Glamorama, the fourth novel by Bret Easton Ellis, arrived to U.S. bookstores just in time for Christmas 1998. The book tells the story of Victor Ward, a young, attractive model who becomes involved in an international terrorist group. To critics, Glamorama seemed delirious. To Ellis, it was a satire of ‘90s society, obsessed with consumerism, brands and success. During the same era, Hoyt Richards, who is considered the first male supermodel, was immersed in his own thriller rife with conspiracy and paranoia. At 36 years of age, he was a fashion legend. He had worked for the best designers, walked runways around the world, and earned millions. What no one knew is that he was also trying to escape from an exclusive sect for the hot and rich.
One sweltering summer evening in 1999, history’s first top male model managed to flee the headquarters of Eternal Values in Asheville, North Carolina. He had spent 15 years under the influence of the organization, which was led by Frederick von Mierers, a former model turned New Age guru. The best-paid male model of his generation left the complex with only the clothes on his back. He had no money, no savings. He wasn’t in contact with his family or friends. Fabio Lanzoni, with whom he had shared catwalks in the ‘80s, paid for his flight to Los Angeles and welcomed Richards into his home.
For years, Richards hid so that the cult’s members couldn’t find him. Now, he and the group’s other other victims are telling their stories in Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult, a documentary that recently premiered on HBO (the third and final episode airs next week). Directed by Emmy-winning Chris Smith, the film is stranger than anything Easton Ellis could have dreamed up. “If I hadn’t lived it, I wouldn’t have believed it myself,” Richards told Page Six in a recent interview.
At first glance, he didn’t seem like easy prey for a sect. He had grown up in a well-off family in Philadelphia and studied economics at Princeton. He was a college football star. When he fell into the web of Eternal Values, he was 23 years old, educated and beautiful, with a promising future. The only thing he was missing was something to bring meaning to his life. Von Mierers, an older man who Hoyt knew from their summers in Nantucket, was happy to provide one.
Von Mierers had worked as a model himself in the ‘60s and was well-connected in New York high society. He knew everyone. He introduced Richards to Joey Hunter, president of Ford Models, the agency that represented Brooke Shields, Ali MacGraw, Naomi Campbell and Christy Turlington. Hunter saw Richards as the American Dream come to life. The young man was tall, blond, athletic and charismatic.
A photo session with Bruce Weber led Richards’ career to take off like a spaceship. He began to work with legendary photographers like Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, and to appear on runways with top models like Cindy Crawford and Linda Evangelista. He also began to earn a lot of money. Richards had it all during an era in which having it all meant a lot. It was the mid-’80s. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, the liberalism of Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger was running rampant on Wall Street, and the radio was playing hymns to capitalism like Paninaro, in which the Pet Shop Boys sang “Armani, Armani, Versace.”
Richards was successful, but he felt empty. He wasn’t the only one. “Rich kids with troubled psyches took themselves off to Tibet to see the Dalai Lama or invited plump Indian swamis to move in,” wrote journalist Marie Brenner in an article about Eternal Values published by Vanity Fair in 1990. “It was an era in New York of crazy religions, cults, and odd self-help groups. These cults attract mostly the Less than Zero [the first novel from Easton Ellis] generation, born in the 1960s, reared on fashionable doomsday prophecies about the millennium […] The anxiety attached to the end of an era, much less a millennium, inevitably produces collective madness,” Brenner concluded.
In the mid-‘80s, there were more than 2,000 sectarian organizations operating in the United States. Groups like Scientology, Synanon and Arica were on the rise. Eternal Values was one of many. “There was so much materialism going on in New York at the time… but Frederick and his friends found a way to balance it somehow,” the model explains in the HBO documentary. Von Mierers was not your average guru. “He was the Brooks Brothers’ version,” says Richards. The megalomaniac’s last name alone evoked Central European nobility, but even that was misleading. His real name was Fred Meyers, the son of a Brooklyn dry cleaner who had managed to make his way in high society, first as a model then as the apprentice of the famous decorator Billy Baldwin, then as friend and confidant of several of the city’s wealthy women, and finally, an esoteric guru.
By the time Richards crossed paths with him, Von Mierers was beginning to lay the framework for Eternal Values. He was already claiming to be an alien from a distant star named Arcturus, who had come to Earth to save a handful of people from the imminent end of the world. According to him, the apocalypse would come in 1999 — but his followers would have nothing to fear.
The story didn’t make much sense, but it captivated Richards and other yuppies who were troubled by the savage capitalism of the Reagan era. Von Mierers turned his elegant apartment on the East Side, near Sutton Place, into the group’s center of operations. “Bring me the beauties,” he’d say. He only recruited attractive, monied men and women. “Only the elite will be saved,” he explained to Brenner in the Vanity Fair article. “I am here to train the leaders of the New Age. I am only interested in archduchesses and lords! Everyone I am training for leadership will have perfect features. I believe in the master race!” The journalist entitled her article East Side Alien.
In just five years, the picturesque wannabe with extraterrestrial messianic ambitions created a cult with a hundred followers. Richards was his most famous acolyte, but Eternal Values also attracted Jacki Adams, at the time the face of cosmetic brand Elizabeth Arden; Douglas Wyatt, son of Texas oil tycoons Oscar and Lynn Wyatt; and William Scranton III, the governor of Pennsylvania’s son. There were also TV executives, Wall Street brokers and graduates of Harvard, Yale and Princeton. Sylvester Stallone and Rae Dawn Chong showed and interest in some of the group’s activities.
Eternal Values became a very profitable business. It sold self-help cassette tapes, videos and books, nutrition plans and diets, dietary supplements, and conducted seminars, personalized astrology sessions and in-person lectures. Another source of the organization’s income was the illegal trade of precious stones. Von Mierers sold his followers sapphires, emeralds and rubies. He called them “talismans.” “The gems are God’s thoughts condensed… the gateways into this dimension for the ether waves… They are as candles in the dark… to prevent you from falling into delusions,” the bejeweled guru told Brenner. He earned an estimated $2 million from that endeavor.
From the outside, it seemed like a liberatory pseudo-religion. From the inside, Richards remembers it as a “mental prison.” The cult’s members had to follow strict rules. They could not drink alcohol, smoke, do drugs or have sex. They had to protect their body to achieve redemption. Von Mierers controlled what they ate, the exercise they did, and demanded blind devotion. Those who did not follow his rules were shouted at and subjected to insults and humiliation during sessions in which all members participated. Rebels were punished with manual labor. According to Richards, there was also sexual abuse.
The cult advised against forming relationships with non-followers and encouraged members to break ties to family and friends. It was the absolute good, and the outside was the enemy. The climate of isolation increased the leader’s power to inflict his abuse, manipulation and trickery. Similar to South Korea’s Reverend Sun Myung Moon, Von Mierers took control of the possessions and wealth of his followers. “The mentality around Eternal Values and the way Frederick operated was everybody needed to give everything that they had. This group was only going to work if you committed fully,” Hoyt says in the docuseries. “If you had money like I did, you would give it. If you didn’t have money, you maybe had more time. You would give your time.”
Over time, the model calculates that he gave a fortune to the organization. “I wasn’t great at accounting back in those days, but I would put it between $4 and 5 million,” he told Page Six. He was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars as the face of Versace, Gianfranco Ferré, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karen and Jeffrey Banks, but he didn’t even have his own house. He slept on the floor of his “master’s” apartment. “You become your own worst enemy. I just knew what was happening was wrong… potentially dangerous and bad,” he says, adding that he was “determined” to maintain the “narrative” that Eternal Values was spiritual.
The control was ironclad, yet subtle. No one was forced to stay. Richards confesses that he managed to convince himself that his modeling success was due to membership in the sect. Such magical thinking is common in cults.
Von Mierers died from complications related to HIV/AIDS in 1990. He was 43 years old. Eternal Values continued operating for more than a decade. Its most famous member was able to escape soon before the group dissolved. Richards had begun a secret relationship with a woman, something the cult strictly prohibited. They wanted him to break up with his girlfriend by fax. It was the final straw. “Donna’s involvement played a crucial role. She kind of unlocked my heart,” he says. A few years ago, they met and got back together. They are now engaged and plan to get married in September.
Today, Richards is 64 years old and continues to work as a model and actor. He also collaborates with Living Cult Free, a non-profit whose mission is to empower survivors of coercive control and undue influence to safely share their stories. The organization looks to fight shame, stigma and isolation among victims and promote cult education and prevention.
The model says the first step towards healing has been taking responsibility and admitting his mistakes. “Even though I was being brainwashed, even though I was greatly under the influence, I was still making choices. And I’m responsible for them,” he told The New York Times. He is still in the healing process, still in therapy. Meeting other cult survivors helps.
He decided to tell his story because he has seen how the New Age movement is more active than ever in the age of social media. Instagram and TikTok are full of false wellness gurus, alternative medicine and charlatans who promise magical formulas to achieve happiness and success. “We live in a sectarian society,” Richards warns. According to him, anyone can become a Von Mierers. “It can be a father, a brother, a boss, a coach or a lover. Many times, we find ourselves in a situation in which we feel like we have to please the other person. You want to make that person happy, but it doesn’t matter how hard you try, they’re always going to undervalue you.”
Gus Van Sant recently announced that he wants to make a movie about Richards and Eternal Values. The story has all the elements that interest the director of My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting and To Die For: youth, beauty, sensuality, ambition, stolen innocence, tragedy… the life of the world’s first male supermodel is better than any fiction.
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