Among the 1,000 or so conservationists, urban renewers, landscape design ers, architects, doers of good and viewers with alarm who met in Washington last week for the White House Conference on Natural Beauty (see THE NATION) was Mrs. Mary Lasker, 65, whose qualifications as beautifier are beyond dispute. Among other things, Mary Las ker is a devoted philanthropist and sup porter of Democratic Party causes, and a warm friend of President Johnson's at whose side she sat last month at a' Waldorf dinner for party contributors. New Yorkers know her best as the city's unofficial green thumb.
When Mary sends flowers to someone, it is likely to be quite a bunch. In April, as "a tiny gesture" to Lady Bird Johnson's campaign to beautify the cap ital, she sent 10,300 azalea bushes down to Washington and threw in 150 dog wood trees for good measure. Last fall m memory of her friend Susan Wagner' late wife of New York City's mayor' she planted 40 flowering cherry trees on Park Avenue—in addition to the 44 magnolia trees she had already put there and the 400 other trees she has had planted around the city. When the U.N. garden needed a spot of color, she pro vided it with 40,000 daffodils and several hundred cherry trees.
Playing Primavera in an asphalt desert is only part of Mary Lasker's life and work. "I am mainly interested in medical research," she says. "The flowers are just a little thing to keep me from being depressed until a cure is found for diseases like cancer and arteriosclerosis." To help in that pursuit, the Lasker Foundation supports medical research, presents two annual awards of $10,000 each, one for basic research, the other for clinical studies. The foundation also hands out each year three $2,500 awards for outstanding medical reporting in magazines, newspapers, and on television. The American Cancer Society, of which Mary is honorary chairman/benefits from loan exhibits of paintings in the distinguished Lasker collection.
Paintings & Pills. Mary Lasker has been interested in art ever since she was a girl. Daughter of a well-to-do Wisconsin banker, she majored in art history at Radchffe, topped it off with a term at Oxford. She moved to New York to sell paintings for Gallery Owner Paul Reinhardt, whom she eventually married in 1926 (they were divorced in 1934). In 1940 she married Millionaire Chicagoan Albert D. Lasker, who headed Lord & Thomas, then one of the top U.S advertising agencies. Through Mary, Lasker discovered the world of art,' and together they began to amass their fine paintings, particularly those of the French impressionists and early expressionists.
It was also Mary who generated much of the family interest in medical research. Early in their courtship, Las ker had asked Mary what she wanted most to do in life. She replied: "I want to push the idea of health insurance Most people can't afford adequate medical care. And I want to help promote research in cancer, tuberculosis and other major diseases."