HARRIET'S SUMMER OF LOVE!(The Talk of the Town)(Harriet Miers)

In February of 1969, Susan Elizabeth Reese, a first-year student at Harvard Law School, went to hear a speech by Melvin Belli, the San Francisco lawyer. At a reception afterward, she met Belli, and he ended up offering her a summer job. His firm suggested that Reese might want to bunk with the other female summer associate, a law student from Dallas. Right after Reese's last final, she flew to San Francisco and was met at the airport by her new roommate, Harriet Miers.

By the late sixties, Belli was one of the most famous and flamboyant lawyers in the country; called the "King of Torts" by Life for his work in the personal-injury field, he was well known for representing clients like Errol Flynn, Jack Ruby, Mae West, and Evel Knievel. A few days after Reese and Miers started work, Belli took them and a few male lawyers out to lunch. Reese recalls that he instructed the two young women to bring along paper for taking notes, and then the group piled into his Rolls-Royce. "He had me and Harriet crowd into the front seat with him," Reese said. That summer, she kept a diary, in which she recorded details about the lunch: In the car, Belli "started outlining a research problem on patents, and Harriet began writing furiously. I hadn't the vaguest idea what he was talking about and just sat there. Presently, he demanded to know which one of us could do a memo on it. I continued my silence, so poor Harriet was forced to volunteer. I apologized to her later."

The group arrived at a seafood restaurant called the Crow's Nest and sat at a table overlooking the water. They ordered Bloody Marys and Daiquiris, and Belli started complaining about the work Reese had done on her first legal memo, which he proceeded to tear into little pieces at the table. "Belli began on Harriet when he could get no response from me," Reese wrote, but "she was able to tell Belli a few things that she'd researched and he didn't know about. In between interrogating us, Belli tried to see just how many lewd stories he could tell. . . . Harriet and I stared at each other feeling bewildered and a bit angry."

Belli fired Reese the next day, but the two women still roomed together for the rest of the summer, in a furnished two-bedroom walkup near Golden Gate Park. Miers put in the kind of long hours that have become her trademark, often working on weekends. "Harriet left for work early and stayed late," Reese recalled. "She was hardworking to the point where she didn't get to enjoy San Francisco."

Two years had passed since the Summer of Love, but San Francisco was still the swirling center of hippie culture. While other young people in the city hung out at the Fillmore East listening to long, smoky sets by Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane, or ...