Within the group, the number of gems and carats possessed was treated as a sign of devoutness. 'I am Socrates, I am Plato. Often he had $30,000 or $40,000 in cash in his apartment. There is no punctuation in it.' Of course, some conditions are more extreme than others. investigates von Mierers, MARIE BRENNER breaks the story. And a voice said to me, 'Be calm, be calm, the transition will be easy. "This is a holy place.". Even today, years after Charles Manson and the Jonestown mass suicides, more than two thousand cults continue to operate in America. Do you see the ego there? In Aliens Among Us, Montgomery, a former journalist, devotes sixty pages to von Mierers and his persona as a citizen of Arcturus, as well as his astonishing psychic abilities. Over the years, I spent more than $150,000 on gems. At two in the morning, Von Mierers would be beamed out into the universe courtesy of cable television. Richards most recent film is Intersection, a romantic thriller he produced and stars in. Purely by coincidence I met a modeling agent; the next summer I was cast in a big ad campaign for Geoffrey Banks. In clips from these extremely 80s appearances, the former model shills mail-order cassettes and spouts new-age gibberish, his eyes getting impossibly larger and more urgent with each nonsense aphorism. He has a lot of good traits and a lot of bad ones. The anxiety attached to the end of an era, much less a millennium, inevitably produces collective madness. It was sort of pathetic.". I called him in the middle of the night and he paid for a plane ticket to L.A. "You'll never be a Ted Koppel unless you have manners!" Maybe you remember seeing it on late-night public-access cable TV. and 'You are a fucking, sick, evil, satanic piece of shit! Please subscribe to keep reading. I thought, This is crazy.". A year later, as a highschool senior, he ran into Frederick again. The former V.F. "He just understands everything about us." I believe in the master race!". "It has been a disaster," Montgomery once wrote of von Mierers to an angry reader who had taken her book seriously, but the reader has yet to recover $17,000 he says he paid for stones. . Hoyt Richards was dubbed the worlds first male supermodel, pulling in a minimum of $15,000 a day. "The root of all thought is the I thought," he might say while lecturing opaquely on his views of Eastern philosophy. Its hard to imagine just how strange it would all seem without context, an insomniac flipping through the channels, stumbling upon this exaggeration of a man who claimed to be an alien from the star Arcturus. He later told Ruth Montgomery that he had undergone what she called a "bewildering substitution of egos." And here I was, a male model, a symbol of all we were supposed to hate. He spent time at Quest, a bookshop on Fifty-third Street specializing in spiritual books, and there he met other people on their own missions. John comes back down here and Frederick starts smashing him across the face, and just saying, 'You fucking liar!' Andreadis was confronting von Mierers frequently about the gems, and angry factions were arising within the group. The idea was ultimately to destroy the ego and then rebuild it in a more malleable form. In my mind I was working him, kind of taking advantage of this guy and all his cool connections. Eternal Values does not approve of my marriage. " In 1979, Andreadis was a private-school boy from a rich New York family; his father invented Man-Tan. Devastated by illness, he twisted on his tiny lavender slipper-chair perch and clapped his hands for one of his followers to open his bedroom vault. She reportedly paid von Mierers $75,000 for her gems. When Aliens Among Us was published, his fantasy was realized. "I thought John Andreadis was spiritual," she told me. She wrote in Aliens Among Us that the Guides responded, "John is from Arcturus. Von Mierers was still local in 1983. Incredibly, von Mierers was able to persuade scores of his followers to buywith cash or money orders only his very pricey jewels. When I wasnt in trouble, theyd call me Dippy, but generally I was just called Dipshit. Tell her how much her book and the group have helped you!" She seemed to have abdicated all responsibility, resigned to the vulnerabilities of young beauties who often come from troubled homes. "He would say to us, 'You look fabulous, but inside you really are a mess. Frederick Von Miers Sciences Education Art Writing & UFO. We've had stones in our family for years. Olson, the head of quality control for IBM's Latin-American division, owns gems von Mierers sold him for more than $100,000. "I went to one weekend seminar," a businesswoman named Christina Andrews told me. But I know one thing: If I do bring it up, nobody ever finds my storyboring. "He would cross-reference all these books, and then he began to order sapphires," Andreadis said. Life after a cult has been challenging and terrifying and liberating. They can uplift you, mentally and spiritually. ", "Things happen. You can cancel at any time. "Oh, you duchesses and lords!" At its peak, there were perhaps one hundred active members. Splintered family relationships of the type familiar to anyone who has had experience with cults. Montgomery had been so moved by Andreadis's letter that she felt compelled to consult the Guides. Shortly after Jacki Adams and John Andreadis fled from von Mierers, group members put out three cassettes. "Why do you have to be a gem salesman? He even let me drive one of his Porches. Many people were convinced that the world was going to end in A.D. 999, 1013, 1844, and 1914, and the year 2000 has always kept the prophets in an uproar. "Everyone would sit around, and they were all wearing these gems on their fingers. Freddy did astrological charts and life readings. A pharaoh! Hunter soon signed Hoyt under the name Hoyt Richards. One of the women, Erika Wilson, a model with the Ford agency who has appeared in Glamour and Self, had a bland, sweet expression and an allAmerican beauty. Like every other American woman who grew up reading Seventeen, I have always thought of Eileen Ford as a benevolent godmother, a woman who protects her own. It is true that our space brothers and sisters have arrived. When the money manager demanded a refund, he says, von Mierers at first screamed at him, then refused to take his calls. Copyright 1995-2023 eBay Inc. All Rights Reserved. Blind faith, fear of the millennium, and obsession are less easy to analyze. The fairy tales of this dimension! I won back some of my money; the group went broke after that and eventually disbandedas you can imagine, that victory went a long way toward some sort of closure and vindication. . .immaculate dresser. Andreadis would put a life reading on the tape machine, and Frederick's voice, like the Wizard of Oz, with harmonic music in the background, would engulf a client with tales of past lives. "You are fabulous! That summer she began her spiritual quest in earnest. It is materialized, objectified thoughts. It is embarrassing to admit, but looking back, I didnt finally leave the group because I was being abused or because I was mad about giving them my money. "Frederick was only trying to help him." Hoyt Richards was one of the worlds biggest male supermodels in the 80s and 90s. He said, 'These gems will help you! She once wrote a syndicated column called "Capital Letter," until, as she says, "Arthur Ford told me that I could do automatic writing." Fabulous emeralds. He put me up in his house for almost 18 months. Amelia is kind and innocent and comes from a family with money. Basically, at this point, Ive shifted the shame to a place where I think of myself as a survivor. ''I was told I would have to wait a year to get my cassette, maybe eighteen months," a painter named Glenna Hartwell told me, ''but all the money had to be paid in advance.". Vanity Fair Summary. She knew that she had no rational basis for feeling unhappy with her life; she was at the very pinnaclea Ford model, a classy beauty booked by Vogue, photographed by Irving Penn. The group members watched me suspiciously, and, as in the faces of the Jonestown survivors in news photos, behind their blank stares was fear. There's no Lake Lure phone listing for Eternal Values or other names the group is known by - Unified Cosmogony or Ultimate Custom Interiors. Control of diet was an important first step. "Ramakrishna said, 'When flowers open, bees come of themselves, " von Mierers used to tell his new young friends. New York has always been a city of pretense, filled with mythomaniacs and con artists, most of them rank amateurs. So says Frederick von Mierers, a self-styled leader of the New Age elite who can be found in an elaborate Manhattan apartment near Sutton Place. .. protege of Billy Baldwin.. . "And you'll never be a David Bowie unless you get a better story," Bey replied. Oh. First, the mental seduction, the flattery Moonies call "love bombing." "You have to do something! Ruth Montgomery detailed von Mierers's relationship with Mrs. Williams in Aliens Among Us: "In company with his dowager godmother, Frederick traveled the high roads of Europe, meeting socially with the Queen of England and European aristocracy. It was right at that time when models were becoming celebrities. "Don't ever carry a Vuitton bag!" By the time Jacki Adams introduced herself to Andreadis, von Mierers's successor was becoming disenchanted with Eternal Values. You see everything like it is. "There are really two kinds of Jews," a friend remembers him saying. Writer Marie Brenner, who confirmed the now-dropped investigation by the Manhattan district attorney's office, compared the blank stares of von Mierers' minions to those of Jim Jones, who led his followers in a mass suicide in the jungles of Guyana in 1979. They are essential for every sincere seeker of the Truth. ") . "He cared so much about being with the rich and the prominent," a friend who knew him well fifteen years ago told me. . ", GREENSBORO Jurors found TikTok star Jessica Middlebrook, known as towtruckjess on social media, not guilty of involuntary manslaughter Thu. He would tell us, 'We are living a high spiritual life.' I asked. "I was represented by Ford," he told me. Frederick von Mierers almost ruined my life." She was saved by her intelligence and her astonishing beauty. ", Mind control inevitably follows a specific pattern. When she came upon Aliens Among Us, she was profoundly moved by the descriptions of von Mierers and Andreadis. "When I first met Frederick, I was only sixteen years old, and I was so naive I still believed that anyone who said he was spiritual was holy," a young man named John Andreadis told me. Flanked by Catherine Edelmann and John Hoyt, von Mierers pointed his finger and spoke sharply to his host, Richard Bey. He screamed at me, attacked my character, and told me I was being irresponsible and that the ring would fix all that.". "I found him at dawn reading a passage about precious stones or something," Andreadis told me. It would be the final certification, for who in the psychic world could ever doubt Montgomery's famous Guides? Black Vanity with Carrara Marble Top. "He's harmless," Hunter told me. "Ruth Montgomery really created Frederick," one Ford model told me. To whom do these thoughts arise and whence do they come? Andreadis often did ten astrology charts a week for von Mierers. "Her ideas are good," von Mierers said. . There, in 1978, he met a sixteen-year-old named John Hoyt. I am not for the masses. "Iam doing this for you," von Mierers is said to have replied. summers in Nantucket and falls in Oyster Bay. Eternal Values is unusual in that many of its young devotees have a lot of cash to spend on von Mierers's healing gems. I bought an emerald. Sign up for our newsletter to keep reading. I work for a gemologist, and I told her to bring in the stones. Of special interest to the tabloids were the models and ``life readings' or other advice von Mierers had given celebrities such as Sylvester Stallone and Rae Dawn Chong. ''Cash would come in for the gems from all over the country," Andreadis told me. And Freddie just laughed." "Handle them carefully," one of the young men said to me. Mr. Richards, shown above, organized and produced the . "Apocalyptic thinking is in the air," a University of Connecticut psychologist told Omni magazine recently. We thought the end was at hand. von Mierers told Jacki Adams, the Ford model who had come to see me, on one cassette. Enrolled now at Columbia as a freshman, Andreadis often helped von Mierers do the charts. "Let me tell you something! Now prosecutors in the office of the Manhattan district attorney are investigating the possibility that von Mierers was involved in a multimillion-dollar gem ring. you duchesses and lords," Freddie would say '%u are fabulous! And so, in 1984, Andreadis wrote to the best-selling author. . "I ran into her on an airplane," a close friend of hers told me. "I was the most powerful political columnist in America," she told me. Beware the razor's edge is sharp," he told one model. A male supermodel on surviving an apocalyptic, vegetarian cult. , sick, evil, satanic piece of shit was represented by Ford, '' told! 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