HBO is bringing Hoyt Richards back into view on June 1 with Bring Me the Beauties, a three-part docuseries about how the man once billed as the world’s first male supermodel was drawn into the Eternal Values cult. Richards says nearly every dollar he made as a fashion star ended up going to the group.
That matters now because Richards was not an obscure figure before the cult took hold. He won a football scholarship to Princeton, then landed campaigns for Versace, Valentino, Ralph Lauren and Burberry, and posed for Helmut Newton and Steven Meisel. The new series puts that success beside the years he spent inside a closed world that used glamour as the front door.
The story begins in 1978, when Richards was 16 and Frederick Von Mierers approached him on a Nantucket beach. Von Mierers was building a scene around models and other attractive young people, pulling them to Studio 54 and then to afterparties at his East 54th Street apartment. From there, the pitch turned into routine: side-by-side futons, fruits and vegetables, tanning sessions, deep-cleaning chores and the demand that members renounce sexual activity, especially romantic love.
Von Mierers wrapped control in spectacle. He held ninety-minute “life readings” using astrological charts and character analysis, urged acolytes to buy pricey gemstones said to carry healing powers and presented the whole operation as a kind of elite social club. Richards later described the experience as becoming “a more evolved, better me,” a line that shows how the group’s discipline could feel like purpose before it looked like manipulation.
That contradiction is the center of the documentary’s pull. Eternal Values traded on access to Studio 54, high society and a cult of beauty, but behind that was a strict system of renunciation and psychological control, with an illicit gem business and claims that Von Mierers was an E.T. from the star Arcturus. Chris Smith said it took about five years to make the film, in part because there was so little information online about the group in the pre-internet era.
Bring Me the Beauties arrives with archival footage of Von Mierers and interviews with Richards and other former members, but it also leaves one question hanging: how many people were ultimately drawn into Eternal Values, and what became of them after the parties ended. For Richards, the answer is already plain. The money, the glamour and the promise of something higher all passed through the cult’s hands.
