Interesting People

"You must have a very exciting life, you meet so many interesting people," is a comment to which few newspapermen ever reply, but last week one did. Though the New York Times calls him a "staff writer," Samuel Johnson Woolf is the only journalist of his kind. An ex-portrait painter, for the last 14 years he has chased after famed men, sketching them with amiable shrewdness, interviewing them as he sketched. Now 61 and lively as ever, Artist-Interviewer Woolf last week published his pleasant memoirs.*

After becoming a successful portrait painter, Woolf rebelled at last because a sitter's tailor complained of the way Woolf painted his client's suit. Turning to lithography, he was hired by the New York Times to do illustrations for its book and feature sections. The idea of doing interviews with his sketches came from an encounter with George Bernard Shaw. Turned down when he called personally to do a sketch of Shaw, Woolf wrote him a Shavian letter, saying that "immortality will not be yours until I have drawn you." Replied Shaw: "I have now considerable experience as an artist's model, but my terms--about $3,750 an hour--are prohibitive." Answered Woolf: "Your price for posing is acceptable to me.My price for a drawing is the same amount. . . ." He got the interview--a barrage of economics, socialism, religion, art, plus a confidential glimpse of a nude photograph which Shaw had had taken of himself in the pose of Rodin's The Thinker. The Times asked him to write it up.

Since then Woolf has done more than 300 such interviews. Mussolini, who grieved to him that dictatorship interfered with violin practice, put on a full-dress show to illustrate how he terrified his aides, and winked broadly at Woolf as the last one left. Said Coolidge--a Woolf favorite--"I am afraid I am hard to draw. I think I would be a much better model if I raised whiskers like one of the Smith Brothers."

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