Hoyt Richards Anchors Bring Me The Beauties Documentary on Eternal Values
HBO’s bring me the beauties documentary premiered on June 1 and puts Hoyt Richards back at the center of a story about fashion fame, manipulation, and a Manhattan cult that outlasted its leader. Directed by Chris Smith, the film follows the former male supermodel from luxury menswear to Frederick Von Mierers’ Eternal Values.
Richards had once been the world’s highest-paid male model, Bruce Weber’s golden boy and the face of luxury menswear in the late 1980s. The documentary’s sharper edge is that he was also calling a Manhattan cult leader every night from hotel rooms across Europe and America, giving away his last penny while living the life of an international model.
Hoyt Richards and Manhattan
In 1981, Richards met Von Mierers on Nantucket at age 16, after the cult leader had already spent several years moving through New York society. That encounter became the opening Richards never seems to have escaped: he led a double life for more than a decade as a model by day and an obedient cult member by night.
His story is the part of the film that lands hardest because it shows how someone already inside the luxury circuit could still be drawn deeper into a closed system. Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell sit in the fashion circle around him, but the documentary keeps returning to the private obligation that ran underneath the public image.
Frederick Von Mierers
Von Mierers, born Frederick Myers, told followers, “I was a walk-in,” claiming an alien consciousness from the star Arcturus inhabited his body to prepare humanity for an apocalypse. He listed himself in the Social Register, implied ties to the Vanderbilts, said he had inherited millions through a godmother in the Kress family fortune, and sold gemstones at enormous markups.
He held seminars at a Park Avenue church and broadcast his teachings on Manhattan public access television in the wee hours of the morning. The cult, which called itself Eternal Values, began in the late 1970s and targeted attractive, vulnerable young people arriving in New York.
March 1990 and after
By March 1990, Manhattan prosecutors were investigating Von Mierers’ operation, and Marie Brenner’s Vanity Fair profile estimated he had sold nearly $2 million worth of gemstones. Brenner asked, “How could an obvious phony like this convince so many smart, attractive young people in New York that he was for real?”
Von Mierers died in the same month the profile appeared, after concealing an AIDS diagnosis while continuing to see male prostitutes near his East 54th Street apartment. Eternal Values survived his death and, by the account in the film, became harsher and more paranoid. That leaves Richards’ account with real weight: the documentary is not just about one man’s celebrity detour, but about how a polished con man built a machine that kept running after the man who started it was gone.
