In researching my last book, “Far From the Tree,” I became close to Harry and Laura Slatkin, whose work on behalf of people with autism — co-founding a charter school, establishing the Center for Autism and the Developing Brain — has set a new standard for parent activism. When I asked Laura how she came to such a vision for medical crusading, she gave credit to Deeda Blair. Four years ago, the Slatkins invited my husband and me to dinner with their muse. Deeda mixes austerity with intimacy, and at that first dinner, I found her both aloof and engaging; she seemed to offer only an impression of herself, but to see the rest of us more boldly than we’d intended. Several accomplished scientists were in the klatch that evening, and Deeda asked questions with her characteristic quiet intensity, as though she were conducting discreet but critical interviews on behalf of the Nobel committee. Her style is at once embracing and exclusive, as though it excluded most of the world but not you, whoever you might be on this particular evening.
Deeda was hardly brought up to be an activist. She grew up in Chicago, went to the Academy of the Sacred Heart for Girls to be educated and made her debut in 1949. She attended a two-year junior college, and lived a vigorously social life, traveling widely. Soon after her disastrous first marriage ended, she met her true love, William McCormick Blair Jr., at Eunice and Sargent Shriver’s house. Bill was a partner at a law firm with Adlai Stevenson at the time, and was a Kennedy intimate; Eunice was the chaperone through their courtship. Shortly after Bill was appointed Kennedy’s ambassador to Denmark, Deeda married him at Frederiksborg Castle. Bill was later Johnson’s ambassador to the Philippines. Deeda brought tremendous style to her ambassadorial posts; WWD called her “a peacock among the wrens.”
In the meanwhile, Bill had introduced her to the medical philanthropist Mary Lasker, who helped build up the National Institutes of Health and led the War on Cancer. Deeda told me that at Sacred Heart, she had worn “the world’s ugliest uniform” and had not been allowed to study biology, and she reacted against the first problem with couture and against the second with Mary Lasker. She and Lasker were soon the best of friends, summering together in the South of France at Villa Fiorentina. Lasker had a gift for leading people with power to those who could conceptualize medical quandaries; she would have Greta Garbo and Princess Grace to dinner with Michael DeBakey (the distinguished heart surgeon) or James Watson (the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA). Lasker saw that Deeda could carry that tradition forward. In 1965, Deeda became vice president of the Albert and Mary Lasker Foundation.
Lasker was on the National Cancer Advisory Board, so Deeda focused initially on cancer research. She met the scientists, asked them questions, read their papers. When she visited New York, she would stay with Lasker, who would introduce her to more physicians. “Mary asked a great friend, David Karnofsky, at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, to take me on,” Deeda recalled. “And that was the most extraordinary learning experience — whether it was rounds, whether it was lectures, whether he was showing me how to dissect chicken embryos and look for liver damage. He made me feel that there was a role for a layperson.” Soon enough, Deeda was on the Breast Cancer Task Force treatment committee, where she was the only woman. She also served for 12 years on the board of the American Cancer Society, where she was on the research committee. She began going to jury meetings for the Lasker Awards, the most prestigious medical prize in the United States. She was a voracious learner.
Soon oncologists were talking about the sudden uptick in a previously exotic cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma, occurring mostly among gay men. Deeda was there for the initial meetings on the subject, which led her to be in the front lines of emerging AIDS research.
She joined the visiting committee at the Harvard School of Public Health and worked with the H.I.V. team there, which was led by Max Essex. “AIDS was the first time I ever really asked anyone for money,” Deeda said. “We needed to know how it was transmitted, and Max wanted to study that. And I asked Mary Lasker for $50,000. A couple of years later, I identified another foundation, asked them for lunch and behaved like the most appalling female. ‘You have been so generous, you’ve done this, you’ve done that. And I hate to ask you for one more thing.’ And I really did. I was so embarrassed that tears were going down my cheeks. I said, ‘We’ve got to have a laser cell sorter.’ And then I rattled off what a laser cell sorter was. And they said, ‘Deeda, stop. We will do everything in our power to get you your laser cell sorter.’ And they did it.”
Deeda soon established a trademark style. Who else would introduce Nobel laureates to Hubert de Givenchy? Who else would come home from the Paris couture shows with $267,000 for an automatic sequencer to identify African variants of H.I.V.? Daniel Romualdez, her Yale-educated architect and interior designer, said, “One cannot overestimate how much she has done for AIDS — she was among the first people of her stature deeply involved with fund-raising and working with researchers when people in society would not even mention the illness.” Essex once wrote that Deeda always had “an understanding of the whole interlocking process of getting things done … and sees one thing always — hope.”
by Andrew Soloman, NY Times Magazine | Read more:
Photograph by Julia Hetta
