This week I watched the first two episodes of the HBO docuseries Bring Me The Beauties: A Model Cult. I am eager to see how they conclude the series in the third episode and what is left out as plenty has been left out in the first two episodes which have focused a little too much on the former model John Hoyt, a.k.a. Hoyt Richards, and his perspective on the cult Eternal Values run by Frederick von Mierers, a.k.a. Freddy Meyers from Brooklyn.
Mierers was a social climbing fraud who
died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of forty-three in Manhattan. After
plastic surgery and illness, he looked to have been much older like
an orange candle that had been lit, allowed to melt for a time and
blown out before becoming a puddle of wax. His cult combined aliens, healing gemstones, tanning beds, poor interior decorating choices, fraud, a
god, astrology and sex, which all cults eventually devolve into,
including Times Square hookers and dildos on Fifth Avenue. There was
also a lake house on Lake Lure in the mountains of western North
Carolina, which too, seemed to have been designed by unicorns on acid.
There is much poor taste and poor decision making on display in 1980s New York in this series than you would find in a small town gay bar in Kansas.
Frederick preyed on the gullible, young and allegedly intelligent people who graduated from Ivy League schools, came from posh families and a few models of both sexes. They were preppy clones and undoubtedly each had copies of The Official Preppy Handbook from 1980 under their pillow. Frederick used the models and their connections to further recruit more members to worship his messages spread from piles of teal and pink throw pillows in the 1970s and 80s. The goal was money and power for himself, of course. And trips to Studio 54 too.
Given the time period, the social
climbing, Manhattan and the connection to Studio 54, I said to myself
that Andy Warhol must have been connected to Frederick von Mierers in
some way. As much as a star fucker and as connected as Warhol was to
anyone with money, glamour and some sleazy people too, he had to have
known Frederick in some capacity. I grabbed my copy of The Andy
Warhol Diaries and began to search.
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| My copy of The Andy Warhol Diaries. June 2026. |
It did not take long.
Wednesday, May 9, 1979
The Du Point twins came in and Brigid told them that Freddy von Mierers had called and put out of the word that he was going to send the police after them if they didn't return his two sweaters. They turned bright red, and she told them not to come around anymore since they steal. Dropped Rupert (cab $4).
It is interesting that he referred to him as "Freddy" and not Frederick. Freddy was his real name. Warhol was not dumb and I wonder if he knew all or part of Freddy's less than aristocratic background from Brooklyn? It is also possible that Warhol was friendly and familiar enough with him to call him Freddy and not by the more proper Frederick. Freddy was also knowledgeable enough to check Warhol's Factory in his search for the Du Pont twins who were socially connected to Warhol.
That was the only mention in Andy's diaries. He loved to gossip in them and to find only one mention of Frederick von Mierers would suggest that he was not close to him or was around him briefly. Warhol as odd as he may have been was not one to join a cult, but he did get into healing crystals in the mid 1980s. He mentioned them several times and referred to them as “Harmonics.”
On Tuesday, December 18, 1984 there was this one funny entry:
Ran into one of those kids from Harvard in the sixties, one of Edie's friends, I can't remember his name. And I showed him my crystals and told him about crystal power and he was just standing there with his mouth open. He said he couldn't believe that someone as smart as me would start believing in crystals after I made it all through the sixties and everything and laughed at all the hippie stuff and that this is just the recycle of it. But really it's not the same, and you do have to be positive, not negative.
Warhol did a lot of rationalizing and had peculiar habits, but at least he was not a cult leader in the 1980s.
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| Cult leader Frederick von Mierers on Hard Copy. |
For more on the Eternal Values cult you can watch the original early 1990s Hard Copy tabloid show report which is partially used in the HBO docuseries. Back at the time, everyone considered Hard Copy, A Current Affair, Inside Edition and all those other syndicated afternoon tabloid shows to have low journalistic standards. In retrospect, they produced hard-hitting reporting when compared to what passes for news today at the local and network level.
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| The March 1990 story on the cult in Vanity Fair. |
And you can read the original Vanity Fair story, East Side Alien, from March 1990 that was the first to expose the cult.