Bailey’s Ladies

Stop by the Hollywood Roosevelt tonight, and you’ll swear Judy Garland has returned from somewhere over the rainbow to entertain in the hotel’s Cinegrill Lounge. The woman on stage looks, talks and certainly sings like Judy . . . but she’s not Judy. In fact, she is really a he--Jim Bailey, whose one-woman, er, man, act runs Wednesdays through Saturdays.

Bailey, who also does shows as Barbra Streisand and Peggy Lee, may put on women’s clothes, but don’t call him a female impersonator. “I call myself an illusionist, because what I do has to do with magic,” says Bailey, who has persuaded audiences from Carnegie Hall to Buckingham Palace. “Basically, it’s character acting.”

Bailey, who studied classical opera in Philadelphia in the 1960s, got his start as an illusionist after he became friends with Phyllis Diller. “I started picking up her mannerisms,” he recalls. When others began to notice the resemblance, Bailey quietly put together a show. He got his big break when a club owner asked him to take the place of the real Diller, who had just canceled a gig at his club. “They really thought I was Phyllis Diller,” he says of that audience.

Soon afterward, Bailey says, “I started thinking about singing,” and he added Garland, Lee and Streisand to his repertoire. Now he performs an entire show as a single character. “I used to come out at the end of the show and do some songs as Jim Bailey. But I’ve created a monster,” he says.

“I always wanted to be a successful singer on my own, but I created these singing ladies that are successful, and now I have to take a back seat.”

Bailey imagines his show must be a bit unnerving to the women he portrays. “If I were to walk into a theater and see someone doing me,” he says, “I’d look around to see if the audience was buying it.”

Bailey appears Wednesday through next Saturday as Garland and June 20-23 and 27-30 as Lee.