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.
