Lauren Greenfield (2012)
You couldn’t make it up: if anyone did, as a piece of dramatic fiction, it would be dismissed as improbable. The true story that Lauren Greenfield tells in this documentary is much more remarkable than the one she must have set out to tell. David Siegel, the world’s most successful timeshare tycoon, and his wife Jacqueline plan to build their dream house, inspired by the palace of Versailles – or, at least, by the architecture of the hotel where the Siegels stayed in France when they visited Versailles. This will be the largest residence in the USA[1] – larger than the White House, which seems appropriate for a man who claims, as Siegel does, that George W Bush has him to thank for his win in the 2000 presidential election. (He’s not prepared to tell Greenfield more of what he did to help because ‘it wasn’t necessarily legal’.) Jacqueline reckons the existing family home in Orlando, Florida isn’t big enough: the couple have eight children and only seventy (sic?) bathrooms. Her husband expresses his motivation for the grand design more succinctly: ‘because I can’.
Filming was well underway when the global economic crisis of 2008 happened, with disastrous effects for Siegel’s Westgate Resorts. I assume that Greenfield expected to see the new Versailles come to fruition but the meltdown scuppered the project and caused Siegel to lay off thousands of employees. Eventually, he loses possession of PH Towers Westgate, a 52-story resort in Las Vegas. At the end of the film, the sign on the building, which Siegel has boasted of as the brightest lights on the Las Vegas skyline (Donald Trump complained to Siegel that they dominated the view from his penthouse), is turned off. Rotten Tomatoes describes The Queen of Versailles as a ‘richly drawn portrait of the American Dream improbably composed of equal parts compassion and schadenfreude’. I guess it’s true that most of us will feel some of both those things but in my case it was only a tiny bit of each one. (There was also the problem that, as someone who’s still not clear what ‘sub-prime’ lending was or is, I found the financial explanation of the Siegels’ troubles incomprehensible.) As Greenfield’s camera roves round the ghost of the unoccupied dream home, Versailles naturally calls to mind Xanadu in Citizen Kane. But the Siegels, whether they’re riding high or going through (only relatively) hard times, are persistently uninteresting. The single point in the film when I felt real sympathy for the couple is when David Siegel says wearily to Greenfield, ‘Will this be over soon?’
Siegel is occasionally witty. He’s in his mid-seventies, three decades older than Jacqueline, but he did warn her that once she was forty he’d trade her in for two twenty-year-olds. He’s furious when she spends money on cosmetic surgery (‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’). She reminds him of his earlier threat and he snaps back, ‘You should have waited ‘til you were sixty – then I could have traded you in for three twenty-year-olds’. His philosophy is at least clear: ‘Everyone wants to be rich. And if you can’t be rich you wanna feel rich. And if you don’t wanna feel rich you’re probably dead’. A few screen seconds later, he explains that he’s not interested in material things: this turns out to mean that, unlike Jacqueline, he’s not interested in clothes. Later, in the depths of his financial and (it seems clear) psychological depression, he remains determined to have a private plane and/or yacht again. In the time before their marriage Jacqueline worked for IBM then very successfully as a model. She went on to win beauty contests – she and David met when she was the reigning ‘Mrs Florida’. At forty-three, she’s still glamorous but her tanned fleshiness becomes a repulsive image of the overconsumption of her lifestyle. Jacqueline’s vast wardrobe allegedly cost a fortune – one of the pathetic things is that most of the outfits still look cheap on her. As she insists, she’s ‘not a stupid person’ but the few things of interest she has to say are inadvertently funny or outrageous – for example, that she wouldn’t have had so many kids if she’d known she was going to have to fire most of their nannies. When times get rough she takes a trip back to her native town of Binghamton, New York. She’s surprised to learn that the car she’s hired doesn’t come with a driver. (She’s nowhere near as surprised, however, as the man at the airport check-in, when he hears that Jacqueline expected to be chaffeur-driven.)
Following the completion of the film, David Siegel sued Lauren Greenfield and the Sundance Institute (The Queen of Versailles won the US Directing Award at Sundance 2012) for defamation. Whatever the substance of the legal claims he’s making, there’s evidence that Greenfield shapes the material in ways that misrepresent the Siegels’ situation post-2008. At one point at least, she’s careless: Siegel, when the going’s supposedly still good, is shown handing over an enormous cheque to applause and flashing cameras – the cheque is dated June 2009 (and I don’t think the point is that it’s several months post-dated). There are several powerful images juxtaposing Jacqueline’s unabated extravagance and the decline in the family’s standard of living – not least dog shit in the house, and a pet lizard which has died because no one bothered to feed it. We’re presumably meant to think that, having got rid of much of their paid help, the Siegels can’t cope domestically (or, at least, can’t keep an eye on what’s going on in every room of the vast mansion) – but did the dogs always shit indoors when the place was fully staffed? Jacqueline’s return to Binghamton, where she grew up in less than privileged circumstances, doesn’t ring truth either. She says she’s not been there for some years. Why does she choose to go back once the recession bites – just when the people she knew there, who haven’t risen to the stratospheric heights of material comfort that Jacqueline enjoys, might be enjoying her reversal of fortune yet at the same time still resenting her relative affluence? It struck me that the most likely answer to this question was that it produced dramatically richer material for Lauren Greenfield to film. The gross family Christmas party in 2010 also suggests that, by this point in the Siegels’ story, the director is exploiting the camera-conscious Jacqueline.
The best thing about the trip to Binghamton is a clear and satisfying definition of the American dream – given by June Downs, an elderly woman on the estate where Jacqueline used to live. The other most interesting contributor to The Queen of Versailles is the teenager Jonquil, who’s actually Jacqueline’s niece but whom she and David have virtually adopted as one of their own. Jonquil explains that she knows what it’s like ‘to be dirt poor and to be filthy rich’ – a pairing of phrases that reminds you that where there’s brass, or even where there’s an absence of it, there’s muck. There’s also one pleasing transformation among the Siegels’ biological children. Before the meltdown Victoria, the eldest, is depressingly obese. I don’t know whether it’s the private gym or privation, compared with what she’s known previously, that does the trick but, by the closing stages, Victoria has lost weight, is cooking shepherd’s pie rather than wolfing chicken nuggets, and tells her bitterly miserable father to stop being a pain in the neck. The immediate cause of his bad temper is the evidence that other members of the household are leaving lights on and doors open. To try and improve his mood, Jacqueline urges one of the sons to enter his den and tell David how much he loves him. The boy obliges. ‘If you love me, don’t waste electricity’, replies his father.
6 October 2012
[1] This is according to the film. According to Wikipedia, it’s to be ‘the second-largest and most expensive single-family house in the United States’.
