For a stretch in the late 1980s, Hoyt Richards was the most successful male model in the world — Bruce Weber’s golden boy, the face of luxury menswear, a man who moved through fashion’s upper atmosphere beside Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell with the ease of aristocracy. What nobody knew was that every night, from hotel rooms across Europe and America, Hoyt was calling a Manhattan cult leader to report on his behavior. The man on the other end of the line claimed he was an alien consciousness from the star Arcturus inhabiting a human body.

His name was Frederick Von Mierers. Born Frederick Myers, the son of a Brooklyn dry cleaner, he had reinvented himself through charisma, social climbing and a particular genius for identifying lonely or aspirational people and making them feel chosen. He listed himself in the Social Register, implied ties to the Vanderbilts and claimed to have inherited millions through a godmother in the Kress family fortune. None of it was true. Those who knew his real background would sometimes shout “Freddie Myers!” across the floor at Studio 54 just to watch him flinch.

Frederick told followers — mostly men but women, too, all of them attractive, often plucked from the world of fashion — that he was a “walk-in,” meaning an extra-terrestrial had taken over his body to prepare humanity for an apocalypse and guide a spiritually evolved elite into the next age. He preached detachment from worldly concerns while selling gemstones at enormous markups, claiming God’s thoughts condensed themselves into crystal form. He held seminars at a Park Avenue church. He broadcast his teachings on Manhattan public access television in the wee hours of the morning, after Robin Byrd and before dawn.

By the time journalist Marie Brenner profiled him in Vanity Fair in March 1990, Manhattan prosecutors were already investigating his operation. (“How could an obvious phony like this convince so many smart, attractive young people in New York that he was for real?” the piece quoted a detective asking a model who had recently fled from the group.) Brenner estimated Frederick had sold nearly $2 million worth of gemstones using fraudulent appraisals from jewelers on West 47th Street. He died the same month the story appeared, having concealed an AIDS diagnosis while continuing to see male prostitutes near his East 54th Street apartment. The group, which called itself Eternal Values, survived him, mutating from Upper East Side spiritual theater into something harsher and more paranoid after his death.

On June 1, HBO premiered Bring Me the Beauties, director Chris Smith’s documentary about Hoyt’s journey through the fashion industry and into Frederick’s orbit. What the film captures is the double life Hoyt led for more than a decade, being an international male supermodel by day and an obedient cult member by night.

What the documentary only hints at is how long Frederick had been doing this and to whom. His operation began in the late 1970s. By the time 16-year-old Hoyt encountered him on Nantucket in 1981, Frederick had already spent several years moving through New York society, collecting beautiful, vulnerable young people arriving in Manhattan and hoping to become someone larger than themselves.

Frederick, who was said to have been born in 1946 but was also a known fabulist, had once been genuinely handsome in the clean-cut American way. He was Robert Redford-esque, before the facelifts and self-mythologizing transformed him into something stranger. He dressed impeccably, carried himself with authority and seemed to possess an endless Rolodex of aristos, decorators, socialites and semi-famous New Yorkers. Billy Baldwin, the dean of American interior design, became one of the key legitimizing figures in Frederick’s orbit. He dropped Baldwin’s name constantly.

People entering Frederick’s world always encountered two versions of him simultaneously: the absurd cosmic figure claiming extraterrestrial origins and the highly convincing Upper East Side sophisticate who seemed entirely plausible in rooms full of wealth and glamour. The alien mythology almost functioned as a test. If someone accepted that, they had already surrendered their skepticism and were ripe for recruitment.

“He was the most frightening person I have ever met in my life, and I’ve met some very dangerous people,” says Richard Dupont, one of the Dupont twins, who were fixtures at Studio 54 and Andy Warhol’s Factory.

Richard was 16 in 1977 when he encountered Frederick in the menswear department at Bloomingdale’s. He had come into the city from Connecticut with his mother for a weekend of shopping and theater. While she was at Kenneth Salon getting her hair done, Richard wandered uptown alone. A very handsome, very tanned older man approached him casually in the department store and introduced himself as Frederick Von Mierers. He said he was a Ford model, a decorator, a member of New York society. Richard remembers him seeming glamorous, worldly, entirely at ease inside the city’s adult universe. Richard called him the following weekend and was invited to stay at Frederick’s apartment on East 54th Street. Richard told his mother he was visiting colleges.

“Take your shoes off,” Frederick said immediately after opening the door, telling Richard that the marble floors had just been cleaned. Then he asked the teenager to remove his jeans as well because the oils from the fabric could damage the silk sofas. Richard stood there in Brooks Brothers boxer shorts inside Frederick’s Billy Baldwin-designed apartment while Frederick served tea and sandwiches from William Poll.

Two days later, Richard woke up alone. A note instructed him to leave before Frederick returned. On the train back to Connecticut, Richard replayed the weekend in his mind, wondering whether he had been raped, whether a boy could even be raped. By the time he reached Southport, he had decided not to think about it anymore. Years later, he says, after moving to New York, he ran into Frederick again at Studio 54. Frederick began pursuing him aggressively. Richard warned people about him. Nobody listened.

His twin brother, Robert, did not listen either. Richard had no idea at the time that Robert had already encountered Frederick himself. The brothers had never discussed their sexual histories. Robert moved into Frederick’s apartment for several months in 1979. He says Frederick gave him acid and subjected him to repeated sexual abuse. He eventually fled after growing jealous over another young man Frederick had become involved with, a soap opera actor from One Life to Live.

“Freddie was evil,” Robert says now. “Everyone knew it. You saw it in his eyes.”

Fifty years later, both brothers — neither of whom appear in the HBO documentary — still remember Frederick’s phone number by heart. “Plaza 53530,” Robert says, recounting the number instinctively. “Wow. Maybe he put a trance on us.”

***

Hoyt met Frederick at 16 on a Nantucket Beach. Frederick drew a yin-yang symbol in the sand and told the teenager he possessed a higher destiny. Hoyt remembers the experience now less as persuasion than emotional engulfment. “Rather than asking, ‘Who is this person who acts like they know me when I just met them?’ — which is the important question — I was just lost in it,” Hoyt says. “We all like being told we’re special.”

A few years later, Frederick walked Hoyt into the office of Ford Models president Joey Hunter, who signed him immediately. Hoyt became one of the defining faces of late 1980s fashion: Weber, Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton all photographed him. A sprawling 58-page spread in the Italian magazine Mondo Uomo helped establish him internationally. Designers and photographers loved him because he could project softness and authority simultaneously.

He moved through a world populated by the likes of Linda Evangelista, Crawford and Campbell, a world of private fittings, hotel suites, European nightclubs and endless flights between New York, Milan and Paris. What nobody around him understood was that he experienced most of this glamorous world from behind glass. After shoots, after parties, after dinners, while everyone else disappeared into nightlife and romance and cocaine and celebrity, Hoyt returned to Frederick.

He flew home to a Manhattan apartment where multiple members slept side by side on mats, surrendered their earnings to the group and phoned in detailed reports about their thoughts and daily behavior. Romantic relationships were discouraged. Independent identity itself gradually became suspect. “I fell so in love with the narrative,” Hoyt says now, describing the mythology Frederick built around him, “that I started self-censoring to preserve it.”

Because Frederick hammered it into their consciousness, the group believed the world would end in 1999. Spacecraft would descend before global destruction and airlift the chosen into rejuvenation chambers, he promised them. Hoyt, who grew up on Star Wars and Spielberg, found the mythology thrilling at first.

After Frederick died in 1990, the group lost the charismatic center holding the mythology together. The surviving members relocated to North Carolina near Asheville, where Frederick had begun constructing a pink marble estate because he believed the Blue Ridge Mountains would survive the apocalypse. The house was built with funds provided by Hoyt’s salary; he was allowed to keep very little of it for himself.

The days and months were ticking toward Frederick’s predicted doomsday. The remaining members, just the men at this point, stockpiled food, guns and gold while waiting for civilization to collapse. Hoyt had spent enough time traveling internationally by then that reality itself increasingly contradicted the prophecies.

“I’m still jetting around at Europe, Paris, Milan, Stockholm, whatever,” Hoyt recalls. “And I’m looking around and going, ‘Well, all the signs that he had told us were going to lead up to this thing, the storms, the earthquakes, the tidal waves — none of that’s happening, and certainly the economies aren’t collapsing, governments aren’t falling apart. So I got up the courage to go back to say, ‘If nothing else, I think the timeline’s off.’ And that’s when I got attacked.”

The self-appointed new leader of the group responded by systematically humiliating him. “He would say: ‘I just wish you had the guts to kill yourself,’ ” Hoyt recalls. “It would put me out of my misery.” Hoyt began contemplating suicide. He had been convinced that he was burdensome, weak and spiritually defective. Leaving the group eventually felt less like rebellion than mercy. “It’s like the battered partner who keeps thinking: ‘They’re having to spend all this time screaming at me because of what I’m doing to them,’ ” he says.

On July 3, 1999, Hoyt made the call that changed his life — to Fabio. The two men had worked together at Ford Models. Fabio bought him a plane ticket to Los Angeles immediately, let him stay at his house for 18 months and handed him the keys to one of his Porsches, the world’s most recognizable romance cover model quietly becoming a safe harbor for the world’s most successful male supermodel. The friendship became one of the first genuinely unconditional relationships Hoyt had experienced in decades.

But not everyone emerged from the wreckage so fortunate. Jacki Adams was a female Ford model who escaped Eternal Values and later became the main whistleblower in the Vanity Fair exposé. “The Vanity Fair article more or less killed Jacki’s career,” Hoyt says. “And for me, it catapulted mine.” Somehow, the industry fascination around his involvement in the cult led to even more bookings. His career and celebrity grew.

Victimhood and complicity, he learned, are not mutually exclusive. He did not recruit himself into the cult, but he also ignored warning signs, rationalized contradictions and benefited professionally while others paid the price for telling the truth. “It’s like being a drunk driver who runs someone off the road,” he says. “You can say, ‘I was drunk’ — but you’re still accountable.”

Bring Me the Beauties director Smith (an executive producer of Tiger King) says the aspect of the story that affected him most was the contradiction of a man publicly embodying beauty, status and aspiration while privately surrendering almost every element of personal autonomy. “I’ve never found cult stories that interesting,” Smith says. “But this one felt different because of the dual life — the split between the public image and the private reality.”

Frederick understood instinctively that proximity to beauty and status legitimized him. Models became a recruitment tool, and fashion itself became proof of cosmic specialness. The more successful Hoyt became publicly, the more difficult it became psychologically to admit something was wrong privately. Success became evidence that Frederick must somehow be right. “If you met any of them,” Smith says of the former cult members, “you would never think they had this experience in their past.”

Today, Hoyt works as a cult exit counselor helping families recover loved ones from high-control groups. He is engaged to Donna Flagg, a dancer and choreographer whom the cult pressured him to abandon decades ago.

When he talks about manipulation now, he speaks with the specificity of someone mapping terrain he once lived inside: love-bombing, isolation, the teaching of self-distrust. “But the pilot light never goes out,” he says of the critical thinking cults attempt to extinguish. “It gets turned down so low, you can’t see it. But it never goes out.”

This story appeared in the June 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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