Even though I earned most of the money that supported us, the leaders seemed to be growing more and more disdainful of me. Basically, at this point, Ive shifted the shame to a place where I think of myself as a survivor. "He cared so much about being with the rich and the prominent," a friend who knew him well fifteen years ago told me. They quickly annulled their marriage, but they have remained friends. They are as candles in the dark to prevent you from falling into delusions," he said on one cassette. During the spiritual seminars in the Park Avenue church, ugly shouting would break out. (''This cassette describes how the one Principle of Cosmic Intelligence expresses itself. They told me then to make two payments in cashone $8,000, one $3,000. How could I have been duped like that for solong? Karr said he had never heard of von Mierers until after his death. His maid did my laundry. What is the nature of this world?. East Side Alien: Frederick von Mierers, who claims he's from the star Arcturus. "I come from a very rich family," he once told a TV interviewer. I knew at that hour they couldn't be up to any good," the tenant told me. I am the chosen one. Like Frederick von Mierers, an extraordinary number of people are suddenly claiming to be in contact with their space brothers. And that is all I am going to say.". The leader was a man named Frederick Von Mierers. The speaker was emaciated, obviously very ill, but swathed in white cashmere, flawlessly groomed. Vanity Fair Summary. 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! John Hoyt, another member, said, "John was a very stubborn boy. Later, in therapy, I would figure out I was repeating a pattern from my childhood. That's $3 million. Each apartment had immense displays of pink azaleas and tiger lilies, arranged as if for a garden show. "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. 'I am Socrates, I am Plato. Von Mierers invited him to his apartment, and Andreadis recalled, "It was Zen, it was so beautiful. 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. In 1984 von Mierers took him to see his old friend Joe Hunter, the president of the Ford modeling agency. He chose to come back because of an urgent need to reach the young people who will be founding the new society after the shift of the earth on its axis.". "How does Frederick know so much?" I looked at them in a loupe. One of the aspects that troubled Andreadis was Frederick's increasing desire to find members who were rich. 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. Frederick had sophisticated his operation. "It made me cry," she said. I realized I was being taken. Mr. Richards, shown above, organized and produced the . In January 1988, on a television show called People Are Talking, he cried, "Americans, you are going into the most crucial period of earth history! Did it matter? Von Mierers gave me an appraisal from a West Forty-seventh Street jeweler who said the ring was worth $58,000. We thought the end was at hand. "I had read everything. The only thing that mattered was loyalty to the group." He kept elaborate ledger records, but he insisted on being paid in cash. Were they real? The first time I tried to leave the group, I fled to New York. That is the crux of the recovery process. There were many mirrors, plump lavender sofas, and reproduction Egyptian furniture. Once, in 1969, the producer Joel Rice ran into him in Venice. 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. "He saves them from their egos. It's real bottom-line. "Don't ever carry a Vuitton bag!" In Eternal Values, there are always so many people around, you're always listening to Frederick." 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. He lived in this awesome apartment and had all these young, intelligent and wealthy followers. Scarlet and turquoise feathers drifted by. "What could I do?" He no longer needed to suffer the dreadful slights that often beset ambitious and aging pretty boys. Subscribers have complete access to the archive. Williams, who was later the executor of his mother's will and had her power of attorney, changed the locks on his mother's apartment and told the doorman never to let von Mierers up again. "How could an obvious phony like this convince so many smart, attractive young people in New York that he was for real?" . A few people in the room were buzzing about her: Who is that beautiful woman? Von Mierers waited impatiently for the publication of Aliens Among Us. LAKE LURE MANSION HOUSED STAR PROPHET LEADER SOUGHT REFUGE BEFORE DYING OF AIDS. Later, Hoyt went to Princeton and became a member of Cap and Gown. Jeremiah will take over your body.' Often he would rage at his followers. Helen Kress Williams's will, filed in Manhattan in 1981, did not mention Frederick von Mierers. Kathleen Turner and her. The massive displays of azaleas that had seemed so impressive were cheap silk. "Frederick immediately saw that we needed an organization, merchandise, a name!" "My gems help me to see things clearly," an IBM executive named Pete Olson told me. In 1992, the Italian mens magazine Mondo Uomo did a 58 page spread onme. I looked over at the owner, Cipriani, and got the distinct impression he would have thrown him out if I hadn't been there. From the time he was twelve or thirteen years old, he had been interested in Hindu philosophy. Mostly it was menial jobsdoing dishes and laundry, scrubbing toilets, doing vacuum packing. . Von Mierers's conversation often dwells on the master race and Jews. "I thought I was in love with Jacki," he told me. I am here to train the leaders of the New Age. Through connections he made at Quest, von Mierers began doing astrology charts and psychic readings, presumably now strained to make ends meet. From then until now, Ive worked to rebuild my life. I work for a gemologist, and I told her to bring in the stones. Von Mierers, like the leaders of the People's Temple, talked constantly of Satan's influence in the world, the dark forces, and viciously belittled the notion of family ties. When Aliens Among Us was published, his fantasy was realized. He was a scrambling pretty boy who lived life on the edge. Andreadis's mother, Barbara, who owns a New York talent agency, began to worry. He says he gave von Mierers $17,000 for a sapphire, a topaz, and a cat's-eye which von Mierers assured him he was getting for an astonishing bargain price, "way below wholesale." It was Christmas this past year at the Ford agency, and Eileen Ford was frantic. In the summers, von Mierers would return to Nantucket. . Since then, he has acted and started his own film and TV production company, Tortoise. When you've been in a cult and you meet new people at a dinner party, you're never quite sure when to bring it up. Frederick's been working like lightning. There is no punctuation in it.' This guy is raking in millions! I don't know anything about this!" 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. "It is not working! Montgomery's deadly-earnest oeuvre details the advice of her spirit guides and includes titles such as A Search for the Truth, A World Beyond, and Aliens Among Us ("Dazzling true testimony that extraterrestrials are on earthabout to usher in the New Age"). "I told her, 'A young lady should have the best of everything.' "We are not a cult," von Mierers told me angrily during the strange afternoon we spent together. Suddenly my son was talking like a robot.". He looked at her emeralds and told her they were junk. Eternal Values was by now big business, so successful that von Mierers had anointed Andreadis as his probable successor to run the organization. " I could give these kids almost a Harvard course in metaphysics." You come to realize that given the circumstances you experienced, many other humans react the very same way. His house in Nantucket, his medical insurance, his club dues. Pulsating ionization machines cleansed the air, and billowing clouds were painted on the walls. The inner circle of Eternal Values calls itself "the group." I recently asked Eileen Ford and Joe Hunter, the company president. Immediately! 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. "The root of all thought is the I thought," he might say while lecturing opaquely on his views of Eastern philosophy. He said he had come to Earth to warn people of an impending apocalypse, and to train his students to become leaders in the aftermath. Von Mierers had decorated the other apartments exactly like his own. We've had stones in our family for years. We all want the gems,'' I had heard a Princeton honors graduate and devotee of Eternal Values say on a cassette about the stones. His hair was the color of canned pineapple; his eyes were hard, cold blue, the eyes of a man who finds little surprising anymore. In a series of visions I saw the coming wars, the destruction of New York City, my own mission, and the future of the earth." It was Helen Kress Williams who had brought von Mierers and Billy Baldwin together, according to Ruth Montgomery. I thought there was the possibility for real violence. One tenant in the building had to stop a doorman from letting in a threateninglooking group of men on their way to 4N, von Mierers's apartment, at three A.M. "I said, 'Lock the doors! "Interior decorator 28 years old . I looked past Frederick von Mierers and stared at an arrangement of satin pillows in mauve, turquoise, and teal on a pale-blue sofa. You have such powers! Andreadis dismisses this as pure invention. But von Mierers did not limit himself to selling jewels. When he had them appraised privately, he learned that this was not the case. Ha, that seems so simple when you say it. View cart for details. One apartment, 6E, was used as the office, and had desks with computer screens, shelves of merchandise, and files containing thousands of letters and orders for von Mierers's services. Purely by coincidence I met a modeling agent; the next summer I was cast in a big ad campaign for Geoffrey Banks. John comes back down here and Frederick starts smashing him across the face, and just saying, 'You fucking liar!' He described Frederick as "an internationally renowned Hindu astrologer and lecturer in the underlying unity between science and religion. Any job they could think of that was a pain in the ass, theyd assign it to me. A few days later I called him and said, 'I don't want the ring!' By 1976 he was listed in the New York Social Register, and he carried it with him everywhere, as if to call attention to his social stature. In the light, it was obvious that the furniture was shabby, that the fabrics were second-rate. When asked recently about his relationship to Mrs. Williams, he said, "She was my great-aunt. Andreadis sat in a lotus position and, according to Glenna Hartwell, said calmly, "I have been asked to leave the group. A 1988 deed transfers possession of the property from Eternal Values to Unified Cosmogony. ' This last year, in the early fall, I received another call, this time from a close friend. At that time I was high priest! Everyone I am training for leadership will have perfect features. By his sixteenth birthday he had read volumes of metaphysics, and he often bought books at the Quest bookshop. " Von Mierers's apartment became a hangout. "Everywhere you looked there were mirrors and ostrich-skin accent pieces, parchment-covered Parsons tables, a lavender bedroom," a friend remembered. I hung out with Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell. When I saw him in Venice, he just sat right down with me at Harry's Bar. I have been in journalism a lot longer than you, young lady! After that things were pretty crazy. He has a lot of good traits and a lot of bad ones. ", An affluent Manhattan woman found von Mierers through Aliens Among Us. In August 1987, Jacki Adams began to attend meetings of the group. In four months, she claims, she paid more than $100,000 to von Mierers and Eternal Values. "It is time to go big-time," Andreadis remembers von Mierers telling him a little later. The real reason I left was because I felt like a failure. When I look around, I see that, to a greater or lesser extent, we all have cultic relationships with peoplerelationships where the person we love, the person from whom were seeking approval, is also the one who is dishing out the abuse. A male supermodel on surviving an apocalyptic, vegetarian cult. Like so many cult leaders, he appealed to his followers vanity, telling them that they were special enough to literally save the world. Pressed about other people who claimed he had cheated them, he said, "These are jealous, sick, twisted people. "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. His Manhattan number is unpublished, and there's no listing for him in Lake Lure. Lacking a sense of the past, the group is bound together by its loyalty to von Mierers and its belief in a dark futurethe possible triage resulting from the greenhouse effect, the shifting of the earth's poles, the melting ice caps. He told us to call him Freddy. 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. {{start_at_rate}} {{format_dollars}} {{start_price}} {{format_cents}} {{term}}, {{promotional_format_dollars}}{{promotional_price}}{{promotional_format_cents}} {{term}}, Nebraska cheerleader competes by herself at state competition, but crowd doesn't let her feel alone. 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.' He is trying to alienate him from all of us!" Often he would take his new clients to Doubles. (renews at {{format_dollars}}{{start_price}}{{format_cents}}/month + tax). She was like an Audrey Hepburn, exquisite beyond words," the stylist, Richard Adams, who is no relation, told me. With an entire group of new friends who looked up to him as a spiritual guide, he could reject social New York as it had once rejected him. "There was something endearing and maybe a little sinister about that." "I recognized him as a phony," Jocelyn Kress told me. I would never have made it without the help of my old friend Fabio, the spokesmodel. ``They pretty much stayed to themselves.'. I spread them out under a lamp. Shortly after Jacki Adams and John Andreadis fled from von Mierers, group members put out three cassettes. Some are more abusive. They came after me and talked me into coming back. It is all very positive," the Houston lawyer Douglas Wyatt told me. . Over the years, I spent more than $150,000 on gems. 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