Ina Ginsburg

Ina Ginsburg, who for more than half a century elevated the arts and the art of socializing in the nation’s capital as a prominent hostess, a fund-raiser and a well-dressed decoder of Washington ways for unelected outsiders, including Andy Warhol and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Born into a comfortable Jewish family in Vienna, Ms. Ginsburg fled to America during World War II, settled in Washington and by the early 1950s was bringing a dose of continental cachet to a city not known for style. The Georgetown home she shared with her husband, David Ginsburg, a liberal lawyer who had helped shape Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and later helped found Americans for Democratic Action, was a dinner destination for the politically powerful during five presidential administrations: those of Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. Besides giving exclusive dinner parties, however, she helped raise the profile of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts through her work as trustee of the American Film Institute and the Washington National Opera, both of which held events there. Her fund-raising for the film institute began in the early 1970s, after she and Mr. Ginsburg separated. (They later divorced, and he died in 2010.) She and Warhol went on to become such good friends that he stayed with her on visits to Washington and made silk-screen portraits of her that have been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery. He also hired her. He made her Washington editor of his magazine, Interview, for which she filed sometimes revealing interviews with prominent people she knew socially, including two defense secretaries, Robert S. McNamara and Caspar W. Weinberger, and Paul A.Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve. In turn, she helped Warhol get dinner invitations to the Carter White House and the home of Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post. Besides her son Mark, Ms. Ginsburg’s survivors include another son, Jonathan; a daughter, Susan Ginsburg; and two grandchildren. Her marriage to Kurt Ettinger also ended in divorce.