Doors open when you’re Miss America. For instance, did you know that the famously hundred-and-two-floor Empire State Building actually has a not so famous hundred-and-third? “There’s this little ladder to get up there, and it was literally, like, a ledge,” Cassie Donegan, who was crowned Miss America in September, said the other day. “But it was really cool.”
Behind another such door: the velvet-seated V.I.P. lounge hidden in the St. James Theatre, in midtown, where Donegan was sipping a Diet Coke and sitting beside a bespoke Niki Lassiter handbag with a poofy pink strap. Or perhaps she’d have found another way in; the star of the night’s show, Kristin Chenoweth, is a pal from musical-theatre circles. A few months ago, Chenoweth sent Donegan, who has starred in regional productions of “Legally Blonde” and “Carrie,” a video of herself offering encouragement before a competition. “She’d kill me for sharing this, but she had the flu and was just dying,” Donegan said. “I watched it on repeat before the Miss New York finals, and then again before Miss America.”
Chenoweth’s new musical, “The Queen of Versailles,” based on Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary of the same name, tells the story of Jackie Siegel, a former Mrs. Florida winner who married a time-share magnate and set out to build the largest private home in the United States: a fourteen-bed, thirty-bath mansion, in Orlando, Florida, modelled on the Palace of Versailles. (Also part of the design: an observation deck to watch Disney World’s fireworks.) Then the 2008 financial crash hit. Construction halted, and things veered more toward “Grey Gardens.” By the end, Siegel’s husband was lambasting his family for leaving the lights on, lest the utility bill creep higher.
Donegan, who is twenty-eight, grew up in small-town Virginia, in a family that owned an assortment of local businesses—a tobacco farm, a mechanic shop, an electricity company. “I remember hearing the impacts of those financial fluctuations,” she said, of the aughts recession. “But I was eleven. I didn’t really log a lot of that.” She does not have Siegel’s residential ambitions. Donegan now lives in Sunnyside, Queens, in a garden-level one-bedroom that she shares with two dogs. “I got an incredible freaking deal,” she said. “And I have a leasing office, so, if there’s a problem, someone actually answers the phone.”
Cartoon by Frank Cotham
Showtime approached. Donegan, who wore a black dress with a crisscrossed neckline and a black bomber draped over her shoulders, made her way to an orchestra seat. Some two hours later, after Chenoweth, in a series of eye-popping ensembles and animal prints, sang of “American royalty” and “caviar dreams,” Donegan rose to join the standing ovation. Most of the audience filed out. Stephen Schwartz, the musical’s composer, and Winnie Holzman, Schwartz’s collaborator on “Wicked,” shook a few nearby hands.
Several minutes later, Chenoweth reappeared onstage, in a black Blondie sweatshirt and untied white sparkly sneakers. She rushed to hug Donegan, then gestured apologetically toward her own throat—vocal rest. “No, I get it—you just ran a marathon,” Donegan said. The two whispered their greetings, then scooted over to the set’s faux-marble staircase for a photo. Chenoweth cheerily waved over the rest of the cast for a group shot, and a handler produced Donegan’s Miss America sash and tiara. She tried to secure the tiara atop her strawberry-blond hair. “I don’t have any pins,” she said with a frown, then shrugged. “I’ll just balance it.” A cast member asked what Donegan had done for the pageant’s talent portion. “I sing,” she said, drawing a few oohs.
On the way out, as a staffer closed down the merch stand and the lobby bars’ slushy machines quietly hummed, Donegan brought up the lyric about caviar dreams. “So often we pray and hope and dream for things,” she said. “Then you wake up and you realize that day that you’re in the middle of what you hoped and prayed and dreamed for.” She considered her own career. The goal, still, was to be on Broadway herself. In the meantime, things were pretty good. “I distinctly remember being in my bedroom in middle school and thinking that being a working, professional actor was so far away,” she said. “The reality is, I can pay my bills just being an actor, and that’s not a reality for a lot of people.”
The caviar could wait. “I won Miss America in a wardrobe that probably cost less than a thousand dollars in total,” she said. “You don’t have to be the Queen of Versailles to be the Queen of Versailles, you know?” ♦
