Frederick von Mierers claimed that he came from the Arcturus star system – but he certainly knew how to show Earthlings a good time.
He threw parties almost every night in the 1980s and they were packed to the gills with beautiful people – top models and wealthy socialites – dancing the night away.
And he was only interested in glamorous young professionals.
‘Bring me your beauties – not your friends, only invite the beauties,’ the handsome, intelligent and charming New Yorker told acquaintances.
He often took his fresh-faced charges – frequently still in their teens – to witness a night of debauchery at Manhattan’s notorious, star-packed Studio 54 nightclub.
The famously picky doormen would wave them inside, where clubgoers did lines of cocaine on the tables and it was not unusual to see people having sex on the dancefloor.
Then it was back to his glittering apartment, elaborately decorated in the style of an Eastern palace, where his real work would begin – fixing these rich young things with his piercing blue eyes and using his spellbinding charisma to exploit their hunger for spiritual fulfilment in the uber-materialism of Trump-era New York.
In the process, the self-described ‘psychic astrologer’ reeled them slowly but surely into an insidious New Age Doomsday cult that sucked them dry of their money in exchange for large ‘healing’ gems that he ‘prescribed’ for them after analysing their star charts.
Von Mierers aped the poet John Keats by claiming that ‘beauty is truth’.
Many of his followers were fashion models (generally from the prestigious Ford agency), not only because of von Mierers’ obsession with physical beauty, say insiders, but because – as an ex-model himself – he tapped into the crippling insecurity that some felt about being judged entirely on their looks.
Although von Mierers insisted his message was about love and synthesising the best of the world’s religions, he was a misogynist who preached, among other things, that Jews were ‘evil’ and Hitler was ‘divinely inspired’ in wanting to create a ‘master race’.
He was intent on doing the same, ready to take over the world after an apocalypse he predicted would occur following a ‘magnetic polar shift’ at the close of 1999.
The extraordinary story of von Mierers and his Eternal Values cult is revisited in a HBO TV series beginning tonight, Bring Me The Beauties: A Model Cult, which contains interviews with many of his former followers, including two of the top models from the 1980s, Hoyt Richards and Jacki Adams.
It’s a tale of vulnerability, narcissism and jaw-dropping gullibility in which high-flyers would finish a day’s work on the catwalk or Wall Street and then spend hours scrubbing hall floors or doing the laundry because von Mierers – who’d read enough Eastern philosophy to sound convincing – insisted they had to work on controlling their egos.
He wasn’t just a New Age cult leader but an old-fashioned conman whose ‘healing’ stones were worth a fraction of what he charged his moneyed admirers for them.
But they happily forked out because he insisted the gemstones – which they had to keep close at all times – were imbued with a spiritual power that would transform their lives and protect them from dark, satanic forces.
Von Mierers also lied about himself.
He wasn’t the orphaned scion of an illustrious and super-wealthy Manhattan family who knew the British Royal Family, as he claimed, but Fred Meyer from suburban Brooklyn, whose father ran a dry-cleaning business.
An avid social climber, whose German-sounding accent was entirely fake, he’d cut his teeth at the art of separating rich people from their money by sponging off elderly New York widows after his modelling career hit the skids.
Latching on to a soaring interest in yoga, meditation, astrology and lifestyle gurus in the 1980s, he provided a ‘bridge between the Yuppies and the New Age’, former member John Hoyt – who later became supermodel Hoyt Richards – tells the documentary.
Hoyt was 16 when he first encountered von Mierers, who sat next to him on a beach on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket.
He was soon spouting Eastern mysticism to the teenager, drawing yin and yang symbols in the sand.
It wasn’t long before he was taking the impressionable youngster to Studio 54.
Von Mierers urged Hoyt – who had spent his sixth-form years at the £60,000-a-year British public school Haileybury in Hertfordshire – to go into modelling.
With his movie-star looks he was spectacularly successful and, after working alongside the likes of Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell, he was dubbed ‘the first male supermodel’.
Almost all his earnings – millions of dollars, he says – went to von Mierers, whose group he joined the day after he graduated from Princeton University with a degree in economics.
He moved into one of the string of cramped flats in von Mierers’ Manhattan building, where his disciples lived communally, doing their chores each day before going off to their high-powered jobs.
At night they’d hunker down side by side on futons wherever they could find space on the floor.
Like many members, Hoyt convinced himself his career success was largely due to von Mierers’ influence and – although he deeply regrets it now – he happily introduced many other models to him.
Word spread that von Mierers had genuine psychic powers, and his followers sincerely believed he was a supernatural being.
While their guru had a hot temper, he excelled at the art of flattery – an approach that worked wonders on self-doubting young people who felt there was something missing in their lives.
After initially allowing them to come and go as they pleased, he gradually lured them in and persuaded them to cut themselves off from their family and past lives.
There were strict rules.
Members had to dress immaculately, stay tanned and follow a healthy diet that kept them....
