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High Mission. There have been a good many forks in the road to Percy Foreman's present state of eminence. The son of a small-town Texas sheriff, Percy was one of eight children. He went to work at the tender age of eight, tried everything from shining shoes to professional wrestling. During his years at the University of Texas Law School, he turned his natural talent for oratory into tuition fees by hitting the Chautauqua trail, lecturing widely on such subjects as "The High Mission of Women in the 20th Century" and "How to Get the Most Out of Life." After getting his law degree at the age of 25, he served briefly as an assistant county prosecutor before entering into private practice.
Foreman is a man of bewildering contradictions. His personal charm, when he cares to exercise it, is overwhelming; yet he has been known to snarl at dilatory waitresses: "I get $200 an hour, and you have taken up $60 worth." In the courtroom, he would almost literally die for his clients; during conferences in their cells, he often cusses them up one side and down the other. With the well-heeled, he is merciless about fees. They must be paid in either cash or property (he owns numerous cars and houses turned over to him in fee settlements). However, if a case involving an impoverished person interests him, he will undertake it for nothing. Even though his work keeps him away from home for long periods, Foreman is a strong family man who dotes on his eleven-year-old daughter. His second wife is former German Screen Actress Marguerite Obert; he also has an adopted son.
In the Dead of Night. Foreman can be cynical about the law. It is, he says, quoting Aaron Burr, "whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained." He is, in fact, dedicated to the law and is one of its hardest-working practitioners. Foreman's Houston office consists of himself and a secretary, and Percy does almost all of his own investigating. Says Houston's Bill Walsh, a lawyer who has known Foreman for many years: "While other lawyers are at home and asleep in bed, Percy's out in the dead of night, trudging around in the rain looking for witnesses."
Although he has made a career out of defending accused killers, Foreman is genuinely horrified at the act of killing. His aversion applies not only to any state-ordered execution of his clients but goes so far as to include game hunters. Foreman takes genuine pleasure in telling the story of a deer hunter who, while sitting in the branches of a tree, fell out and impaled himself on the antlers of a deer he had meant to shoot. That, says Foreman, was "divine justice."
Last week, after the Ray trial and while still in the process of changing his mind about retiring from criminal practice, Foreman sat, stripped to his undershirt, on the edge of his Memphis hotel-room bed. There, he held court for fascinated newsmen and expounded his theories about the declining art of criminal-law practice. Most of today's young lawyers, he said, are much too gutless to take on criminal cases. "They are afraid to leave the library for fear they'll make a public ass of themselves in court." Perhaps it is because of this shortage of guts that Percy Foreman has recently had some second thoughts about retiring.