THE MISERY BROKER.(Raoul Felder has been a divorce lawyer for 41 years, and is still going strong.)(Interview)(Biography)

No. 437 Madison Avenue is an anonymous concrete and glass office tower just south of the Palace Hotel. On the thirtieth floor, to the left of the elevator bank, is a set of fake brown doors painted to resemble the entrance to a run-down Los Angeles office circa 1938, with signs that say, "Sam Spade: Criminal Investigations" and "Philip Marlowe: Private Detective." Between the fake doors, a real one bears the legend "Raoul Lionel Felder." Inside, there is a small waiting room decorated with dozens of framed headlines, some of which go back several decades. They include "dr. estranged love" (GQ), "the dean of divorce'' (the News), "scourge of stars, rich spouse's nightmare" (the Times), and "captain divorce" (Vanity Fair). Felder, who is sixty-nine years old, is a shameless self-promoter, but much of the publicity that he has received he has earned. In forty-one years as a marital attorney, he has sued more famous men than any other divorce lawyer in America. The list of his targets includes Martin Scorsese, Carl Sagan, Tom Jones, Lawrence Taylor, Johnny Carson, Frank Gifford, Peter O'Toole, Al Roker, Brian De Palma, and Joseph Heller.

It would be doing Felder a disservice, however, to portray him simply as a tormentor of famous males. A couple of years ago, when he was representing former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, he said of Giuliani's then wife, Donna Hanover, "She's howling like a stuck pig. She reminds me of the little kid who murders his parents and complains he's an orphan." This past October, Felder sued Liza Minnelli for ten million dollars on behalf of her estranged husband, the concert producer and promoter David Gest. In a ten-page complaint that delighted tabloid editors from Florida to Fleet Street, he described Minnelli as a washed-up, overweight alcoholic who beat Gest so badly during drink-addled rages that he suffered "unrelenting headaches; vertigo; nausea; hypertension; scalp tenderness; insomnia; mood dysphoria; photosensitivity; and phonophobia."

One morning shortly before Christmas, I went to see Felder, pausing in a corridor to inspect a life-size photograph of him, a fierce expression on his bearded face. His wood-panelled corner office overlooks the back of St. Patrick's Cathedral. When he rose from a big wooden desk, he was taller than I had expected, over six feet. He had on an expensive-looking brown three-piece suit, one of more than three hundred he owns, and a cream cotton shirt with the words "Honest Lawyer" stitched on the breast pocket. Beneath his shiny bald crown there were deep lines on his forehead, large brown eyes, a fine Roman nose, and a wide mouth.

Felder is an inveterate collector. The walls of his office are lined with ornaments, toys, books, magazines, papers, photographs of him with famous people, and all sorts of other paraphernalia: an old globe that he picked up in a flea market, an F.B.I. baseball cap, and a plaque from the Brooklyn School for Special Children, honoring him as a "distinguished humanitarian." On his desk he keeps a glass replica of the black Maltese falcon statuette featured in John Huston's 1941 film version of Dashiell Hammett's novel, and two engraved quotations from Raymond Chandler: "Trouble is my business" and "Everybody has something to conceal." Amid the bric-a-brac are some valuable pieces of art, including two Rodin sculptures and two Picassos--an etching and a painting--that Felder received when he represented Picasso's son Claude in a divorce case. (Claude's wife claimed that he had promised to give her some of his father's work. The jury didn't believe her. Claude rewarded Felder with the painting and the etching.)

After introducing himself, Felder offered me a cup of white Fauchon tea, explaining that it contains more antioxidants than any other brand. Although he likes to imagine himself as an old-fashioned gumshoe, he has also been heard to describe himself as a "classic hypochondriac Jew." His over-all health is good, and he exercises every morning, but he lives in constant fear of a heart attack. Some years ago, he was walking on Brighton Beach, in Brooklyn, when he felt short of breath. His doctor ordered an EKG and an angiogram, which were both normal. Felder insisted on also having a new type of CT scan, which detects calcification in the walls of the heart arteries. A normal calcification count is below a hundred; Felder scored a thousand. His doctor told him not to worry: the link between calcification and heart disease wasn't proved. Far from reassured, Felder went to the medical center that pioneered the arterial scan, St. Francis Hospital, in Roslyn, Long Island, and had another one, only to record a calcification count that was almost off the scale. "What can I do about it? Nothing," he said when he told me this story. "I wish I'd never had it. I try to forget it. But I can't."

Felder's clients pay some of the highest fees in the business: an hourly rate of five hundred and fifty dollars, and a retainer of at least twenty-five thousand dollars. He proudly points out that he was the first divorce lawyer to receive a fee of a hundred thousand dollars and the first one to receive a fee of a million dollars. Divorce law isn't usually seen as a cyclical industry, but Felder has noticed that it ebbs and flows with the economy. During the recession of 2001, and particularly after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, his business dropped off sharply; lately it has rebounded. Felder's wife, Myrna, works with him, along with six other attorneys. At any one time, they handle between a hundred and two hundred cases, dealing with divorce, prenuptial agreements, and paternity suits. Some of Felder's rivals accuse him of taking on too many clients, and it is true that he doesn't know the details of every case his firm takes on. However, he oversees them all, and he certainly works hard. He gets to the office every morning at seven and often stays for twelve hours or more.

About three-fifths of Felder's clients are women--an imbalance he attributes to the sociology of gender. "When men leave their wives, they tend to get recommendations for divorce lawyers from their colleagues," he said. "Women, especially women married to rich men, often don't have a network of professional contacts. So they turn to me." Over the years, Felder has represented more than three thousand clients, a number of whom have retained him more than once. The record--seven times--is held by two women. One was a former beauty queen who got divorced and remarried every few years; the other kept switching back and forth between two husbands.