HBO premiered Bring Me the Beauties on June 1, putting Hoyt Richards back in view as the former supermodel who was pulled into Frederick Von Mierers’ orbit. Directed by Chris Smith, the documentary follows Richards from the fashion world’s top tier into a cult that kept its grip on him through some of the industry’s brightest years.
Richards was once the world’s highest-paid male model and, in the late 1980s, the most successful male model in the world. He was Bruce Weber’s golden boy, the face of luxury menswear, and moved through fashion’s upper atmosphere beside Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell. But every night he called a Manhattan cult leader to report on his behavior, a ritual that ran alongside the glossy life that made him famous. That leader was Frederick Von Mierers, born Frederick Myers, who told followers he was a “walk-in” — an alien consciousness from Arcturus inhabiting a human body, sent to prepare humanity for an apocalypse and guide a spiritually evolved elite into the next age.
The documentary lands now because Richards’ story is not just a tale of fame and loss; it is a window into a long-running operation that preyed on attractive, often fashion-world people and was already deep into its work by the time Richards encountered Von Mierers on Nantucket in 1981, when he was 16. Von Mierers sold gemstones at enormous markups, held seminars at a Park Avenue church and broadcast his teachings in the wee hours on Manhattan public access television. By March 1990, Manhattan prosecutors were investigating the operation, and Marie Brenner had profiled Von Mierers in Vanity Fair, estimating that he had sold nearly $2 million worth of gemstones and asking how an obvious phony convinced so many smart, attractive young people in New York that he was real.
That question is where the film appears to stop short. It shows enough to sketch the seduction, but only hints at how long Von Mierers had been operating and to whom. The group called itself Eternal Values, and it did not vanish when Von Mierers died in March 1990 after concealing an AIDS diagnosis and continuing to see male prostitutes near his East 54th Street apartment. It became harsher, more paranoid, and kept going. Bring Me the Beauties makes Richards legible again, but the fuller accounting of who else was drawn in, and how far the operation spread before anyone intervened, is still sitting just beyond the frame.
