When the cameras rolled, Jacqueline Siegel glided through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s period rooms like she owned them — poised, polished and attuned to the quiet performance of being watched. She paused before an embellished wooden table once owned by Marie Antoinette, running her eyes along its glossy surface, before letting a smile break through. “I wish this museum was a store,” she said, half joking, half dreaming.
Off-camera, the shimmer dulled as the 59-year-old former pageant winner’s shoulders drooped ever so slightly. The self-styled “Queen of Versailles,” who was immortalized in a 2012 documentary about her family’s stalled effort to build a replica of the French palace in the Orlando suburbs, was suddenly less a performer and more a person. She admitted to being nervous about the photo shoot, more than she had predicted after a decade chasing the spotlight of reality television.
The documentary had shown the beauty queen in the half-finished ballrooms and boudoirs of her mansion, planning for the day when she could add a Benihana restaurant and ice rink to its sprawling blueprint. But after her billionaire husband, David, spent millions on construction, the 2008 financial crisis forced him into a fight for the survival of his timeshare empire. The family retained control of the house and have spent the intervening years crawling toward the finish line of construction.
Siegel’s excesses and tragedies are being restaged at the St. James Theater on Broadway this fall (previews are set to start on Oct. 8) in a new musical with songs by the “Wicked” composer Stephen Schwartz and a book by Lindsey Ferrentino. Kristin Chenoweth will step into Siegel’s stilettos to re-enact the most infamous tableaux: a dead pet lizard, the mansion filled with dog poop. (F. Murray Abraham will play her husband.) But the show also digs deeper, tracing Siegel’s working-class origins and the 2015 opioid overdose that killed her daughter Victoria.
“We have talked about it as a cautionary tale from Day 1,” Ferrentino said she has told Siegel, explaining how the blond glamazon exemplifies the pernicious “more is more” mentality at a time of rising income inequality. “The desire for more includes a desire for more attention — and a desire to tell your story,” Ferrentino said.
Siegel never flinches when others repeat this explanation. “I hope to inspire people,” she responds. However, she understands her role as the show’s antihero: She’s an example of what happens when one’s delusions of grandeur become attainable. But as the musical heads to Broadway and she prepares to finally move into her Versailles palace, the delusion seems to be cracking. It has been only four months since her husband died of cancer and her sister, Jessica Mallery, overdosed on cocaine laced with fentanyl — on the same day. (Mallery died a few days later.)
After the photo shoot with Chenoweth wrapped in the period rooms, Siegel requested one more location. The group followed her to the museum’s sculpture gallery where she posed underneath a statue by the 18th-century Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. The artwork depicted Perseus holding the severed head of Medusa. Siegel chose to stand underneath the snake-haired gorgon; she smiled and gestured toward the decapitation like Vanna White revealing a vowel on “Wheel of Fortune.”
Was it just a silly tourist picture or did she see herself in the monster?
The Girl From Endwell
Siegel tried to become a chorus girl on Broadway in the late 1980s, dancing for casting directors for “Cats” and “The Will Rogers Follies” before making a name for herself in beauty pageants and modeling campaigns. The dream of being onstage vanished after she moved to Florida in the 1990s, married a billionaire and began raising eight children.
Several years after the “Queen of Versailles” documentary was released, Ferrentino was pursuing an adaptation; the stage director Michael Arden had expressed interest with the hopes of attaching Schwartz and Chenoweth.
“Jackie is a harbinger of where America is heading,” Arden said during a phone interview, describing Siegel as a character that would allow Chenoweth to flex her comedic chops and dramatic range. “The role might just seem funny, but there is deep pathos underneath it.”
Ferrentino was also drawn to the idea for personal reasons: The Siegels had purchased several properties in her Florida hometown, Cocoa Beach.
“They bought the pier and hotel,” said Ferrentino, who arranged a meeting with Siegel in 2017 to discuss the possibility of a show. She assured Siegel that she would not be written as a punchline. “I’m not interested in putting her onstage and tearing her apart,” the playwright continued. “But there is a crucial difference between putting someone onstage and glorifying that person.”
Siegel said their encounter was more like a celebrity sighting, with Ferrentino approaching her on the beach like a fan girl. “I don’t know how she recognized me,” Siegel recalled. “I wasn’t even wearing makeup.”
That period in her life was admittedly a haze. Victoria’s death in 2015 shook the family and reconfigured Siegel’s image of herself. Siegel was busy fulfilling her daughter’s last wish to publish the contents of her personal diary, which were eventually released with a text message in the introduction that Victoria had written in case she overdosed.
“I’ve never shown anyone my journal but there’s no one else I would rather pass it onto than you. My business is everyone else’s business now and I’m OK with that mom 
hey maybe you can publish my teenage journal and bump up your career,” the note said. “If it worked out I’d be so proud of u. I’ll always be proud of you.”
Siegel agreed to Ferrentino’s musical without asking permission from her family. “I had already made up my mind,” the queen said. She even invested in the production, explaining that Victoria once told her she would win “a Grammy or something.” (She figures she meant a Tony.) And though the creative team said she had no artistic control, Siegel would still profit from her story if it’s a success on Broadway.
But her relationship to the documentary’s creator, Lauren Greenfield, was complicated. Shortly after the movie’s release, David Siegel sued for defamation, claiming “The Queen of Versailles” was “more fictional than real.” He ultimately lost the lawsuit and was ordered to pay $750,000 in legal fees, according to Greenfield, who had continued to travel through Europe with Jackie to promote the film while their lawyers battled.
“Jackie is quite different from when I first met her,” said Greenfield, a producer on the musical. “She is still the same person, but she doesn’t have that innocence anymore.”
Greenfield attributed the shift to Siegel’s time on reality television, which has included an episode of “Celebrity Wife Swap,” her own series called “The Queen of Versailles Reigns Again” and several appearances on the “Below Deck” franchise. She became more aware of the camera and less afraid to toy with the audience’s perception of her as a materialistic trophy wife.
The musical introduces Siegel in a negative light. Chenoweth steps onstage with a number called “Because We Can,” in which she revels in the conspicuous consumption of floors studded with precious gems and walls covered in gold. But the portrayal softens as the show dives into her childhood in a working-class family from Endwell, N.Y., a bedroom community for IBM employees where she spends her days looking into rich people’s windows and watching “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” When her engineering degree and entry job at IBM fail to meet her standards, she searches for other levers of wealth and happiness.
“Here lies Jackie Mallery. Minimum wage salary,” Chenoweth sings in the role. “With a tiny life and great big dreams she has no clue how to achieve.”
There is a sound cue in the show described in the script as a “pong,” which represents Siegel’s ability to constantly bounce between obstacles and opportunities. (The sound is also a reference to her love of the video game Pong.) It plays when she leaves her IBM job; when she leaves her first husband, Ron Solomon, whom she called abusive; and again when she meets her second husband, David, who compliments her daughter Victoria for having a royal name.
She has continued to pingpong through life, surviving hardships by switching her focus.
After Victoria’s death, she established a nonprofit called Victoria’s Voice Foundation to promote drug awareness and prevention. She worked with the Obama administration to help pass the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act in 2016 and appeared in the White House more recently with President Trump, a friend of her late husband, when he signed the Halt Fentanyl Act.
“I am tired of death,” Siegel said, explaining that watching the musical was like being reunited with the departed members of her family. “When I saw Victoria onstage, I felt like my daughter came back to life and I started crying.”
She views her life as part of a divine plan that includes fame, fortune and now a pint-size soprano named Kristin Chenoweth.
“When I got married, my husband started designing Versailles on a napkin,” Siegel said. “It was his dream, not mine. And I have been reflecting a lot since my husband passed away: Why did God put this in my path when I didn’t even ask for it?”
Switching from a pilsner beer to a piping kettle of mint tea at the Met Museum’s balcony lounge, Siegel outlined a new vision for Versailles without her husband. She wanted to use the 90,000-square-foot mansion to draw guests into fund-raising events for issues like health care and drug addiction. She rationalized that a high-profile musical would only extend her reach to do good in the world.
“This Broadway show is going to help me save lives,” Siegel said.
Palace Intrigue
About two years ago, Chenoweth made a pilgrimage to Orlando, driving beyond the palm trees to the quiet shores of Butler Lake where Versailles stood, almost finished, in the dust bowl of construction machines.
Both the actor and her subject had eagerly anticipated this meeting. Broadway musicals overwhelmingly focus on historical or fictional events; it’s exceptionally rare for an actress to cultivate a long relationship with a subject that she will embody through pop ballads and box steps. Especially one who’s investing in her project.
Chenoweth arrived at the mansion to an illustrious surprise. Siegel had written the actor’s name in lights as if it were spelled out on a Broadway marquee. The former pageant queen was wearing a long, pink Balmain dress, which Chenoweth complimented.
“The next day, she had it delivered to me,” Chenoweth said as she recalled the meeting over tea at the Met Museum.
Siegel added with a smile: “It was the last one in the country.”
Chenoweth said, “My immediate reaction was that this was going to be a friend of mine.”
Not only is Chenoweth making her return to Broadway for the first time in nearly a decade, she is also making her debut as a theater producer. “The Queen of Versailles” is the 57-year-old actor’s chance to prove herself to the business community.
“I don’t think anyone should ever invest in anything on Broadway expecting a profit,” Chenoweth said, briefly pausing to gleefully acknowledge the irony of her next statement. “Of course that’s my goal with this show.”
But she has tasted success more often than most actors on Broadway, originating the role of Glinda in “Wicked” and gaining mainstream recognition in television shows like “The West Wing,” “Pushing Daisies” and “Glee.” In addition to her steady film career, the Tony and Emmy winner has also gained a large following on TikTok, where she occasionally sings her old repertoire, belts high notes from a public toilet and discusses her love of 7/11 Slurpees.
In some ways, Chenoweth has been waiting for “The Queen of Versailles” since debuting in “Wicked” over two decades ago, when Schwartz, the composer, promised to write her next musical. It wasn’t until 2015 that he hinted about the opportunity — and then another five years before they started to collaborate on the project.
“I did question how we would make this work,” Chenoweth said, but then she saw the potential of Siegel as a larger-than-life personality who came from a small town just like her. “I love my home state, I am still an Oklahoma girl, but I did have a dream of getting out and making my own money.”
There was an immediate connection between the women during their meeting at Versailles, which was scheduled as a photo shoot to promote the musical’s world premiere in Boston last year. Siegel was understandably nervous about meeting the actor portraying her, and Chenoweth could sense it.
And as Siegel continued to show support for the musical, Chenoweth became more nervous. During one of the last readings, she pulled Siegel aside and told her, “As we tell your story, I just don’t want you to be hurt by it or be saddened by it.”
“I remember that,” Siegel said, bidding for the actor to continue.
“We are telling your story and there are going to be lots of reminders for you. And she just gently and beautifully gave me permission to not worry about it,” Chenoweth said, adding that Siegel told her, simply, “Just play me.”
Of course, it’s not so simple.
When a House Is Not a Home
The documentary ended with Siegel realizing how little she knew about her husband’s finances after David revealed that Versailles was headed toward foreclosure. The couple vowed to start living within their means, just like many other Americans did following the Great Recession. But soon after the timeshare business recovered and the family fortune was to some extent restored, the Siegels continued to build even in the face of Victoria’s death.
“The well of grief is so deep,” said Ferrentino, who thought it was a uniquely American problem to put one’s entire identity into a symbol of wealth. “What this house has come to represent — the scale of her ambition, the scale of every dream she has ever had for her family — when that well inside you is so deep, no building will ever contain that.”
She continued: “I witnessed it over the years. They would finish sections of the house that could have been move-in ready but then decided they wanted something bigger and better. They would take it out and start again.”
Siegel is now facing the reality of Versailles’ completion alone. She will take her five dogs to the completed palace, but most of her children are living in different parts of the country. The bedroom planned for Victoria has been converted to a prayer altar. “Her spirit can stay with me in the master bedroom,” she said.
When asked about her plans for the move, the widow winced. “It’s going to be sad,” she said. “I don’t have any immediate desire to move in, plus all my memories are at my old house. I still have my husband’s memories there. His toothbrushes are right there.”
When our afternoon at the Met was finished and we walked toward the exit, I thought back to Siegel’s playful pose underneath Medusa’s severed head. Was it just a bit of camp from a woman who has spent years performing for the cameras? A little nod to the “off with her head” style of execution that the other queen of Versailles faced during the French Revolution?
Siegel later told me that she was attracted to the statue because it reminded her of a fountain she owns that includes a sculpture of the sea god Poseidon. I told her that the two mythological figures are connected; in some version of the myth, Medusa is transformed from a beautiful maiden into a monster after Poseidon seduces her.
The story reflects a recurring theme in Greek mythology, where women bear the brunt of divine conflicts. And Medusa is a mythological figure who has been recast for centuries: vilified by some, worshiped by others, always frozen in the moment of her undoing. Perhaps Siegel sees herself there, a woman who is both a spectacle and a survivor, staring back at a world that has already decided what she is.
When I told her all this, she said it was possible that fate led her to the statue. But she herself, didn’t know why. She said, “I forgot the story, in all honesty.”
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
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