“A tremendous amount happens behind the scenes,” she says, “and you deal with the same people over and over again. I know every divorce lawyer’s number in town.”
For more than two decades, Capshaw has finessed tense, stressful family-law cases for Carmody MacDonald, a firm that had five lawyers when she started and has 32 today. She’s at ease in the elegant 18th-floor conference room, the gilded conversation area, the hallways hung with exquisite paintings. But she’s still got her Bootheel twang, and she speaks her mind with few concessions to convention.
“She has something of a ‘dragon lady’ reputation,” says one young lawyer, Ellen Kelly. “I have heard she is difficult to work with as opposing counsel. In some lawyers’ minds, that makes you a terrific lawyer. And she has always been rather flashy—short leather skirts, long nails, big blond hair.”
“Flashy?” Capshaw repeats incredulously. “If you saw my closet, you’d start laughing: There are three colors in it: white, black and khaki.” What about that recent informal contest that pronounced her one of the five best-dressed women lawyers at the county courthouse? “I wear a starched white, blue or pink shirt every day
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“My style is my style,” she says. “I’d like to think I’m very fair-minded. I have a lot of energy, and there’s nothing flat about my personality.”
Behind the mahogany desk hangs the largest photo of all: a portrait of Joyce’s late father, Robert Capshaw, a longtime car dealer and the legendary mayor of Chaffee for 16 years. Their town was so safe, he left the keys in the cars on his lot and people took test drives whenever they felt like it. Capshaw says that she had the best childhood imaginable, nurtured by a stay-at-home mom and flooded with attention and perks as the mayor’s daughter.
Bob Capshaw didn’t finish high school, but he focused sharply on the educational lives of his seven children, sending them to Chaffee’s only Catholic grade school and then to Notre Dame High School in Cape Girardeau. “Raising seven children is no easy task,” he once said, and, on another occasion, “Bless those nuns. They taught discipline, discipline, discipline.”
So did he—and Joyce didn’t mind, not even when she had a car accident at 18 and her dad forbade her to drive for a year. They’d already had the ritual precollege talk, when he took her into his office and said, “Either make the dean’s list or you are automatically out of college. You study six hours a day. Don’t go up there and waste your time and our money.”
She earned a bachelor’s degree in education and started an MBA—but she could still hear her father’s voice saying, “To get anywhere in this world, you have to have either a law degree or a medical degree. Unless you have a law degree or a medical degree, you are not going to have life nailed.”
Near her father’s portrait is a framed letter, on City of Chaffee mayoral stationery, that he gave Joyce just before she left for the University of Missouri–Columbia law school. “I am extremely proud of you,” he wrote, “and for the past several years you have been one of the bright spots in my life. It is my hope and prayer you make the most of this opportunity.”
Well, she did, if one can judge from the comments of colleagues, clients, judges and even the lawyers on the other side of the courtroom. Adversary Merle Silverstein pronounces her “honorable, aggressive, fair and tough.” Another courtroom opponent, Robert F. Summers, offers grudging praise: “She zealously represents her clients.”
“Joyce is well respected by the bar as well as the bench,” says criminal attorney Scott Rosenblum, who’s known her since the Mizzou days, “and she doesn’t get lost in a crowd!”
Jerry Carmody, who came to his brother Donald’s law firm three years ago after 24 years at Bryan Cave, watches in amazement as Capshaw “balances 75 things at one time.” He says that, “in discussions on firm-related matters, she captures the issues better than anyone.” Another partner, Kevin Cushing, says, “Joyce brings a tremendous amount of passion to the office. She’s a spark that ignites energy in all of us.”
Capshaw says she never intended to go into family law—until she tried her first case at Carmody MacDonald and restored two children to their father’s care. “It was a custody case in the city. People said to me, ‘Joyce, you can’t win a custody case if you represent the dad.’ I said, ‘Oh yes I can. I can win this one.’ And I did.” She pauses. “You don’t really win or lose divorce cases, because there are so many issues involved. But the most meaningful, the most emotionally and professionally rewarding case I can say I ‘won’ was the first case I ever tried.
“Custody cases are wrenching,” she says suddenly. “I don’t like ’em, because sometimes the kids become the weapon.” (She takes the cases, nonetheless, and thankful parents post messages about her online: “I am going through the same thing right now. I would suggest calling Joyce Capshaw ...”)
Without custody snarls, Capshaw says, divorce straightens into a simple business deal: “It’s about money, and the only difference between my client and me is that they are emotionally charged.”
When Capshaw started practicing, a divorce trial could take three years to come before a judge. “That was too slow,” she says, “but there were advantages: After a few years, emotions have calmed down. Time heals wounds.”
On the other hand, she says, “People are sometimes too anxious to call a divorce lawyer. Being married is hard. When I start an interview with a client, I say, ‘Tell me what’s going on,’ and the words start to flow, and it’s not uncommon for me to say, when they finish, ‘You don’t belong here. You need to be in a marriage counselor’s office.’”
One woman came to Capshaw the minute she learned that her husband had been having an affair. Capshaw said, “I’m not going to do this. You just found out. Go talk to your husband and get to a counselor.”
Capshaw’s exchanges with clients are so open, the familiarity so rapid, that many clients become her friends. “It’s like being in a war together,” she says. “I know them.”
She loves the intimacy of being allowed inside another person’s life, the adrenaline of fighting for them, the satisfaction of a swift and welcome resolution. “People say, ‘I don’t know how you do what you do,’” she says, “but I have greater passion for my job as every day passes. There is nothing in life more rewarding than helping people get through a difficult time—and, other than death, what could be more difficult than divorce?”
Rumors swirled for years about the dozens of roses delivered to Capshaw at her office. But then she found the love of her life and settled down.
That happened five years ago, when she was 46.
“A lot of people say I didn’t marry earlier because I’m in divorce law,” she says. “That is absolutely, unequivocally not true. I never got married because I never had anybody I wanted to marry.”
John Rea changed all that. “He’s grounded, unbelievably respected,” she says. “He’s a giver, not a taker.” They met on a snowy, freezing-cold Friday night when a mutual friend, Tommy O’Toole, invited Joyce to drive out to Annie Gunn’s for a drink. “There’s not a chance in h-e-double-l that I’m driving out there tonight,” she told him. But she went, and Rea was there, and they started talking ...
To their marriage, she brought her son, Coby, now 14. “When I was 37, I thought, ‘I sure would like to have a baby,’ so I adopted one,” she explains. Rea also brought a son to the marriage: Kevin, just a few months older than Coby.
Capshaw says marriage and the delicate art of step-parenting have made her a better lawyer: “A lot of my clients have stepchildren, too. You can’t really appreciate the dynamics of that until it happens.”
Rea retired in July 2005 as vice president of corporate travel for Maritz Travel Co. The couple lives in a 105-year-old house in Webster Groves, which reminds Capshaw of Chaffee, and she decorates up a storm and dotes on their dogs, a golden retriever and a pug. She belongs to Mary, Queen of Peace Parish, has held multiple offices with the St. Louis County Bar Association, makes friends all over town. “It’s hard for me to stand still,” she tells a photographer. “I do have some energy.”
She throws much of that energy to the board of the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Metropolitan St. Louis and other nonprofit organizations—nearly all of them involving children. She can untangle her clients’ lives and help them start fresh, and she can battle out the custody cases she dreads. But she can’t give those kids the kind of childhood she had in Chaffee.
the kate capshaw connection
Six of the seven Capshaw kids went to Mizzou—"It was like a bunch of sheep jumping a fence," their father used to joke. "They just followed each other up there." Joyce pledged Alpha Delta Pi, and soon her older brother, Robert H. Capshaw II, started dating one of her sorority sisters: Kathy Nail, a pretty straight-A student from Hazelwood. "Bob was in graduate school and supplementing his income as the 'party pic' guy, shooting sorority and fraternity parties," Joyce explains. "They met, and the rest was history."
Bob and Kathy—soon to be known as Kate—Capshaw divorced after six years. Their daughter, Jessica, starred for several years on The Practice and now has a new show, Thick and Thin. Bob remarried and lives in New York; Kate is now married to Steven Spielberg.
Joyce insists that this early family divorce is not what launched her interest in family law—and she parries further questions. "My brother and Kate are very private people, and I don't think it's my place to talk about them," she says. "People I don't even know will call and ask if I can show her their screenplay—I'm not going near that with a 10-foot pole!"
