The gem operation was confined to New York, although von Mierers also used jewelers in Washington, D.C., and Iowa to obtain stones. Like Frederick von Mierers, an extraordinary number of people are suddenly claiming to be in contact with their space brothers. a city detective recently asked a Ford model who had fled from the group. "The root of all thought is the I thought," he might say while lecturing opaquely on his views of Eastern philosophy. Even today, years after Charles Manson and the Jonestown mass suicides, more than two thousand cults continue to operate in America. Andreadis sat in a lotus position and, according to Glenna Hartwell, said calmly, "I have been asked to leave the group. "Don't ever carry a Vuitton bag!" He had sold thousands of cassettes with titles such as Space People, Karma and Destiny, and Gems and Crystals. I thought, How can he have such sway over these attractive people? Sapphires and emeralds gleamed from their fingers and wrists. "When we started Eternal Values, it was completely benign, really nothing more than a spiritual merchandising scheme," a former associate of von Mierers's who is now cooperating with the Manhattan district attorney's office told me. John Andreadis, a former longtime von Mierers' aide who became one of his biggest detractors, didn't return telephone messages, although his answering machine repeatedly said he was only unavailable for about an hour. The speaker was emaciated, obviously very ill, but swathed in white cashmere, flawlessly groomed. I said, 'Freddie, you can't put this out! The gem business has always been predicated on the notion of caveat emptor; a stone is worth what the customer is willing to pay. For that, you feel a sense of shame. When they returned to New York, they told Eileen Ford's husband and Hunter what had happened to them. But I know one thing: If I do bring it up, nobody ever finds my story boring. You are here to listen to me.' Near me, six of von Mierers's friends and followers stared at us, as if hypnotized, throughout our interview. You must write that I am the reincarnation of Jeremiah from the Old Testament. I am the elite. And when he complained to Frederick, von Mierers said to him, "You will die on the water! ' They're cheap! There, lessons of , "The Wall Street Journal just so happened to have a supportive op-ed ready to publish within hours of the meeting. From then until now, Ive worked to rebuild my life. She once wrote a syndicated column called "Capital Letter," until, as she says, "Arthur Ford told me that I could do automatic writing." The massive displays of azaleas that had seemed so impressive were cheap silk. I hated myself beyond loathing. After a hard day's work, exhausted young models could be seen in the building spinning von Mierers's laundry and mopping halls. "It was like being in a meeting of Nazi storm troopers," Hartwell told me. ", In gay circles, von Mierers was called ''the mignon." In the summers, von Mierers would return to Nantucket. I had come in to interview Ford and Joe Hunter about von Mierers. ", One of the voices on the tape was that of the lawyer Douglas Wyatt. Sometimes I would have to go out to the end of the dock and do 15 belly flops as a form of self-punishment because supposedly Id been a dickhead that day. Insight is given as to the inner workings of the Universal Magnetic Field, as well as how the stones can help you tune in to higher intelligence.") Nostradamus said 2000 would be a time of tremendous upheaval; the Hopi Indians and the Mayans saw it as the end of our world; Jeane Dixon has weighed in with her vision of a future evil Antichrist; and an avatar of "Maitreya the Christ" presides incognito as a Pakistani in London. Even William Scranton III, the former lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania and son of the former governor William Scranton, once bought gems. I am not for the masses. He had been fascinated by a Ruth Montgomery book called Threshold to Tomorrow. "Think about the white light and the violet light!" Von Mierers was still local in 1983. Im a textbook cultvictim.. We are not a cult.". The fairy tales of this dimension! (renews at {{format_dollars}}{{start_price}}{{format_cents}}/month + tax). Seaman was at the house when von Mierers died, Fritts said. As I came and went to work, I was often accused of being resistant to our rules and way of life. No money changed hands; Unified Cosmogony was just a new name for Eternal Values, according to the deed. Members have included well-known models from the Ford agency, such as Jacki Adams, John Hoyt, and Susan Bearden; an honors graduate of Princeton named Catherine Edelmann; a West Coast money manager; Harvard alumni; Fritz Diekmann, a TV executive; Tracey Miller, a Florida model; an officer of Marine Midland Bank; and Douglas Wyatt, a Houston lawyer whose mother, Lynn, is the famous blonde socialite married to Oscar Wyatt, the head of an oil-and-gas empire. "We had a conversation about various things that had already occurred in my life, ' ' Hoyt told an interviewer. Control of diet was an important first step. No matter how hard I tried, I was always Dipshit. "Maybe Freddie von Mierers is taking people for millions! "There are really two kinds of Jews," a friend remembers him saying. She has a huge audience. We all know its not. Von Mierers had espoused the ways of his mysterious group ``Eternal Values' through mail-order cassettes, at a Park Avenue church and on talk shows, including a cable television show for which he was host. Von Mierers would wax eloquent on the legendary Hindu belief in the healing properties of certain precious gems. Even though I earned most of the money that supported us, the leaders seemed to be growing more and more disdainful of me. 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. "I want her to write about me. You realize its kind of happening to everyone in a way. He would always say, 'You know how you are.' "As far as I'm concerned, he's a crumbum.". It was an era in New York of crazy religions, cults, and odd self-help groupsest, Scientology, Synanon, and Arica. Jesus, Rama, Krishna, Buddha did not come to promise you another piece of ass. "Don't become a cock worshiper! . Montgomery quotes von Mierers: "Overnight I became an adept in the science of Hindu astrology. " When Douglas Wyatt was introduced to Eternal Values, Andreadis claims von Mierers told him, "Be nice to him. I knew at that hour they couldn't be up to any good," the tenant told me. They came after me and talked me into coming back. You come in with nothing and you go out with nothing. I was all of seventeen years old." They are, in the main, blessed with ample salaries from good jobs. Eileen Ford told me. ", "Terrible storms will destroy the world," von Mierers told me gravely. When she came upon Aliens Among Us, she was profoundly moved by the descriptions of von Mierers and Andreadis. Recently, odd sexual practices have been encouraged by the group. "You need to have your pussy slammed," he reportedly told one model before sending her a well-known man from the group. These cults attract mostly the Less than Zero generation, born in the 1960s, reared on fashionable doomsday prophecies about the millennium. It is said that the chosen will be able to survive the apocalypse by being on something called the White Light Star Ship, or by owning property in certain mountain areas, or, in the case of Eternal Values, by wearing special jewels. So Freddie became a prophet, so what?" "Let me tell you something! We never would have signed him." Later, in therapy, I would figure out I was repeating a pattern from my childhood. Nonnegotiable! In Welcome to the Beyond, which premiered at Doc NYC on Tuesday, director Brent Huff deep-dives into Hoyts double life. Write to her and tell her to write about aliens next." Do you see the ego there? After consulting with "the Guides," Montgomery explained gravely to her readers, she had decided that von Mierers's account of his past lives was correct. ", "My grandmother-godmother was an extraordinary archduchess of New York," von Mierers told me. "You will all be dead within ten years. I couldnt seem to live up to the community standards. "I came to New York from Houston to my mother's apartment and saw her checkbooks," her son, Claude Williams, told me. 1913 TO TODAY. On a black January night just six days after American jets began bombing Iraq, Oscar S. Wyatt, Jr., the 66-year-old bad boy of the Texas oil and gas industry, faced more than 1,100 well-heeled . Eternal Values does not approve of my marriage. " Ruth Montgomery had devoted three lengthy chapters to his status as a "Walk-in" from Arcturus, his genius as a psychic, the distinguished quality of his followers, and his rejection of his privileged past. .. protege of Billy Baldwin.. . "Why do you have to be a gem salesman? Released in 2015, the film has been an official selection in over fifty film festivals and has won more than forty awards, including 15 for Best Picture and 10 for BestActor. . Andreadis said. So what was the harm? Suddenly, von Mierers's living room appeared very small. When the money manager demanded a refund, he says, von Mierers at first screamed at him, then refused to take his calls. Von Mierers gave me an appraisal from a West Forty-seventh Street jeweler who said the ring was worth $58,000. He would tell prospective buyers that he was able to get stones at a tremendous discount, which the inflated appraisal papers would confirm. "Everyone fancied him," a friend told me. They speak in New Age jargon and talk of "highly evolved" personalities and "ego renunciation." someone asked. "Frederick has helped so many people. "I was making over $300,000 a year," she said. Purely by coincidence I met a modeling agent; the next summer I was cast in a big ad campaign for Geoffrey Banks. We met on a beach in Nantucket when I was 16he was drawing this cool yin and yang diagram in the sand, talking all this Eastern philosophy. "I thought John Andreadis was spiritual," she told me. Other principals in the von Mierers' story are equally hard to reach. . By now von Mierers had various residences, none of them legally in his name: a Bronx loft leased to a painter who did all the redecorating in von Mierers's other properties; a pink marble palace near Asheville, North Carolina, which von Mierers was enlarging because he believed that only the Blue Ridge Mountains would survive the millennium; a house on Nantucket named Vanity Fair; and a retreat in the Berkshires, where Andreadis spent months filling the hundreds of orders for life readings Eternal Values had received since Aliens Among Us was published. No mother, no father, no brother, no sister. .like Lalique. Copyright 1995-2023 eBay Inc. All Rights Reserved. As unbelievable as it sounds, never once during my two decades with the group did I ever consider I might be a member of a cult. That's what I've found about this planet. "Freddie then went to a lawyer and threatened that he would sue me to get my power of attorney. But little did the world know that he was deeply involved in a terrifying cult. The purported healing powers of von Mierers's gems are only part of the credo of Eternal Values. Solemnly, the merchandise was spread out near me. It's real bottom-line. To this day I owe him everything. The inner circle called itself the group. At its peak, there were about 100 active members, some at the Manhattan apartment, some in a big loft building in Brooklyn. . LAKE LURE MANSION HOUSED STAR PROPHET LEADER SOUGHT REFUGE BEFORE DYING OF AIDS. At its peak, there were perhaps one hundred active members. He was older and cool and unbelievably charismatic. Plus, I was supporting them. A 1988 deed transfers possession of the property from Eternal Values to Unified Cosmogony. "We are now going to help so many people," Andreadis remembers von Mierers told him. 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. Look around. ''Germans have created everything, '' he told me. There are allegations that he, like the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, was able to persuade his followers to sign over their paychecks, houses, even furniture, to further his cause. "Freddie was always bringing me kids to sign," Hunter told me. When youve been in a cult and you meet new people at a dinner party, youre never quite sure when to bring it up. I had another question: Was it, in the end, the need to make his mark in louche New York that caused Frederick von Mierers to believe so totally the myths he had created about himself? They quickly annulled their marriage, but they have remained friends. Mr. Richards, shown above, organized and produced the . He claimed to be an alien reincarnated from the distant star Arcturus. 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. Man died Wednesday. He had mastered enough Eastern philosophy to sound authentic. "It was Frederick's idea to strip us of our egos through sexual humiliation," a model told a prosecutor in the office of the Manhattan district attorney. It was the go-go 80s. He often made remarks about Jews, but he had learned to couch his comments in a sneer. In August 1987, Jacki Adams began to attend meetings of the group. "I decided not to let the moment pass," Adams told me, ''and I introduced myself to John.". Something went wrong. "Vuitton is too Jewish. ", For years, von Mierers had a television show of his own in New York. Karr visited the house occasionally, until the ``no trespassing' signs went up several months ago. From the mind, which is the ego. "Frederick never trusted me," Adams told me. In Eternal Values, there are always so many people around, you're always listening to Frederick." For the narcissistic young, all the talk about their diet, spiritual mission, and ego was just another way they could spend time thinking about themselves. Catherine Edelmann, the Princeton honors graduate, said of von Mierers on a widely distributed tape, "One of the things Frederick said was 'Do not want a position! "He was always accusing me of ego, as if that were a bad thing! At first glance, the flowers appeared real. Instead, they sent the body to Chapel Hill for autopsy by the state medical examiner. In those days, he would hold seminars for hundreds of people at a church on Park Avenue or at a downtown school. Her success did little to affect her malaise, though; Adams often spent evenings reading spiritualism books, trying to make sense of her troubled childhood. Frederick von Mierers almost ruined my life." "Freddie used to tell us all in those days that he had spent $20,000 to decorate it, which was a tremendous amount then!". von Mierers told a TV talkshow host named Richard Bey in 1988 to characterize the followers he had with him on the show. Von Mierers's conversation often dwells on the master race and Jews. One weekend in the country, Adams says, von Mierers told her, " 'If you ever want to be around John again, you have to buy these stones.' "By fourth grade I just buried myself in books," she told me. by such friends and clients as Babe Paley, Averell Harriman, and Cole Porter. It was right at that time when models were becoming celebrities. But little did the world know that he was deeply involved in a terrifying cult. Von Mierers would stare at the camera with his cold blue eyes and talk about Satan and "the dark forces." Through a series of visions, the "new" Frederick suddenly recollected his life as "a mathematician and astrologer involved in building the Egyptian pyramid at Giza, and another incarnation at the time of Buddha in India." Few wind up, as von Mierers did, able to get a listing in the Social Register. We are sincere! When asked recently about his relationship to Mrs. Williams, he said, "She was my great-aunt. Behind him were a golden Buddha and a massive display of pink azaleas and lilies that seemed to take up an entire wall. But von Mierers did not limit himself to selling jewels. Von Mierers, in the company of Helen Williams, began to study the teachings of the famous psychic Edgar Cayce and to learn astrology; he talked constantly of planetary aspects and charts at Doubles and Studio 54. Freddys successors were even more extreme. "He would cross-reference all these books, and then he began to order sapphires," Andreadis said. 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Conversations on Vivekananda, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Hindu Vedas would stretch on till dawn. It's a joke! She told me they had her do things! I gave them $28,000 in cash and traveler's checks. I hung out with Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell. "I almost had a breakdown. "I am a little bit afraid to go public with my story," she said, "but I believe it will help others. They could help you. I was appalled by Frederick. I looked past Frederick von Mierers and stared at an arrangement of satin pillows in mauve, turquoise, and teal on a pale-blue sofa. "We are not a cult," von Mierers told me angrily during the strange afternoon we spent together. "A lot of it I couldn't really absorb at once." As my career picked up, people began calling me the first male supermodel. Frederick gave me spending cash. 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. Her mother next married a man who, Jacki says, was hostile to her and her sister. He looked at her emeralds and told her they were junk. In 1979, Andreadis was a private-school boy from a rich New York family; his father invented Man-Tan. Now she could talk about philosophy until dawn with a new group of friends who had little to do with the artificial world of fashion. With marketing, with the news, with politics, with the military and different religions and forms of government, I see forms of mind control all the time, everywhere. Discount, which premiered at Doc NYC on Tuesday, director Brent Huff deep-dives into double..., according to the deed at once. + tax ) Mierers died Fritts. A listing in the 1960s, reared on fashionable doomsday prophecies about the millennium calling. 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