Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
Albert Shawe Watkins graduated from Ladue Horton Watkins (no relation) High School with top honors. He was president of his class and captain of the track and cross-country teams. He went off to Europe with his British girlfriend and her parents. He came home to a letter from Brown University, where everyone in his family had gone.
It was a rejection letter. And there was another from his fallback choice, Georgetown University.
Perhaps the suspensions scared them. Or the speech he gave at graduation, in which he castigated school officials for giving such short notice to the burnouts who were banned from the ceremony. Or maybe it was the campaign speech he gave before becoming junior-class president, which consisted of breaking six eggs into a pitcher, swallowing them, and raising his arms in the air like Rocky while a buddy played “Hail to the Chief.”
Classmate Mark Kodner—now Watkins’ law partner at Kodner Watkins Kloecker—remembers all the kids going crazy with applause. But Watkins says the last full yolk got caught midthroat, “inducing something resembling a dry heave. If my arms were raised, it was purely to assist the yolk’s downward travels and to thwart the very real potential that I would orally emit raw scrambled eggs.”
In any event, the clincher for the universities was probably his principal’s letter of reference. It read—Watkins thinks this might just be verbatim—“Albert is an extremely aggressive student. Sometimes, however, his aggressions are pointed in the wrong direction. I fear that if I say anything more, I might harm Albert’s chances to matriculate.”
Watkins admires, to this day, “the succinct and articulate nature of his letter—which in retrospect I think is highly accurate.”
I ask when he got so aggressive. “Shortly after crowning,” he replies. “I was delighted to find ways to entertain the world around me, including myself… I was, I think, recklessly bored.”
He says his mother’s response to the disciplinary fallout was usually phlegmatic: “Well, dear, the pasta is on the stove.” But his father, “a very busy man,” wasn’t thrilled to get called up to school so regularly. When Albert escaped suspension for tangling with a kid he found “bullyish,” he received a warning instead: “If you so much as look at him the wrong way, you’re out.” One day he glared at the bully just as the principal was coming around the corner. Which mightn’t have been so bad, if it hadn’t happened so soon after Albert managed to toss his cleated football shoe over his shoulder just as the principal walked by—hitting him square in the face. “I was completely apologetic and said the first thing that came into my head: ‘Oh, Doctor, I’m really f—king sorry!’ He was incapable of responding at the time.”
By the time the Ivy League asked for references, he’d remembered how to use his words.
The letters arrived just as Albert’s father was being transferred to Texas. “You can go to SMU,” he told his son wearily. But in Albert’s mind, Southern Methodist University was “where you could go if you didn’t get in anywhere else.” He went to meet with the Rev. Paul Reinert, then chancellor of Saint Louis University. “What are you thinking of studying?” Reinert inquired.
“Well, to be honest with you, I’m thinking about studying elsewhere,” Albert replied. At which point Reinert rose, patted him on the back, said something kindly, and left the room.
A chastened Albert was back in Reinert’s office two days later. He surprised himself by liking SLU; he met good friends there, graduated with honors, and stayed on for law school. “And by that time,” he says, “I had choices.”
***
Much of Albert’s character is written on his face, in the unruliness of dark brows, the lips too full to press together in censure, the crow’s feet crinkled by years of exaggerated expression. His head is big—plenty of room for that brain—and it rotates on a scrawny neck with a remarkable Adam’s apple. His dimples cut deep, and the devil’s left a thumbprint on his chin.
So is all his mischief genetic?
His wife, Paige, says “his parents are the classic ‘children should be seen and not heard.’ And he’s that classic overachieving middle kid, rejected from Brown, so what does he do? He outdoes them all.” The third boy in a family of five, he is the one who bears his father’s first name—and personality. His mother often tells Paige, “You married an Albert, dear.”
Both men achieved splashy success. Both have five children. Both settled in St. Louis—first the son, now the father—and cultivated similar pleasures. “We used to laugh that the only reason they both belonged to Old Warson Country Club was so they had something to complain about together,” Paige says. And even when they’re complaining, they’re amusing. “I tell him all the time,” Paige says of her husband, “it’s like watching TV.”
His father, Albert G. Watkins, started out as a Broadway actor, then went into ad sales and rose to executive vice president at both Time Inc. and Condé Nast. “He did extremely well in the publishing industry,” says his son, “at a time when the sky was the limit for those with unlimited expense accounts, a willingness to entertain with reckless abandon, and a penchant for selling space.”
Albert was born in St. Louis, but the family moved to New York when he was a few days old. For his first five years, they lived in midtown Manhattan during the week and spent weekends in Chappaqua in Westchester County. Then the pinball game started, with his father transferred to Texas, Chicago, Des Moines, and Philadelphia before landing back in St. Louis just in time for Albert to start middle school in Ladue.
“He was never a very social guy,” Kodner recalls, groping for the right word and inflection. “He was a cross-country runner. He hung around a very introverted crowd, the superbright kids, and he was their leader.”
I ask John Watkins, who’s seven years younger than Albert, what he remembers from their childhood. “I remember terror,” John replies instantly. “He was like the family Rottweiler without a choke collar or an invisible fence.
“Having said that, those are great family dogs,” he adds, “and very protective.”
John, like Albert and their sister Nancy, is a lawyer. “It is a well-trod path,” John says, adding that in Albert’s case, litigation suits him perfectly. “He was born with a tremendously high drive.”
Do they beg him to chill at family gatherings? “No, not really. It’s actually very entertaining.” Not overbearing? “No, not too much. Although 99 percent of the world might disagree.”
***
The summer he graduated from law school, Albert unwittingly sat next to the world-famous Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko on a plane. He was appalled—and said so aloud—when he saw Yevtushenko shaving in his seat. Yevtushenko, in turn, was indignant that anyone would question his actions. “We were humored by each other’s absence of respect for protocol,” Albert says.
When they parted, Albert extended a casual invitation to stay with him and see St. Louis. By the time Yevtushenko called to take him up on his offer, Albert had realized who he was.
He flew into action. He set up a dinner and poetry reading, alerted the media, took the poet all over St. Louis, and kept the vodka flowing. The two remained friends, ringing in the new year in Moscow and meeting from time to time in New York or St. Louis. In 2008, Yevtushenko returned for the 20th-anniversary gala of Albert’s law firm.
“I have learned a great deal from Zhenya [Yevtuskenko] about the art of being commercially exploited while remaining doctrinally intact,” Albert says. “He really should have been a stand-up comic/philosopher.”
A quarter century and an ocean divide them, but they share an earthy, grab-life-by-the-horns approach—and neither lets success obscure common sense. “Money is to be respected but not revered,” says Albert, who buys his morning coffee with spare change from the family Mason jar. “There is a certain pleasure derived from observing the barista’s shoulders slump as she receives my baggie full of coins at 5:30 in the morning.”
***
Albert never intended to practice law; he went to law school as preparation for business. During college he’d bought a hot-dog stand and expanded it into an empire of carts here and in California. When he finished law school, he had a job lined up with the Federal Reserve Bank, starting the coming January. Bored that autumn, he agreed to help out a friend who’d gone off to Israel instead of taking the bar exam. The friend’s father was furious, because he desperately needed help in his law practice. Albert offered himself.
“His dad was old-school: carbon paper, yellow second pages, IBM Selectric II-E typewriters,” he recalls. “He maintained his files alphabetically—by first name. I lost every case…although I’d like to redefine the term loss.”
One of his clients, for example, went to the men’s room at a movie theater and ran into a man who’d cuckolded him. “He proceeded to slam his face into a urinal until the urinal broke, creating a mess and costing tens of thousands in medical care. The jury verdict was about $1,400 in damages. I consider that a victory.”
After a year of such cases, Albert started his own practice. His office was directly above the underground parking-garage door, so it vibrated all day long. His clients were “those nobody in their right mind would represent, for every reason you can imagine. Who the hell else would come to me? That client base has grown up with me, and I would not give them up for the world.”
When they can’t pay their legal bills, they do work around his house. “My neighbors are like, ‘Who are all these people working at your house?’” Paige says, “and I’m like, ‘Don’t ask.’ He’s still taking care of people he took care of his first year in practice, and taking care of them more emotionally than legally. He can turn away every large corporate client there is, but people he really feels have not been dealt a fair hand, those he can’t turn away.”
Nor can he turn away a hot issue, a precedent-setter, or a zany story. He’s currently going up against Disney, alleging it stole his clients’ “Santa Paws” story. He’s sought redress for an angry bride and mother of the bride (the venue was a disappointment), represented a hairdresser who found the script to a Twilight sequel in a Dumpster, represented cuckolded Steven Hackney in an alienation-of-affection suit against former baseball player Al Hrabosky. He argued one of the first cases disputing custody of frozen embryos, and he managed, in what may be the first such case in the country, to win a judgment against a woman who registered false complaints about a police officer.
He made videos of her deposition public.
***
He’s famous for playing well in the media—and for playing the media as well.
When the Mangia Italiano restaurant got mad at his client, the Mangia Mobile food truck, for stealing its name, Albert suggested a “toasted ravioli smackdown” to let the people decide who deserved the name. When Mangia Mobile was ordered in U.S. District Court to stop using its name, Albert issued a press release inviting the public to suggest a new name.
Last fall, he filed suit for David Schwartz, who’d allegedly been dismissed from a Webster University master’s-degree program in family counseling because he lacked empathy. Albert announced that Schwartz would be conducting an empathy workshop at the polar-bear pit at the Saint Louis Zoo. When the zoo asked them to cancel the stunt, lest it interfere with the visitor experience, Albert agreed and noted that the exercise had perhaps already accomplished its purpose.
In 2010, Michael Kahn, then with Bryan Cave, represented The North Face and Albert represented The South Butt—a parody clothing line started by a college student. Albert insisted on calling his client “young Jimmy” Winkelmann and described him as “a handsome cross between Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman…and Skippy the Punk from the Midwest,” submitting a photo of Winkelmann as evidence for the court records. He complained that The North Face showed “little recognition, if any, that the savvy of consumers precludes anyone from confusing a face with a butt.”
The parties settled on April Fool’s Day 2010. And when it was all over, Kahn told Judge Rodney Sippel, “I’ve learned that the most dangerous place to be in St. Louis is between Albert Watkins and a microphone.”
Albert shrugs off his media-hound reputation. “I learned early on from my father, gone are the days when you can simply say, ‘No comment.’ It is counterproductive and tremendously disrespectful, and you are doing your client a disservice,” he says. “The media have a duty, and if you don’t assist them, they are left with only their other tools and resources, and you cannot fault them for moving ahead despite your recalcitrance.”
***
Aggression is a valuable trait in courtroom litigation, but it’s dangerous at home. Every night, Albert walks through the door of his house—an Italianate mansion on Portland Place—and has to modulate into fatherly patience with a brood of kids. How does he make the transition? “I drink heavily,” he says. “A couple glasses of burgundy. Then I curl up in the fetal position and go to sleep.”
Paige thinks domestic life humbles him. “He usually does OK with the kinetic energy of all the kids at the dinner table, when everybody needs his attention, but the moment he goes to relax, he’s out. Sometimes he’ll sit down to help the kids with their homework and I’ll look over and he’s sound asleep with his mouth hanging open.
“He wants so desperately to be respected by the kids,” she says. “There will be kids going to basketball, kids going to soccer, kids going to a sleepover, and you can see him struggle to try to keep up. He can say out loud, ‘I’m not the greatest husband or father out there, but I’m not going to stop trying.’ How do you hate somebody like that? Sometimes it’s just, he’s done. He’s empty… Because while he’s got a command of the law, this family is the thing that can throw him for a loop, which with a guy like Albert can knock him off his pedestal. He wants to give it all he can—but he can’t.”
I ask him what he’s learned about being married. “I’ve mastered the art of staring out the window and hoping the weather changes,” he tosses back. “And I’ve learned to keep my mind open to the very distinct possibility that the way I look at things is deficient.” His wife stands 6 feet tall and swims with Olympic prowess, he points out. “She is one of the few people I’ve ever crossed paths with that had a personality and a confidence level sufficient to mute my own.” The adversarial skills of law, in which he must think 10 steps ahead and take steps to anticipate certain machinations, are useless in their interactions, he adds: “The trust in a marriage requires that you completely ignore the risks of vulnerability and just embrace it.”
When I repeat his comment to her, she chuckles. “He sounds like he’s had some really good marriage counseling, doesn’t he?”
***
Paige is Albert’s second wife. He describes his first as “a delightful woman, very young.” She was 17, to be precise. “I was 32—in calendar years. Emotionally, kind of the inverse of a dog, maybe somewhere around 12.”
Carolina Diaz-Silva met Albert in Lima, Peru, where he’d been sent by the U.S. government for reasons he sums up obliquely: “The Maoist guerrillas, Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path], provided me with a unique opportunity to be paid handsomely while serving the interests of my country.” (While he was there, he also set up an Anheuser-Busch distributorship, but the Peruvians preferred their own beer.)
He returned to his St. Louis law firm—he and Kodner had set up a practice in 1989—and added an immigration specialist whose first job was to smooth Carolina’s arrival. Albert was soon passing out contraband Cuban cigars at their daughter’s birth. Two years later, they divorced and received joint custody of Alexandra. He now describes his first attempt at matrimony as “the functional equivalent of Helen Keller with a rake on a golf course.”
He played the bachelor for four years. In 1998, he was having dinner with his young daughter and one of her au pairs at Tribeca, a sleek glass-and-steel Clayton restaurant part-owned by one of his law partners at the time. Paige Romero was tending bar and giving the owners advice. Just 26, she’d already co-owned a nightclub and coffeehouse downtown.
Albert ordered a couple of Tanqueray-and-tonics in rapid succession and proposed to her. It had taken him 25 minutes to pop the question; it took her several months to answer it.
“He was very charismatic,” she says. “We used to call him Slick Rick the Ruler. Not slimy-slick, just well rehearsed, you know what I mean? And you’re at that age where you’re like, ‘No, really? I think I’ve heard this before.’ You want really badly to believe it, but you’re like, ‘I’m not 15.’”
She came to realize he was honest about what mattered—“There’s no falsity. He means what he says, and if he says it, he genuinely believes it.” When something doesn’t matter, though, he can spin it 10 different ways with rhetorical precision. “Let’s not kid ourselves about the whole honesty thing,” Paige says, already laughing. “He is the master of the English language. I mean, I’m married to him, right? And even after 13 years, I will watch him weave a story, and two or three days later I’ll think, ‘What?’”
***
Albert teases us all with elegantly complicated rhetoric, but he doesn’t use it to hide what he’s thinking. “Things come out of his mouth in court, during depositions, or in casual conversation that are often…surprising,” Kahn says. “They’re off-color, eccentric, almost always funny. And somehow, he has survived.”
Just how carefully metered his apparent spontaneity is, nobody knows.
But he’s good with words.
Once, irritated by a female witness, he told Kahn, “Be sure to say hello to Fawn Liebowitz for me.” Kahn had to go home and look up the reference. Liebowitz was the dead student whose name the frat boys in Animal House used for a prank.
“Albert can’t just write a letter,” says Kodner. “He has to write a letter that has 26,000 multisyllabic statements in it. It’s a hard deal for him, because sometimes he’ll say something so acerbic in such lovely language and people will figure it out later. Things come back to—not harm him, but haunt him.”
Back in law school, Albert was asked to participate in what he thought would be a Dean Martin–style roast of a beloved professor, Vince Immel. It turned out to be “more of a simmer,” he says. When he began cracking affectionately crude jokes, people murmured their shock. Some walked out, Kodner says. “And when he was done, [then–St. Louis County prosecutor] Buzz Westfall came up and said, ‘I hope you’re not planning on working as a lawyer in St. Louis County.’”
More recently, talking to reporters about one of his cases, Albert couldn’t resist divulging a woman’s complaint that her husband obsessively groomed the hair in his most private places. “The guy’s a member of the country club I’m a member of, not that I’m a fancy-pantser,” Kodner groans. “And the Jewish community went nuts,” because the man’s father was something of a legend. Finally, even Albert had to concede poor judgment. “There are times,” he says now, “when one wishes to retract an utterance.”
Oddly, talk radio seems to be taming him. He does a show, Watkins Word, for Westplex Radio in Troy, Mo., and it’s about to launch in the St. Louis area on 100.7 KFNS-FM; he plans to syndicate it. “I think there’s a real good possibility that someday you’re going to turn on radios from California to New York and hear his voice,” says Westplex general manager John Scheper. “I set a script on fire while he was on the air—it’s an old radio trick—and he didn’t miss a beat. And he’s very good at diplomatically handling hostile callers. He seems to be able to rationally figure out the quandary.” Maybe talk radio’s a homeopathic dose of aggression. Or maybe it’s just a guaranteed outlet.
***
In 2003, Albert was diagnosed with squamous-cell carcinoma, Stage 4. The cancer had metastasized to his lymph nodes and beyond, and he underwent a neck dissection, chemotherapy, and radiation. More than 6 feet tall, he dropped to less than 100 pounds. A “fallen Catholic” (his term), he received last rites five times; on one of these occasions, he was sufficiently conscious to tell the person praying over him, “Get the f—k out of my room.” The lay minister turned out to be former Cardinals football linebacker Larry Stallings, who continued administering the rites. “To the extent that it got me pissed off and got some adrenaline going, I did appreciate it,” Albert says.
He freely gives graphic details of the topical anesthetic he had to drip down his throat to numb the searing pain so he could swallow medicine. And the stomach acid that splashed from his feeding tube and ruined his leather shoes. And the way food could have been a pile of steaming manure, because he lost the ability to taste as well as swallow. “Basically, I was on my ass for a year,” he says.
“He’ll tell you it was only a year, but it was two,” Kodner says. “He did not want me to see him, but he was my partner, and I had to find out what was going on. I forced his sister”—Nancy Watkins, who works for their firm—“to take me there. He was living with his parents, because he was too sick for the kids to see. He weighed about 60 pounds; he was just a bump in the bed.”
Kodner left shaken. But Albert fought his way back to life, and one day he showed up at work rolling an IV alongside him. “He would dump his feeding tube in the sink!” Kodner says. “It was so gross. I said, ‘What are you doing? Get the hell out of here!’”
Albert stayed and worked on cases.
“You learn that there is nothing in this world you need to be afraid of,” he says. “It’s an emotional swagger. What’s the worst someone can do to you? Clients, like cats and dogs, are capable of smelling it. So too, other counsel.”
Paige sighs. “He got even more intense. It’s ‘They knocked me down, and I’m going to stand up even taller.’”
Her phrasing is interesting, because when I puzzled over a family photo in which he’s noticeably taller than she—even though they’re both around 6 feet—he said, “I always stand on my tippy-toes in photos so I’m taller.” I wondered then if it was just a guy thing. But later he pulled out a photo of himself with the surgeon who dissected his neck. Sure enough, tippy-toes there, too.
***
If Albert Watkins were writing his own blurb in a guide to lawyers, he’d say to choose him “if you want an honest asshole.”
At the end of a case in which Debbie Harris and Kristen Saverin wrangled over fur coats and art-gallery assets, he said in his closing statement, “All that was missing was the kitty-litter box and Jerry Springer.” He began a comment in the South Butt case by saying, “While Jimmy may have turned 19 years of age, and while he looks 14 and, to some extent, acts 12…” Of the salon owner who found the Twilight sequel script, he told a Riverfront Times reporter, “She’s a Dumpster diver. Look, I’m not going to judge her hobby. She opened the bin and the script was lying there right on top. It’s not like she was inside the Dumpster rummaging through the garbage—though I’m not saying she wouldn’t do such a thing.”
These are his clients he’s talking about. He sharpens the sarcasm for the opposing side. When Sherry Flotron accused his client, Jim Neumann, of coming into her hotel room and masturbating on top of her while she was asleep during a business trip, she said she’d brought the semen-stained shirt back to St. Louis then thrown it away. Albert rolled his eyes at the jury. “Even Monica [Lewinsky] knew to keep the DNA evidence.”
He will represent people who’ve done wrong, but not if they lie about it. One of his clients, financial consultant Paul Burkemper, sought investors in a plan to build vodka kiosks in St. Petersburg, Russia, and improprieties followed. Albert informed reporters that his client was no longer selling securities, but had started a consulting firm advising those in the industry how to avoid securities violations. He also represented Orthodox Jewish investment advisor Joshua Gould, who confessed to stealing $5 million from clients in his own community. Albert made him apologize to everyone he’d wronged.
In arguing for lenient sentencing for Howard Goldstein, a physician who’d admitted lying to the FBI about his Medicare billings, Albert spent 90 minutes describing his client’s messy handwriting and heavy caseload, until U.S. District Judge Richard Webber wondered aloud, with heavy sarcasm, if the audience might think they should applaud Dr. Goldstein. Yet the client wound up serving far less than the sentencing guidelines prescribed: only five months, half of which could be served by home confinement.
Jim Strughold was a grade-school principal who’d been charged with attempted sodomy, sexual abuse, and furnishing pornography to minors. Albert noticed that almost all the charges stemmed from a single teacher’s class; Strughold’s 35-year career was otherwise unblemished. When Strughold was convicted of two counts of sexual misconduct and four counts of furnishing pornography, Albert called the verdict “a compromise among the jury factions, in an effort to terminate a deadlock and get out of a hot courthouse.” He appealed, got one of the charges dismissed for lack of evidence, and won the right to a new trial on the other five. “Some of the things the children said, he was able to pounce on,” Strughold recalls. “One child testified that I had some kind of big old gun, and I jumped over the hood of my Jeep Cherokee. Well, I weigh 300 pounds…” In the end, Strughold was found not guilty on all five counts.
Watkins is, even opponents concede, a good lawyer. “Often people underestimate him,” says his brother John, “and I think he enjoys that.”
When I ask Albert his greatest weakness, he doesn’t exactly bare his soul. “Our profession is fraught with shortcomings,” he says, “and every now and then, your demeanor comes off devoid of bedside manner. You want to be completely respectful of brethren counsel, but sometimes the facts and the machinations being undertaken to address them are so out of proportion that you have to employ candor, which is often misinterpreted as indicia of assholishness.”
Indicia of—I’m not sure I’ve got it right—“assholeness?”
“Assholishness,” he corrects, stringent as a grammar teacher.
***
New York playwright David Bar Katz went to college with John Watkins and became a family friend. “I’ve known Albert for 25 years, and he’s represented me over the years. My impression 25 years ago was that Al was way too entertaining to be wasted on the law. But I learned early on not to confuse the humor with his effectiveness. It’s kind of a smoke screen. He’s wildly smart, and as a lawyer, he’s methodical and thorough and cautious when caution is called for.”
Albert assures new clients, “We can talk as early as you like, 4, 4:30 a.m. even.” In two decades, no one’s taken him up on it—until now. A client in Vietnam said 4 a.m. would be perfect.
After years of feeling rebuked by Albert’s zeal, colleagues are ready to send the guy roses.
“In the office, he’s a terror,” Kodner explains. “He works harder than anybody, including me.” He doesn’t insult people, exactly, but his impatience is sharp enough to draw blood. He once questioned Kodner’s paralegal in a tone that made Kodner snap, “If you want to be mean to somebody, you be mean to me.”
Albert poked him in the chest.
Kodner said, “You poke me again, I’m going to beat the hell out of you.”
Albert poked him again.
“I picked him up—he weighs about 5 pounds—and threw him over the table. I meant to throw him on my sofa, but I threw him too high and I threw him into the wall. We both started laughing. My shirt’s torn, his shirt’s torn, and we’ve got a client waiting. The client says, ‘What happened?’ and Al says, ‘Mark just threw me through a wall.’ Sure enough, they look, and there’s a hole in the wall.”
Michael Schwade, an associate attorney who’s worked under Albert’s supervision, loves the variety of his cases: criminal work of all kinds, from white-collar to violent; securities fraud; complex civil litigation; intellectual property… “In our lobby, there will be people in cargo pants and dirty work boots sitting next to CEOs or people who’ve been swindled.”
Albert also does a lot of arbitration work and, unusually, represents both claimants and responders. Isn’t arbitration kind of peaceable for someone of his temperament? “You’re thinking of mediation,” Schwade tells me. “Arbitration is binding. It’s just that there’s a panel of experts instead of a judge and jury, and the process is less formal and more expedited. You can take shortcuts.”
Suddenly, it makes more sense.
Across the board, “the people who hire him are people who are fighting with somebody,” Kodner explains. “He’s a litigation combat kind of guy. We get referrals from the big firms in town because they don’t want to get their hands dirty.” That doesn’t mean he’s drawn to rich and powerful…assholishness, though. “He really has empathy for the little guy,” Kodner says. “It seems like we’re always representing the underdog. We’re never representing bullies. Even though sometimes he acts like one in the office, he doesn’t like them.”
***
Albert is no longer bored. And he has learned to control his recklessness. “I think being impulsive without being reckless is a great thing,” he says. “I find inhibitions to be relatively valueless.”
What lies underneath all that audacity and aggressive wit? “He internalizes a lot of distress,” Paige says. “It’s very personal to him, everything he does. He wraps his arms around it, and it is his. And there is no doing it halfway. He’ll be arguing a motion that’s very easy, one he’s done 100 times, and he prepares like it’s the very first time he’s ever done it. So under the humor? A real, raw need to do the very best that he can, because if he doesn’t, he feels like he’s failed.
“It’s been tough watching him, as he gets older, be even more driven,” she says. “You’d think he would mellow. I see glimpses—when everything is fine, and the kids are all well, and we’re on vacation. But there’s something inside of him he has to prove, and only he is going to be able to decide what that is.” Until he does, she adds, “he is more exhausting than all five kids put together.”
Editor's Note: This article has been revised to reflect the following corrections: Carolina Diaz-Silva was 17, not 18, when she married Watkins; they received joint custody of their daughter; and Watkins' account of Diaz-Silva's family history was inaccurate.
