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TeaThat text came on Tuesday afternoon. “This is the Queen of Versailles. I can’t wait to meet you.” Jackie Siegel – socialite turned reality star whose unapologetic excess of life first captivated audiences 2012 documentary queen of versailles – It took more than two decades to make it 90,000 square foot palace in Florida and matched an equally baroque public persona. Now, their story has been re-imagined as a Broadway musical Kristin Chenoweth Wearing a tiara. The production promises to explore Jackie’s improbable climb from small-town obscurity to millionaire notoriety and the series of tragedies that have reshaped his life. But whether this is a glitzy celebration, a cautionary tale, or simply a chaotic cycle of both is hard to pin down.
I joined Jackie for a preview performance of the show before our sit-down interview, in hopes of understanding why her story still captivates audiences—and why she believes this musical, in all its forms, is the way to tell it. She arrives on the mezzanine at 7:32 for the 7:32 pm curtain (of course, the theater knows better than to start the show before the Queen has sat down), wearing a light pink sweater dress, fur scarf, knee-high boots, a black bow sash at the waist, and a glittering tiara. Once she and her crowned entourage of eight friends settle into their seats, she quietly passes me a matching shiny headpiece.
The show itself is a spectacle, with shimmering costumes and a Versailles set so elaborate it leaves the audience breathless. Chenoweth plays Jackie with cartoonish bounce, but the musical can’t decide what tone it wants to strike. In one moment it turns a blind eye to the absurdity of attempting to build America’s largest house; After this, it turns into a sobering retelling of the Seagulls’ family tragedies – particularly Death of his 18 year old daughter VictoriaDue to excessive drug abuse. The tonal whiplash is real: the sparkle, the grief, the punchlines, the ballads. It’s grim and gaudy and awkwardly moving in parts, and at times so disjointed that you can feel the audience readjusting.
Sitting next to Jackie, the emotional axis emerges differently. She bows again and again – “It’s a true story,” “I love how they change sets” – but when Victoria’s heartbreaking Act II solo begins or when her late husband David (played by F. Murray Abraham), who died in April, appears on stage, she becomes silent and nervous. When the curtain falls, she looks at me with wide eyes. “What did you think?” The curiosity is almost childlike.
Two weeks later, we met again – this time in a recording studio, with Mochi, the Pomeranian, in her lap and two assistants at her reach. She is wearing a pink top and cream pants, paired with knee-high tan suede boots and a pink tweed blazer. This is giving away Equestrian Barbie. Without the distraction of dynamic music, Jackie feels more controlled but no less dramatic. She cycles between excited conversation, serious reflection and surprising candor about the grief that has shaped her life over the past decade: Victoria’s death in 2015; the death of her stepson Steven last year; And, on the same day David died, his only sister, Jessica Mallery, died suddenly from cocaine laced with fentanyl.
“We’re living in a very difficult world,” she tells me. “This show was very emotional for me because a lot of the people in it are no longer alive, and I felt like they brought them back to life. Some of the most amazing things are happening in my life, like Broadway shows, and with the most amazing people. But it’s so weird because the worst things are also happening in my life.”
Jackie claims that the billionaire husband, mansion, reality show and now drama were never part of any grand design. “I didn’t set out looking for any of these things. I didn’t set out to build the biggest house in America,” she says. “I mean, it was all thrown on my plate.” Versailles continues to dominate his life. Construction – theoretically – is nearing completion after more than 20 years. She is toying with the idea of combining her 60th birthday early next year with the long-awaited debut of Versailles. “I want to have a big opening party,” she says excitedly.
She is now a single parent to eight adult children (six she shared with David, as well as two nieces whose mother died of an overdose) while juggling brand ventures like Queen of Versailles Coffee and continuing her activism against the opioid epidemic. “This drug epidemic is so terrible,” she says. “When my husband and I – especially my daughter – died, we donated the rest of our lives to saving other families and educating them about the drug epidemic.”
The couple launched Victoria Voice Foundation Shortly after his daughter’s death, with the goal of helping prevent future drug overdose deaths. He is proud of the work he and David did to pass the Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act in 2016. She speaks with equal enthusiasm about hosting charity ceremonies at Versailles and about her recent appearance at the White House for the signing of the Half Fennel Act (she knows President Donald Trump from her days on the beauty pageant circuit).
There is a real purpose behind his work, but it sits atop a mountain of spectacle just like everything else in his life. “I want to host events at my home and bring people together,” she tells me eagerly. “I mean, God put me in a situation. It’s not really for me. Why, in this moment, coming from a small town, when it’s beyond all my dreams — why is all this happening?” Then again, his activism is not a departure from Versailles, but an extension of it – another part of the vast empire he and David built together.
Jackie often speaks as if her tragedies are part of some moral plan. She says, “It’s about spreading love. That’s really what I want to do because there’s so much darkness in my life and I’ve got to find a way to turn it into light. Because if I didn’t have the tragedies that my husband put in my path, maybe we could have gone into a life of gluttony and God didn’t want that.” It seems as if she was suggesting that the massive loss was corrective – even divine.
His belief in fate came to the fore most poignantly after Victoria’s death. In 2019, coinciding with the launch of their foundation, Jackie and David published Victoria’s Journal, which described their struggle with drug abuse. Although this may seem like an unusual choice, it was actually Victoria’s dying wish that the magazine be published to help others – a wish she shared in a letter to her parents. In another message, she foresaw her mother’s future Broadway success.
“My daughter took a lot of pills before she died – the first time she thought she had taken an overdose. And she left a message– [she] Sent this to a friend, [saying] Jackie tells me, “If she doesn’t wake up the next morning to send this to me.” She said she saw me on a stage receiving a Grammy Award and I would receive the award and I would feel her peaceful presence like an angel because she would be there with me. And I realize now, because I’m not a singer there’s no Grammy, but I think it might be a Tony.
Jackie often speaks in sweeping pronouncements about luck, faith, and the “great mission” behind her wealth; In the next breath, she will focus on arranging for the remaining gems to be transformed into souvenirs for visitors to Versailles. At times, she seems acutely aware of her own spectacle; In other places, she seems to inhabit it completely.
What’s most surprising is how neatly she folds her trauma into the spectacle, as if loss and luxury were chapters of the same story. Her belief that the tragedy drove her away from “gluttony” offers a glimpse of how she has come to understand unfathomable things while continuing to build the life she knows. This is the same tension the musical tries to balance, and often fails: dizzying glamor and ruinous cost.
Here is a woman who has suffered deeply and yet insists on living vigorously. In the end, what becomes clear is that being the Queen of Versailles is not a persona she adopts – it is the only way she knows how to survive.