Supersize Moi

THE CLOSEST THING to the Palace of Versailles in the United States is Biltmore, the Gilded Age mansion constructed for George Washington Vanderbilt II near Asheville, North Carolina. The stone and timber pile remains the largest privately owned house in the country. There’s a big qualification there: The house is privately owned, but no one lives in it. A group of Vanderbilt heirs run the mansion and its grounds as a tourist attraction, resort, and winery.

Biltmore made an impression on me as a schoolkid, not just for its unrivaled scale and storybook site in the Pisgah National Forest—or its bowling alley, electric lighting, and dozens of themed Christmas trees. Above all, I was struck by the fact that this mansion was a completely impractical place to live, and had been for decades. Given modern obstacles like fair wages, taxation, and energy prices, the richest person on earth would find it too onerous to make this house a home.

You couldn’t build a Biltmore again. Not as such. The materials, the craftsmanship, the sheer size of the grounds available to OG robber barons are all out of reach. This is the age of prefabrication: Even luxury features are likely to be mass produced. The most scrupulous modern dupe of Biltmore would be a simulacrum, a maze of steel studs and gypsum panels dressed up like solid stone.

You definitely couldn’t build a Versailles, either. Try to imitate that royal pinnacle of soft-power dazzle and you will wallow in chintzy compromise—just like the 90,000-square-foot châteauesque monster started by Jacqueline and David Siegel in Windermere, Florida, within sight of the Disney World fireworks. When it’s done, it’ll be the largest owner-occupied residence in America. It’s got a pub with walnut parquet floors, gilt plasterwork throughout, and, in the ballroom, a custom stained-glass dome that costs more than most people’s houses. They call it Versailles, but it’s not Versailles. The genuine palace has eight times the square footage, orders of magnitude more opulence, and a countryside’s worth of manicured gardens. Versailles, Florida’s version, abuts several neighboring mansions and a swamp. And the house, under its marble and gold skin, is made of the same stuff as thousands of houses in US suburbs at six- and seven-digit price points, assembled with similar levels of skill. There is simply more of it.

The Siegels’ self-made American dynasty falls so short of l’ancien régime that it’s almost touching. Like so many hapless 1 percenters, they eat shit food and wear gaudy clothes and shop at big box stores. Their hallways are stuffed with crap. Jacqueline Siegel, Jackie to her friends, has humble roots. She quit her job at IBM, became a model, won Miss Florida, and was a divorced single mother by the time she met her rich future husband at a pageant party. Now, she is a hoarder without a budget. David Siegel, the grouchy patriarch thirty years her senior, is a self-described Timeshare King who made his stack (roughly $7 billion at the time of his death) by locking Mr. and Mrs. Walmart Shopper into vacation rental contracts they couldn’t afford and doing clever things with debt.

Sadly, at least for Jackie, it will never be the family home she dreamed of. The Siegels broke ground in 2004; meanwhile, their eight children grew up and left. Jackie’s oldest daughter, Victoria, died of a drug overdose in 2015. David died in 2025. Versailles is still unfinished.

Instead of an eternal palace, the monument the Siegels have built is made of images. Their gargantuan plans piqued the interest of photographer Lauren Greenfield, known for portraying the ultrawealthy in their conspicuously overappointed habitats. Her documentary The Queen of Versailles began filming in 2008 and premiered in 2012. It was followed in 2022 by The Queen of Versailles Reigns Again, a six-episode reality series on Discovery+ (Greenfield wasn’t involved). And in October 2025, the Queen of Versailles musical, with Kristin Chenoweth and F. Murray Abraham as the leads and songs by Stephen Schwartz, opened for previews on Broadway.

THE SIEGEL FAMILY is a natural subject for reality TV and all-access documentaries. The Discovery+ series, with relatively low stakes, effortlessly combines the formulas of the Real Housewives franchise and the bottomless genre of home renovation shows. The more sophisticated Greenfield film is powered by joie maligne. First we’re jealous. Then the subprime mortgage crisis threatens David’s business and construction stops—he puts Versailles on the market for $75 million, or $100 million once complete (nobody nibbled.) The second half of the film consists of Jackie bravely adjusting to her (relatively) diminished circumstances—she takes the “for richer or poorer” part of her wedding vows seriously. David, for his part, is inconsolable. The bank takes his new Vegas hotel. The End.

The stage spectacular dampens the voyeuristic pleasures of watching real people live actual, fallible lives. Translated for Broadway, the Queen of Versailles story transpires like a monkey’s paw parable. The writers augmented the main plot with vignettes from Louis XVI’s day, featuring a plywood Hall of Mirrors and a French Revolution body count. In case that’s too subtle, the play has Jackie have someone paint her face onto a giant portrait of Marie Antoinette. (Like many things in the Broadway adaptation, this is an on-the-nose rendition of Jackie’s on-screen behavior; she’s fond of overlaying her and her husband’s likenesses on antique portraits of the gentry.) The class-war overtones are blaring. The Louis XVI character gives a speech from the mezzanine as the Terror rages, to the effect that our system of government is quite clever: The peasants think they have a chance to become aristocrats, so they don’t rebel—they work harder.

The play differs from the doc in another key way: It draws out Jackie’s story, unspooling her hardscrabble youth and first marriage, and covers the aftermath of the Great Recession, when the Siegels get their money back. It also deals with Victoria’s death, albeit in a way that grasps for any lesson in the tragedy. Jackie Siegel was consulted on the play; supposedly she didn’t sugarcoat anything. And it’s true she doesn’t come off that well. But the play also qualifies her buoyant selfishness. The Queen of Versailles on Broadway builds Jackie up as a striver with big fake boobs and bigger dreams who got lucky, yes, but only in the way that people who never stop yanking at their bootstraps get lucky. Anyway, it’s society who made her this way. The play ends with the house nearly done, Jackie alone in it, lonely but incandescently rich.

Les Mis it ain’t. Just before Christmas, after thirty-two previews and forty-nine performances, the show closed early. The recurring criticism—in the press, on Reddit—amounts to two things: One, the book stinks. No hit songs. Some straining rhymes (“random” and “abandon,” in a song that draws on Victoria’s diary) and misfiring poignancy, as in a whole ballad about a dead lizard. Two, the Jackie character is muddled, neither vile and cynical nor sympathetic and relatable, but not complex either. There’s a long tradition of blending good and evil to make compelling characters (à la Wicked, Chenoweth’s last vehicle, or so I hear). But a heroine whose special power is a pathologically cheerful commitment to (as the song goes) “Champagne Wishes and Caviar Dreams” comes across as obtuse; her knack for accumulation seems as cancerous as biology itself. This rags-to-riches-to-less-riches-then-back-to-riches story doesn’t have the same zing as the doc, with its conflict and consequences. We see enough to learn that Jackie doesn’t change. She wants more! She gets it. She loses it. Her daughter dies, her mood dips for a few onstage minutes, then she musters a sequined Scarlett O’Hara and declares that, after all, tomorrow is another day.

Broadway theater is a Gilded Age art. The “book musical,” integrating songs, dance, and plot, took shape around the same time as Biltmore. The form is decadent and grandiose and over the top. The songs grab heartstrings with both fists, the costumes ruffle and shine, and the sets alone can draw crowds. It all amounts to a middlebrow spectacle, somewhere between opera and a monster truck rally: kitschy escapism larded with pathos. Indeed, Jackie’s story straddles Broadway’s target demographic; she rose from the lower-middle class to become filthy rich, and her transcendent cash flow hasn’t washed away her vulgar tastes. Broadway is a splurge—a way to feel rich, especially if you aren’t—and tickets to The Queen of Versailles averaged $110 for the initial previews, although the production later started slashing prices. Maybe a play about abstract levels of affluence weathering the Great Recession isn’t the kind of escapism folks are after. Hatewatching doesn’t scale up to Broadway.

“The Ballad of the Timeshare King,” a lumpy big-band showstopper in the first act, dedicated to the rise of David’s company, Westgate Resorts, gets to the core of the problem with The Queen of Versailles: The Siegels are rent-seeking the American Dream. Yes, bootstrapping and all that, but specifically the dream of owning your own home and taking at least one week of vacation a year, which flourished for a brief, Boomerish time. The post-WWII economy cohered around selling people leisure without letting them escape the middle class. Those must’ve been the days: Increasingly, people can’t even escape the working class or take vacations, period. The Jackie Siegel story embodies the desperate new myth of faking it till you make it, of slipping off the hamster wheel of work. It follows that The Queen of Versailles on Broadway has a special way of rankling its audience. It reminds you how your caviar dreams are going—and how dearly you paid for a few hours in that seat.

IN 1999, ARTIST AND WRITER Allan Sekula took a self-portrait while he swam in Lake Washington. On the shore behind him, fuzzy above his red swim cap, goggles, and winking eye, is a sprawling lodge-style mansion belonging to Bill Gates. The photo is the centerpiece of Dear Bill Gates, a triptych of images and an open letter. It reads:

Sekula’s letter is an arcane and sentimental gesture of equality. The recipient is a billionaire (in 1999, the richest man on earth), the sender a modestly successful artist and Gramscian intellectual. But Sekula phrases things like they’re on a first-name basis, as if all men were created equal and stayed that way. Or maybe Sekula is rich in something else: cultural capital, the consolation prize. He critiques Gates’s obscene fortune by assuming they share an appreciation for a particular nineteenth-century painting of awestruck trawlers. Sekula seems honestly curious to know why Gates likes Lost on the Grand Banks. Presumably, having paid $30 million for it, Gates sees more there than a nautical theme. Has he found sympathy for the working class? Does he relate on some deeper level to a sense of helplessness among elemental forces, like those fishermen on the crest of their doom? Sekula is literally in the water, but maybe Gates is figuratively overboard, drowning in the vastness of his wealth and awed by the technologies he unleashed to gain it. Sekula snares him in a pun on “net” and an appeal to common humanity—that is to say mortality, the inescapable crash. However ironic Sekula is being, his letter is also a genuine offer of aid.

Few depictions of the lifestyles of the rich and famous are as subtle or generous. Docusoaps like The Real Housewives show arrivistes playing vain monsters, while a genre of films including Triangle of Sadness and The Menu (both 2022) indulge the desire to eat the 1 percent. When it comes to their houses, there’s the genre of sassy, class conscious criticism best embodied by Kate Wagner, a NYRA contributor and the architecture critic for The Nation. It’s undeniably amusing to point out how someone with enough money for a very nice six-bedroom managed to buy themselves an ugly one. The Trumpist orbit is full of opportunities for this kind of mockery.^* In 2018, for instance, Wagner took on the Betsy DeVos summer lake house in Holland, Michigan, with its three styles of roof and no obvious front door. “As someone who owes tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt,” she wrote, “getting paid to make fun of DeVos’s tacky seaside decor is one of few ways to both feed myself and make myself feel better.” Pooh-poohing Trumpist interiors, with their bounty of gold appliqués and superfluous urns, offers a certain catharsis. But mocking the ringard rich is itself a rarefied pleasure. Many Americans, if they had that kind of money, might build something similar to Versailles, Florida.

It’s not just that we can’t build Versailles again—we shouldn’t want to. (Let alone in low-lying waterfront Florida. The nouveau Versailles has already been damaged by one hurricane.) The truly wealthy (Musk, Thiel, Bezos), the Vanderbilts du jour, prize mobility. They buy multiple houses, yachts, private islands, foreign passports. The Siegels, on the other hand and in their own way, are trapped by the American dream—unable to see beyond lives of constant work (him) and constant consumption (her), a huge family and a huger house for them all to live in. All their eggs in one hell-bound basket. “Everyone wants to be rich,” David tells Greenfield. “If they can’t be rich, the next best thing is to feel rich. And if they don’t wanna feel rich, they’re probably… dead.” He’s referring to Westgate’s punters, but his personal concept of wealth is as pedestrian as the rich feeling his company sells.

In the documentary, David describes their finances as an addiction. With money so cheap—in the halcyon days of subprime—he leveraged everything, saved nothing. And then, when the poor folks defaulted, the pushers at the banks cut off his supply and tried to take his business. Versailles is an addiction too. You could say Jackie just can’t finish it. But she also can’t stop building it. Maybe this is ultimately why the Broadway show was unsatisfying: It moralizes the Siegel boondoggle as a spiritually vacant but dazzling dream, while their lives are bitterly common.

The Queen of Versailles Reigns Again is ostensibly about Jackie, but in the lightly scripted way of flipper porn. It’s really about the house. In the first episode, some of the exterior marble cladding falls off and breaks. In another, water from an uncapped sewage line spills onto some antiques. A lot can change in fifteen years. The kids’ playroom is redesigned as a nightclub, and Victoria’s room needs to be repurposed. More than Biltmore or Versailles, the Siegel mansion resembles the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California, which the widow of a Gilded Age firearms magnate spent decades expanding in incremental, spiraling ways, with halls to nowhere and whole rooms cut off by new additions. The Jacqueline Siegel franchise does something similar. Does the fact that it’s an ugly building make this quixotic quest more tragic? More sympathetic? Either way, the Siegels have no patience for your snobbery. Jackie doesn’t care if you like her new house. Just as long as you keep watching her build it.