Cultural philanthropist and publisher of the Paris Review
a onetime actress who married an heir of the Heinz foods empire and became a cultural philanthropist and the publisher of the Paris Review, died March 30 at Hawthornden Castle near the village of Lasswade, Scotland. She was 103.
The death was announced by the Heinz Endowments, a family-run foundation. The cause was not disclosed.
Heinz, the British-born widow of Henry J. “Jack” Heinz II, was a quiet but Drue Heinz, influential force in the literary and cultural life of the United States and Britain for decades. She endowed literary awards in both countries, supported quarterly journals and a publishing house, and bankrolled a major expansion at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
She and her husband devoted much of their philanthropy to Pittsburgh, the home base of the Heinz family’s enterprises, and were instrumental in the development of the city’s downtown cultural district in the 1970s.
Heinz, who often stayed awake all night reading, used her fortune largely to benefit the visual arts and literature. Her circle of friends included artist Andy Warhol and writers Antonia Fraser, Harold Pinter, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe.
Although she gave few if any interviews, Heinz became known for the glittering parties she held at her homes in New York and London, where royalty and political leaders mingled with members of the Rolling Stones and struggling poets in T-shirts.
“Drue Heinz was the great literary philanthropist of our time,” publisher Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, said in a statement to the Heinz Endowments.
Heinz was a longtime friend of the Paris Review’s founding editor, George Plimpton, and served as publisher of the influential literary magazine from 1993 to 2007. She sometimes contributed to it herself, including an extensive 1995 interview with British poet Ted Hughes.