Pearl Bailey, Entertainer for 57 Years, Dies at 72

Pearl Bailey, a Southern preacher’s daughter who became a top performer best known for her throaty rendition of “Hello Dolly,” died Friday at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. She was 72.

A hospital official refused to provide further details.

The singer, dancer, humorist and homespun philosopher--Pearlie Mae to friends--had suffered from a recurring heart condition since the early 1960s.

“Singing does bring out the soreness,” she once said. “But when I get on the floor, baby, you know nothing hurts.”

Last month, the singer underwent surgery to replace her arthritic left knee with a metal and plastic joint.

She left Pennsylvania Hospital on July 30, intending to continue visiting two sisters for a week while undergoing physical therapy. She then planned to return home to Arizona with her husband, jazz drummer Louis Bellson.

Bailey, a performer for 57 years, is one of the few entertainers who could still be called a trouper in the classic sense.

Born in Newport News, Va., Bailey moved with her family to Washington and then to Philadelphia, where she made her debut at age 15, winning an amateur contest by singing “Poor Butterfly.”

Perhaps best known for playing Dolly in the black version of the musical “Hello, Dolly!” in the late 1960s, she also enjoyed a long film career and appeared in “Carmen Jones,” “Porgy and Bess” and other movies.

In 1968, she received a special Tony award for her role in “Hello, Dolly!”

But Bailey considered herself foremost a singer.

Her standbys included “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home,” “St. Louis Blues,” “Row, Row, Row,” and “That’s Good Enough for Me.”

She also has served as a delegate to the United Nations during the Reagan Administration.

Bailey did her first show for U.S. servicemen in 1941 and had been a staple performer of the USO ever since.

She wrote humorous and inspirational books, including “Hurry Up” and “America & Spit.” Her autobiography, “Between You and Me,” appeared last year.

Flipping a feather boa or swathed in chinchilla, ablaze with rhinestones and jewels, Bailey was famous onstage for her throwaway style of singing, a mumbling growl laced with husky patter.

“I’m not a comedienne,” she once told an interviewer, “I call myself a humorist. I tell stories to music and, thank God, in tune. I laugh at people who call me an actress.”

She attributed her talent to God.

“People say, ‘Pearl, what style do you have?’ I say ‘it’s God, not style.’ ”

The tall, folksy daughter of a preacher quit school for show business at 15. Her blossoming career made her a star of nightclubs, motion pictures, television and Broadway shows and earned her the friendship of presidents.

At a Washington performance of “Hello, Dolly!” she was joined onstage by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson and his wife.

And in 1970, President Richard M. Nixon named her America’s “ambassador of love” to the world.

At the time of her death she was married to Bellson, her fifth husband, a white musician.

The interracial marriage proved to be a happy one. The Bellsons adopted children and at one time lived on a ranch in Northridge in the San Fernando Valley.

The singer said in 1970 that perhaps she had failed to speak out enough about racial injustice, “but I’ve lived that way. I walk with love and hope it rubs off.”

“I believe in humanity in that you don’t bother to look at the color of a man’s face. That’s brotherhood,” she added.

In 1988, she took a spin around the Persian Gulf to visit U.S. Navy personnel on ships there.

That year she also told the World Health Organization that she wanted to dedicate her life to fighting AIDS.

Bailey had her own television show in the early 1970s and in 1982 appeared in an NBC production of “Member of the Wedding.”