Versailles... Orlando Style

Last night the whole Blue America L.A. team went to dinner and a film. Dinner was at True Food Kitchen in Santa Monica Place, a mall. It's a restaurant based on Dr. Andrew Weil’s anti-inflammatory diet and everything was delicious; recommended! The movie was The Queen of Versailles which had been suggested to us by a congressman who had been the recipient of some support from David Siegel, one of the two subjects of the documentary. The other was Mrs. Siegel, his wife Jackie. David is, basically, a right-wing Republican who supports politicians steeped in the gospel of greed and bribery. Earlier in the movie he claims to have been responsible for the election of George W. Bush in 2000. He didn't want to elaborate, he said on camera, because what he did to elect Bush may not necessarily have been legal.” Businessweek's Susan Berfield interviewed him about the claim early this year.

“I’m not bragging, I’m just stating the fact: I personally got George W. Bush elected,” Siegel told me during two days of interviews. “I’m not proud of it. I feel like I’m responsible for all the problems in the world.” By that he meant, mostly, the then-deteriorating situation in Iraq.

Here’s Siegel’s account of how he swung the election in Bush’s favor: “Whenever I saw a negative article about [Al] Gore, I put it in with the paychecks of my 8,000 employees. I had my managers do a survey on every employee. If they liked Bush, we made them register to vote. But not if they liked Gore. The week before [the election] we made 80,000 phone calls through my call center-- they were robo-calls. On Election Day, we made sure everyone who was voting for Bush got to the polls. I didn’t know he would win by 527 votes. Afterward, we did a survey among the employees to find out who voted who wouldn’t have otherwise. One thousand of them said so.”

It wasn't one of the key points in the film. The personalization of the economic collapse of America at the hands of the banksters-- who are throughout portrayed as the villains-- is a far more salient point. And that's even if it is more than a little difficult for sympathize too much with this family's fall from billionaire status to millionaire status. I'll never forget the shopping and spending addicted Mrs. Siegel's plaintive cry about how the Wall Street bailout money should have gotten to the "common people"... like them. She was upset because their planes had been repossessed and the banksters were pressuring them to sell Versailles, the 90,000 square feet home they were building for a hundred and something million dollars, the largest home in America. And David Siegel was just full of the same kinds of ironies, complaining bitterly throughout the film that greedy banksters tempted him with cheap money to take out loans he couldn’t repay-- which is exactly what he has trained his sales force to do to their pathetic time-share customers, who are uncharitably referred to as "the moochers." The trailer above will give you the full idea.

It's almost an advertisement, at least to my mind, about why, precisely, billionaires shouldn't exist in America and why a tax structure that protected society from them in the 1950's and early 1960's must be reinstated. My congressional friend who told me I would find the movie entertaining had also told me the Siegels are back on top of the world, having recovered, at least in part, from the Bush economic collapse they helped cause. When I got home, I googled around a little and saw that he's correct. Reuters, July 30:

David Siegel, owner of the largest privately held time-share company in the world, says he is rebounding from the recession so well that he is restarting construction on an extravagant Florida home modeled on the Palace of Versailles outside Paris. [I hate to be picky, but it was actually modeled after the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas more than after the actual Versailles.]

His company, Westgate Resorts, this year is also hiring 1,500 new employees, closing on $450 million in mortgage-backed securities in the first such transactions since 2007, and fending off banks that he says "are throwing money at us now."

"We're the most profitable we've ever been," Siegel told Reuters, projecting nearly $500 million in gross sales this year and expecting to be debt-free within two and a half years.

That is not the epilogue viewers of the movie, The Queen of Versailles, now screening in independent movie theatres around the country might expect.

The documentary film chronicles the outsized lives of Siegel and his flamboyant wife Jacqueline as they tapped the pre-recession gusher of money from Westgate time-share sales to build what would have been the largest privately owned home in America, a 90,000 square-foot (8,360-sq-metre) indulgence just outside of Orlando patterned after the French Palace of Versailles.

The film ends with Siegel halting construction on the shell of the mansion to marshal all available resources to protect his company.

Viewers watch the lights go out in 2011 on the Westgate name atop the 52-story Planet Hollywood Towers on the Las Vegas Strip, as Siegel, hamstrung by the credit crunch and banks' unwillingness to finance sales, loses his biggest project and millions of dollars he personally invested.

Presenting the documentary as an "allegory of the overreaching of America," director Lauren Greenfield won the directing award for U.S. documentaries at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival showcase for independent films.

Siegel, 77, contends the film inaccurately depicted his company as failing, and that sensational parts of the film, such as his 46-year-old wife, Jacqueline, taking their kids through a drive-through restaurant in a limousine, were staged. The family, he said, does not own a limo.

On the eve of the film's premiere at Sundance, Siegel filed a defamation lawsuit over the portrayal of his business which continues to wind its way through federal court.

[That didn't stop him from buying out the entire theater for a party when the movie opened in Orlando.]

Now that film is being seen by a wider audience, the Siegels have brought in a public relations crisis team, made themselves available for media interviews and opened their lives to more scrutiny, including their current 26,000-square-foot (2,415-sq-metre) home in the tony Isleworth gated community, best known as the scene of Tiger Woods' 2009 car crash just before his divorce.

As a private company, Westgate's financial figures are not publicly available. However, for the past three years, Westgate has ranked within the top 50 private companies in Florida by revenue, as assessed by Florida Trend magazine.

"I'll be the first to admit in 2008, we were fat," said Siegel who said gross revenue topped $1 billion that year. "We had departments that were maybe out of control. I was making so much money I didn't care. I didn't know what to do with the money. That's why I was building this big home."

Then came the crash, and Siegel cut payroll at Westgate from 12,000 people to 5,000, drastically reducing overhead costs. He said the company also became choosier about the potential buyers it qualifies.

As a result, Siegel said, the sales force now closes deals with 25 percent of the potential buyers it engages, compared with a typical time-share closing rate of 10 percent to 15 percent, increasing net profit on the deals.

"We got lean and mean. We're basically doing what the whole country should be doing. We're living within our means. The company today is more profitable than it was back in its heyday of 2008 in terms of actual profit. We're more profitable today than we have been in our history," Siegel said of his 30-year-old firm.

His next big project, Siegel said, is coming up with a financing scheme to restart construction later this year of a Westgate resort in the Anaheim Garden Walk Mall adjacent to Disneyland, a project which also stalled after the credit bust.

Jacqueline Siegel, a former Mrs. Florida who now owns the pageant franchise, accomplished her own version of recessionary budgeting, paring housekeeping staff from 15 to one and enlisting the five nannies for the family's eight children, who are aged 5 to 18, to help with chores in their spare time.

While her husband worries over the depiction of his company in the film, Jacqueline liked the limelight, and said she has heard from the people behind the Supernanny reality show and other producers about possible future projects.

"I like the camera and doing projects. I don't know if it's my five minutes of fame, or it's going to develop into a mini-career," she said.

Meanwhile, the Siegels are in the process of getting building permits to restart construction on their Versailles.

Siegel said he took out enough money through a refinancing to finish the facade over the next year, as a gesture to the neighbors and to make the house more appealing to buyers.

But when the house is finally finished, some of the children will be heading off to college, making features like a full-sized roller rink, two-lane bowling alley and three swimming pools, less desirable.

This week Jackie told the Orlando Sentinel that she isn't sure what the monthly mortgage payments are on their version of Versailles "but if you have a certain budget, you live within those means. We are on a really tight budget right now-- my husband is trying to be debt-free with the company in next two years. He's even got the nannies on a budget. He shuts off the lights when he leaves. Of course, I turn them right back on. I like mood lighting."

Both David and Jackie are kind of self-made characters. Neither inherited any wealth. I would love to see Chris Hayes have them on his show and talk with them about the meaning of the collapse of the American meritocracy... and what comes next.