The Beautifier

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."

Berries in the Fall. Albert Lasker, himself a cancer victim, died 13 years' ago at 73. But Mary kept moving, has involved herself in a dazzling variety of civic ventures. She makes her headquarters in a narrow, 71-story town house on Manhattan's fashionable Beekman Place. White, even to the furniture and the rugs on the floor, is the background -her paintings. There is a Monet a Picasso, a Lautrec. Five Matisses hang in the dining room; Van Gogh's Zouave over the living room couch faces a Renoir girl in a boat over the fireplace.

Flowers and leaves abound, in big bowls, little vases, jars. On shelves and tables are figurines and archaeologi cal finds, Chinese porcelain, and affectionately inscribed photographs of the great.

In Beekman Place or at her rambling country house near Amenia, N.Y., Mary Lasker is an elegant hostess, moves purposefully through her rooms, rapid-firing opinions and prodding listeners' attention with a frequent "Don't you agree?" or "Don't you think so?" Again and again she reverts to her sense of urgency about the need for more flowers and plants. "Urban renewers don't seem to realize that people need space for trees and shrubs. They need flowers in the spring and berries in the fall it reassures and comforts them. Central Park should have thousands of cherry trees, and there aren't enough fountains We need an atomic reactor to desalt our sea water so that we can use more water for civic projects. And to get the kind of landscaping we need across the land, vast new nurseries will have to be established for mass plantings. There is so much to be done!"

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