,” says Joe. “Each based on the famous figure model Audrey Munson. Miss Manhattan.”

“Who is that?”

“She was a young woman who found fame, fabulous and fleeting, as an artist’s model. For she could stand stock still for many hours. Bear it all. Her likeness is scattered throughout the city and beyond. Her fame spread far-and-wide in her day. She was a star of the early silver screen. The flickers. The movies, pre-code movies, presumed lost for decades. In them she portrayed an artist model, nude.

She was arrested during the premiere of one of her own films, on a morals charge. Her career came to an end when a doctor she and her mother had been rooming in the house of murdered his wife so he could build a new life with Munson, though she knew nothing of the plot and had had no relations romantic with the man.

Later, she conducted a nation-wide search, public, for the perfect husband for her, but found no one. Her mother committed her to a lunatic asylum. She resided there for sixty-five years, until she died, forgotten, at the age of one-hundred-and-four. No one visited her for decades. But sometimes, the old lady would escape her confines, and walk to a nearby bar, where she told unbelievable stories about herself as a young, desirable, woman. Stories no one she talked to believed.”