Drue heinz biography

Heinz retired in In she established the Drue Heinz Literature Prize at the University of Pittsburgh Press, a prestigious literary award given for short fiction. In memory of her late husband, she created the Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art, which established permanent facilities devoted to the study, exhibition, and exploration of international architecture.

As a member of the London Library, she created an endowment to develop its literary collections. In she became the founder and president of the Hawthornden Literary Institute, which awards the Hawthornden Prize for Literature. In , she was designated a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Support the New York gala. Heinz II —87 , then president of Heinz company and heir to the Heinz fortune.

Prior to her marriage to Heinz she was an actress. Of her character, Teresa Heinz said "Drue was a very private person but she came to know an amazing group of people in her life. She was smart and passionate and deeply interested in art, literature, and especially poetry. In , with the encouragement of her friend James Laughlin , she co-founded Ecco Press.

Heinz began supporting the University of Pittsburgh's fiction prize in The prize publishes collections of short fiction through the University of Pittsburgh Press. In , she restored an old movie theater into the Heinz Hall for the Performing Arts , which was the founding institution of what would later become the Cultural District, Pittsburgh.

In , Heinz endowed a Chair jointly held at St. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. James's Square. We would love you to join them Become a member of The London Library Members have access to around a million books and periodicals, a superb online offering and an unforgettable building in beautiful St.

The food was always sumptuous, and on every table there was a bottle of up-market ketchup — not Heinz. Somehow, over the years, Drue morphed from a formidable patron of the RSL into a friend. Every so often, she would invite me round for tea, an elaborate ceremony involving a great deal of silver — teapot, jug for hot water, domes covering sandwiches and cake.

She loved peanut butter, and believed it promoted longevity. Sometimes, she made a sudden gesture of extraordinary generosity. One Christmas Eve, she had delivered to me a dozen partridges from a smart butcher in Mount Street. She was the life and soul of the party. She could receive as well as give. Drue had many houses, but the one she loved best — and where she died — was Hawthornden, a castle clinging vertiginously to the rocks in Midlothian.

She once invited my husband, Jamie, and me to dinner there during the Edinburgh Festival. In front of each guest, when we entered the dining room, was one entire lobster — and in place of knives and forks a set of pincers and crackers I had no idea how to deploy. To make things more alarming, Drue had seated me next to Richard Ford, and I was thoroughly overawed.

But Ford was charming, and the lobster proved manageable, and it was — as always with Drue — a wonderful evening. About a year ago, Drue invited Jamie and me to drop round one evening after work. She was, by then, too blind to read — but, undaunted, she had arranged a rota of young actors and actresses to come and read to her. We spoke about books, but about many other things besides.

She reminisced about her first meeting with Donald Trump, when he turned up very late for a lunch party, 30 years ago. She talked about hairdressers, and how, as soon as one touched her head, she could tell whether he was worth his salt. The five writers each had a tiny room on the top floor, lunch was left in a basket outside the door, and nobody spoke until the evening when we assembled for dinner.

Then, late one afternoon, Drue herself arrived and everything changed. Walking into the house with a large box of chocolates under her arm, she immediately brought us to life and back into the real world. Over a delicious dinner, she talked most amusingly, showed interest in everyone, and displayed a formidable knowledge of, mainly contemporary, literature.

She was impressively well read, her critical opinions far from mild, briskly dismissing a number of well-known authors with an enjoyable acidity. Here we stayed in the greatest luxury, sumptuous meals, drinks at sunset on the terrace overlooking the garden. Drue listened intently, never interrupting, until the end of the final session, when she commented perceptively on the proceedings mostly, if not entirely, with approval, before sweeping us off for a glorious dinner and a cabaret performed by some of her guests.

Drue, in appearance very fragile, was elegantly dressed in a white tunic and long black skirt. For the first time that I remember she left the party early, protectively escorted out of the room by her devoted driver, Shavez. Derwent May Drue Heinz became a great benefactress of the arts and literature after she married H. Jack Heinz in But I always thought that literature was her great love.

She bought Hawthornden Castle, near Edinburgh, and set it up as a place where writers could stay for a month to work in peace in beautiful surroundings — as they continue to do. She then learned that by coincidence the renowned Hawthornden Prize, founded in and won in its early years by Robert Graves, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene , was short of money, and rather wittily she took that over too.

She bought, en bloc at Heywood Hill in Curzon Street, the books we were considering, and read them all. There were fifteen of them, consisting of three books chosen for the list in January by each of the five judges.

Drue heinz biography

We met on a June morning in her house near Berkeley Square, a set of mews buildings that she had turned into a small palazzo. She always came to the meeting to listen to us, beautifully dressed, but never interfered in any way. We tried to get the winner on the phone straightaway, and Drue particularly liked giving him or her the good news.

This party, followed by a dinner, took place in July, of late years usually at the London Library of which she had also been a great benefactress, and where there is a bust of her on the staircase. Unfortunately she would not invite to the party any journalists, of whom she had a horror. She greatly disliked any mention of herself in the press, and never wanted public recognition of or credit for her good deeds.

This was the main reason why the Hawthornden, though a substantial and serious prize, has never got the publicity it deserves. Some winners naturally regretted this, but Ali Smith made a charming speech in which she said that she was glad there was no great fuss made about it. She was much happier simply to learn that a group of judges whom she admired had chosen her.