‘Queen of Versailles’ depicts fall from grace

“Everyone wants to be rich. If they can’t be rich, the next best thing is to feel rich. And if they don’t want to feel rich, they’re probably dead.”

— David Siegel in “Queen of Versailles”

(Linda Davidson/THE WASHINGTON POST) - Documentarian Lauren Greenfield.

David and Jackie Siegel are definitely rich. Here’s how rich: The septuagenarian chief executive of Westgate Resorts and his 40-something former beauty queen wife reside in a home with 17 bathrooms and are in the process of building another with 30.

Still, in the wake of a subprime mortgage crisis that sent this country into an economic spiral, even these Florida billionaires have felt . . . not poor, exactly, but certainly aware that their supersized American dreams needed to shrink. That humbling experience is depicted in “Queen of Versailles,” the tale of the Siegels’ temporarily derailed quest to build the largest private home in the United States: a 90,000-square-foot mega-mansion inspired by France’s Palace of Versailles.

The movie illustrates how one astonishingly wealthy family’s attitude toward money was forced to shift after the economic crash. What’s happened since the documentary debuted at this year’s Sundance Film Festival — in particular, David Siegel’s lawsuit against “Queen of Versailles” director Lauren Greenfield — illustrates something else: that even after that shift, this family’s desire to project prosperity has not faded.

Greenfield, a photographer and filmmaker whose previous work has often focused on the American compulsion to keep up with the cash-flushed Joneses, spent nearly three years poking cameras into the Siegels’ opulent lives, capturing footage for what she initially imagined would be “an inside view of wealth.” But during that same time, business at Westgate Resorts, a time-share operation whose financial oxygen is supplied by the same lenders caught up in the mortgage crisis, hit a significant snag. David Siegel’s business was forced to lay off more than 3,394 employees in 2008, after the housing bubble burst.

Those financial troubles led to changes for the Siegel family, a clan that consists of David, Jackie and their eight children, including Jackie’s adopted niece. As shown in the film, their staff of 14 nannies and housekeepers was downsized to five, their private jets were grounded and construction on Versailles had to be halted; the 10-acre property was put on the market in 2010 at an asking price of $100 million completed, $75 million as is.

“When they started to be affected in ways that were similar to how other people had been affected by the crisis, namely losing their home and losing their dream, I realized it was a bigger story that was really an allegory about the overreaching of America,” Greenfield says of her film.

Just how much did the Siegels overreach? Let’s talk about Versailles, a residence nearly twice the size of that place where President Obama lives. The original plans for the Siegels’ suburban palace in Windermere, Fla., a few miles from Cinderella’s castle at Disney World, feature 10 kitchens (including a sushi bar), a bowling alley, a full spa, two movie theaters, a baseball field, a pair of tennis courts and an ice-skating rink. It is their dream house, and Jackie Siegel — the onetime Mrs. Florida with a computer-engineering degree and cleavage that spills forth from every “Real Housewives”-y ensemble she dons — is its Barbie.