Before Hoyt Richards became known as the first male supermodel in the late 1980s and 1990s, a mysterious, captivating man from Manhattan laid a towel down next to him on a Nantucket beach.
Richards was 16 years old, hailing from an all-American, suburban Philadelphia family. His encounter with Frederick von Mierers would set him on a path to Eastern philosophy and extraterrestrial intrigue, Studio 54 parties and cosmopolitan glamour, and a two-decade entanglement with Eternal Values, the spiritual community led by von Mierers that is now better known as a cult. In Bring Me the Beauties, a new HBO docuseries directed by Chris Smith, Richards tells the tale from the beginning.
“For almost 25 years,” Richards tells Vanity Fair, “I’ve been telling my story knowing that that felt very empowering—to take ownership of what happened and along the way, start to learn also how and why it happened.”
Richards (left).
Courtesy of Hoyt Richards
When Richards headed off to Princeton in 1981, he started spending weekends in Manhattan and crashing in von Mierers’s apartment. It was the era of New York yuppies and greed, and New Age thinking was in the air as a cleansing counterweight. Von Mierers claimed he was an alien sent to Earth to spread the word about the coming apocalypse, and that his Eternal Values followers would light the way to the future through his teachings. Richards fell in with the group, who lived together either in von Mierers’s Manhattan apartment or a Brooklyn loft, around the time that he had a chance encounter with a modeling agent. After three weeks working with Ford Models, Richards met Bruce Weber, who put him on the map, and embarked on an international career alongside the emerging class of supermodel-celebrities: Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell.
Bring Me the Beauties details how Richards’s earnings bankrolled Eternal Values, and it paints a portrait of how von Mierers amassed sweeping control over his followers’ thinking and lifestyle. Richards ended up separated from his family for over a decade, and even after von Mierers’s death in 1990 from AIDS complications, he remained ensconced in the group’s new North Carolina commune. He tried to escape once before the members pulled him back in, but in 1999, he made a final break with the help of an unlikely ally. Fabio, his fellow leading male model of the era, paid for Richards’s plane ticket to Los Angeles, where Richards stayed with him for over a year and came to realize that he had been in a cult.
Today, Richards, 64, devotes himself to working with other cult survivors and serves on the board of an organization called Living Cult Free. While Smith was making Bad Vegan, the 2022 Netflix docuseries about Sarma Melngailis, the aughts-era raw vegan restaurateur who ultimately served jail time for grand larceny and tax fraud, he met Richards during the course of his cult research. (Melngailis stole from her investors so that her husband could pay a deity to make them immortal.) Murmurs about Eternal Values had circulated at least since journalist Marie Brenner wrote “East Side Alien” for VF in 1990, which examined how New York prosecutors were investigating von Mierers for selling mystical gems with false appraisals. But Smith saw an untold personal tale in Richards’s journey, and he took a particular interest in the texture of that materialistic New York era.
