In the summer of 1978, Hoyt Richards visited Nantucket with his family. One of six children, the then 16-year-old loved the annual trip to the Massachusetts island, a paradise full of sparkling water, jet-skis, and endless sun.
But when he was sitting on the beach with a friend, a man laid down his towel, sat next to Richards, and started talking. “I had heard about him from my friend, this guy who was from New York and was into astrology and ancient religions,” Richards recalls. “I remember him saying, ‘Oh, you’re very smart, so you’ll understand this.’”
The man called himself Frederick von Mierers, and the two quickly began a friendship that followed Richards to college at Princeton and his eventual life as one of the world’s first male supermodels. But what Richards thought was a collective with a deep love of mysticism, spirituality, and personal growth quickly spiraled into a controlling sect called Eternal Values, with Mierers in a position of complete power. Richards thought they were a family. Now, he calls it something else: a cult.
Out today, the new HBO docuseries Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult breaks down the origins of the mysterious 1980s group Eternal Values and the attractive models who largely made up its ranks. Directed by Chris Smith, the three-part series also explores the teachings and demands of Mierers and his real backstory that he tried to bury behind claims of otherworldly power. The title itself comes from a common demand Mierers had of his followers, based on his desire to surround himself with the most attractive people he could find: “Bring me the beauties.”
“The hope and promise for the group was a very altruistic exploration into self-realization and trying to help people become the best versions of themselves. That is what people signed up for and what they hoped to achieve,” Smith tells Rolling Stone. “Once we started digging, it just started to unfold and sprawl in a way that I don’t think we were fully prepared for.”
The Eternal Values Promise
Mierers lured followers in with discussions of enlightenment and mental clarity, often revolving around diet, exercise, celibacy, and the willingness to give up material possessions. But once people were fully enamored—many moving into a Manhattan apartment with him—he revealed his true message. Mierers believed he was a “walk-in,” an alien who has taken on a human body on Earth. He taught that his homeland was a star called Arcturus, the spiritual center of the universe, and that only he could save his followers from an upcoming catastrophe that would destroy most of the world. If they followed his teachings, which included the purchase of healing crystals, they would be rescued during Earth’s tribulations and be brought back when it was over to lead the new age.
“You can look at a story like this from the outside and think, ‘I could never get involved with something like that,’” Smith says. “But many people have cultic relationships in their life that they may not even be aware of, whether those are affiliations with political parties or religions.”
Mierers was able to live a luxurious life by relying on his followers for funds. While attending Princeton, Richards was scouted for Ford Model Agency and quickly became a highly paid male model. After graduation, he moved to New York, where he gave almost all of the money he had directly to Eternal Values. “My career was taking off, and I thought it was because I was involved with this group and had made a conscious choice to commit myself to God and to living a spiritual life,” he tells Rolling Stone. At one point, he was making close to $90,000 a month—and Mierers got pretty much everything.
A Growing Tension
While the group believed they were reaching spiritual enlightenment by listening to Mierers and leaving behind comforts, often sleeping in lavishly decorated rooms in piles on the floor, Mierers pitted members against each other, encouraged policing, and started “slammings,” forceful and loud critiques that came out of nowhere and attacked members for everything from their looks to their actions.
Former Eternal Values member Paul Hinton also says in the documentary that Mierers’ teachings implied that he was above sexual desires, but the leader would secretly sleep with male sex workers. Hinton believes this behavior eventually exposed Mierers to HIV-AIDS.
The docuseries includes never-before-seen archival footage and in-person interviews with former members of Eternal Values, many of whom took years to recover from their relationships with Mierers. One former member was supermodel Jacki Adams, who joined the group after reading about Mierers in the 1985 book Aliens Among Us by journalist Ruth Montgomery.
During Adams’ time in the group, she met Eternal Values member John Andreadis. Mierers believed that Andreadis was also a “walk-in,” destined to be the group’s next leader. But when Andreadis and Adams fell in love and married, Mierers considered their relationship to be a betrayal and turned on them. Adams, convinced that the group was no longer believable, gave a tell-all interview to a reporter at Vanity Fair, calling Eternal Values a cult and exposing Mierers’ practice of charging members thousands of dollars for cheap gemstones and crystals.
But in 1990, Mierers died of complications from AIDS, leaving a power vacuum that split the group into two factions. The Vanity Fair article was published shortly after, further ostracizing Adams from her former friends and causing the remaining Eternal Values members to become even more insular.
An Important Lesson
After Mierers’ death, Richards says that the group became even more abusive, often restricting his food, launching verbal assaults, once even shaving his head so he’d have a hard time booking model gigs. His family had staged at least one unsuccessful intervention, and it took two attempts for Richards to leave the group. After years making millions, he had only $3,000 to his name. He ran away and moved with his close friend Fabio Lanzoni—a favor he says to this day saved his life.
“I was so traumatized and freaked out, going through complex post-traumatic stress disorder,” Richards says. “Fabio had that sensitivity to say, ‘OK, something’s really happened to my buddy. He’s like a shadow of the guy I know, but if I just give him a safe space and just normalize things, when he’s ready, he’ll come talk.’ That’s really what offered me the time to start to process this whole experience.”
Now 64, Richards says that he participated in Bring Me the Beauties not just for catharsis, but to show people just how easy it is to be swayed by a charismatic person.
“I describe my experience as a 20-year cultic relationship with a group. I believe cultic relationships are part of the human condition. They’re relationships where we unconsciously give our power away to someone else, and then we suffer because of it,” Richards says. “People are drawn to these types of stories because unconsciously they’ve had something similar, far more subtle, but with the same dynamics at play. That really is universal.”