'The Queen of Versailles': The Biggest House in America

Addicted

 
I’ve been up and down my entire life.
—Jackie Siegel

“Since I was young, I’ve been dreaming how I wish I could go to America,” begins Virginia Nebab. “Every Filipinos, it’s our dream to have our own house. Those Filipinos that was here, they have their families in the Philippines and they have big houses. I bought a piece of land. So, if God permits, maybe I can go home, maybe I will build a house for the piece of land that I bought.”

As Virginia tells her story in The Queen of Versailles, you see her making beds. You also see her in a photo, some 10 years younger and standing in a driveway, a huge white house with a red tile roof behind her. And you see her too sitting for her interview, surrounded by toys: a giant red Grover, a giant Barbie, a Transformer, and assorted stuffed animals, slouched on shelves. So, she concludes, “I need to save some money.”

Virginia is a nanny for Jackie and David Siegel’s eight children. She lives in Orlando, in a playhouse on the Siegels’ property. She misses her own children, whom she hasn’t seen in 11 years. She leads one of the Siegel boys along a hallway, past a room with a grand piano and a framed portrait of his mother dressed up like a queen. “The Siegel kids,” Virginia adds, “They always say, ‘Nanny, I love you,’ one thing that I never heard from my children, so I’m happy for that.” She wipes at her eyes, the camera cuts to a gym in the Siegel house, kids everywhere, walking on treadmills and doing sit-ups. Jonquil, Jackie’s adopted teenaged niece, pedals slowly on a recumbent bike and plays with a snake on her wrist, her pink bangs hanging over her eyes. Jackie looks over at her and advises, “You’ve got to go faster if you want to burn calories.”

The cut from Virginia to the gym is both jarring and poignant. It’s a good bet that her dream house, the one she’s working for decades to afford, won’t have a gym with picture windows, a huge driveway or red tile roof. It won’t have it 26,000 square feet or 17 bathrooms, like the Siegels’ current house, much less 30, like the house they’re building.

The new house, which gives Lauren Greenfield’s documentary its title, is modeled after Versailles, as well as the Paris Hotel in Vegas. Between Jackie and David’s designs, it includes a bowling alley, a day spa, multiple maids’ quarters, a separate wing for the children, a stage where the kids “can perform or do whatever they want,” as well as an array of “Louis XIV-type furniture,” statuary, and foliage. For David, Jackie says, “It would like a lifetime achievement. He’s worked so hard. I think he deserves it.” Specifically, he built a successful timeshare business, Westgate Resorts, amassing a fortune that granted him power and influence. (Greenfield asks from off-screen, “How were you personally responsible for the election of George Bush?” Seated in an elaborate gold chair that resembles a throne, David smiles, “I’d rather not say, because it may not have necessarily been legal.”) His son Richard works with him at Westgate (“You sell it 52 times a year,” he says of each property, “Because you sell it every week”). Richard compares his salespeople to lifeguards. “Don’t let these people leave here without buying something, something, whether it’s big or small,” he exhorts, “Make a sale, save a life, let’s have a great day!” The team members, name-tagged and drinking Red Bull, rise from their chairs and cheer.

For Jackie, the new house is both practical and not. Stretched out on a divan in her bedroom, a fluffy white dog on her lap and the bed behind her piled high with pillows, she explains that they didn’t plan on the new place being “the biggest house in America. It just kind of happened.” Really, they just needed more room, an idea that might be illustrated by a series of views of the current house, a two-story closet full of dresses, hallways stacked with yoga mats, pet carriers, and suitcases, a bathroom serving as storage for cases of bottled water and Fresca.

If Jackie’s pleasantly surprised at the new home’s size, the film invites you to think twice about it, as emblem and dilemma, an example of the recession that seems to go on and on. “Nothing’s really normal about this life,” observes Jonquil early in the film, which began shooting in 2007. “Getting everything you want, having a huge house, another one in construction, having drivers, you know, it’s like you don’t really have to worry about money, but at the same time, you do.” Estranged from her dad, Jackie’s brother, Jonquil at first maintains a sense of herself as different from her cousins: she’s experienced poverty, she’s lived in a basement with a dirt floor. “I don’t want to be spoiled,” she declares.

While you hope she can manage it, you also see that she’s up against considerable odds, surrounded by what might best be described as “more.” Everywhere it turns, the camera finds more of everything—clothes, dogs and fish, chairs and framed photos, cereal and cookies, shoes, DVDs, and TVs. In every room, the floor is littered with stuff, toys not put away, socks and videogames.

For Jackie, the clutter makes her case, that their space is too small. She grew up in Binghamton, New York (“I’m a small town girl,” she says) and maintains a taste for Chicken McNuggets. After earning a degree in computer engineering, she decided against a future lived in cubicles and started modeling and competing in beauty pageants instead.  She met David, her second husband, when she was competing for Mrs. World. “It took me a while to fall in love with him,” she says, “It felt really good to be so adored.” He bought her everything she wanted and what she didn’t know she waned. They’re addicted, the film suggests, to spending. “In the heyday of my shopping,” she says, “I probably spend a million a year,” noting that purses are a good investment, because you can always sell them on eBay.

If her life now isn’t quite reduced to that, Jackie is feeling the effects of Westgate losses (“We were adding more resorts, employing more people, growing the company larger,” David says, “And it came to a screeching halt”). For one thing, she’s Christmas shopping at Walmart, loading carts full of action figures and perfumes and sweatshirts. “She knows we need to cut back,” David says in voiceover as she and her assistants push multiple carts down the aisle. “But it’s difficult for her, she’s compulsive.” Jackie knows she might have the credit cards cut off, but she needs the stocking stuffers and dog toys, she says. “My wife’s a collector,” David adds. “She can’t have one bird, she’s got to have a dozen, can’t have one dog, she’s got to have a dozen, can’t have one child, she’s got to have seven. So, what can I tell you?”

But even as you’re looking at packages crammed into SUVs or a garage full of so many bicycles that there’s no room to stash the new purchases, Jackie seems less a problem than a symptom. And this is the brilliance of The Queen of Versailles, its complication of what seems obvious. During a visit to Binghamton, Jackie and her kids clamber through the tiny home of her childhood friend Tina Martinez, who notes their lives have gone in different directions. “She decided to go to college,” Tina says of Jackie, “And I decided to marry my high school sweetheart.” Tina’s never had a new car or a credit card. “I would love to have more money,” Tina says, “But I don’t know that I would want that much. My dreams don’t even go that far.”

No one’s dreams go “that far,” until they’re aware they can. When Tina’s in danger of losing her house, Jackie sends her a check for $5000, only to be disappointed to hear that the foreclosure process, already in motion, went ahead. As Tina’s loss, more imaginable for most of us, takes place off screen (that is, Jackie speaks to her by phone, on her bed with her fluffy white dog), the Siegels’ situation is at once more evident and not. When, on his birthday, David is reluctant to emerge from his study—where the floor is strewn with papers and boxes and cell phones—the camera hovers outside the door, as his wife and children make their way in and out, trying to coax him out, trying to soothe his anger that they’ve left the lights on when they went out.

The degrees of loss are different, certainly, as are the consequences and the capacities to fight back. Tina’s house is gone. Jackie and David stop construction on theirs while he seeks new investors for Westgate. Jackie depends on Virginia to make her day possible, to get the children to school or music practices or sports, and Virginia dreams of the house she’s going to build for her children. They have the same dreams, incited by what they see around them. They do not, however, have the same capacity for ignorance.

Cynthia Fuchs is director of Film & Media Studies and Associate Professor of English, Film & Video Studies, African and African American Studies, Sport & American Culture, at George Mason University.