Never-before-seen scrapbooks tell the story of Pearl Bailey’s life from North Philadelphia to Hollywood

When Tony Award winner and variety show host Pearl Bailey wasn’t enthralling audiences with her throaty voice and down-home charm, she must have been working on her scrapbooks.

Bailey — who came of age in North Philadelphia during the 1930s — was the quintessential mid-20th century glamour girl, best known for her starring role in the 1967 all-Black version of Broadway’s Hello, Dolly! Older Philadelphians may remember Bailey as a regular on The Mike Douglas Show.

Created decades before smartphones could store memories, Bailey’s adventures on Broadway, in Vegas, and at the White House make for an impressive collection of newspaper articles, glossy photographs, letters, cards, and telegrams documenting her larger-than-life story. Notes from Queen Elizabeth II, Cab Calloway, and Grace Kelly lay pressed between the yellowed pages.

In 1976, Bailey became the first African American to receive the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, and in 1988 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Still, Philadelphia was always her home. She visited regularly, often to guest on The Mike Douglas Show, filmed in Old City. She was in touch with her friend and former Philadelphia Inquirer publisher Walter H. Annenberg, and often met the founder of Philadanco!, Joan Myers Brown, for tea.

Bailey’s scrapbooks are on display at the African American Museum through Sept. 13 as part of the new exhibit “AAMP Presents: The Pearl Bailey Showcase.” The show debuted March 22 — seven days before what would have been Bailey’s 107th birthday.

“They take visitors down memory lane in a very specific way,” said curator Michael K. Wilson. “They highlight the special moments in Pearl’s life but they also remind us of what we were doing, what our parents were doing, what our grandparents were doing. People will recall their youth in an interesting, dynamic way.”

Bailey was born in Newport News, Va., in 1918. In the 1930s, she moved to North Philadelphia’s 1946 N. 23rd St. — a blue state marker stands in front of it. She attended William Penn High School until she was 15, and in her 20s, won an amateur night talent show at Pearl Theatre

She performed on vaudeville stages in Pennsylvania’s coal mining towns; in 1944, the Village Vanguard hired her as a solo act; and in 1946, she made her Broadway debut, marking her ascent to stardom.

Bailey returned to Philadelphia from her home in Lake Havasu, Ariz., in 1990 on Annenberg’s advice to have her knees replaced at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. While recovering at the Holiday Inn in Old City, she suffered cardiac arrest and died at Jefferson Hospital, at 72.

When Annenberg learned of Bailey’s death, he told The Inquirer he was “shocked and terribly upset.” “She was dancing around the room to show me how successful it was,” he said.

Among the more than 2,000 mourners at Bailey’s funeral at Deliverance Evangelistic Church were her sisters, teachers, secretaries, housemaids, and government workers who, according to The Inquirer, went to high school with her, sat next to her under the dryer at beauty salons, or witnessed her early performances in North Philadelphia nightclubs.

In 1991, Bailey’s husband of 38 years, Louis Bellson, gifted more than 30 of her scrapbooks to the African American Museum in Philadelphia. (Georgetown University, where Bailey earned a bachelor’s in theology in 1985, has a collection, too.)

AAMP held a Pearl Bailey exhibition in the early 1990s, but without the scrapbooks. They’ve never been on display before this, but have been available to scholars upon request.

In 2022, the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage awarded AAMP a $200,000 grant to expand its digital programming. Dejáy B. Duckett, vice president of curatorial services at AAMP, then decided it was time to go digging into Bailey’s ephemera.

Bailey’s scrapbooks hark back to a time 60 years ago when color television was new and Black women were still seen in subservient roles. But Bailey, dressed in sparkles and furs, commanded Hollywood on her own terms.

When she was criticized for being a part of Hello, Dolly!’s all-Black cast, she said: “I wasn’t hired to do an all-colored Dolly... A lot of talented people showed up and what’s wrong with them having a job? What is good for the Negro? What is good for the Negro is good for everyman. Every man has a place in this world, but no man has a right to designate that place."

Bailey’s popularity and the respect she commanded is evidenced by the dozens of notes addressed to “Dearest Pearlie Mae,” from admirers including President Richard Nixon, who appointed Bailey America’s Ambassador of Love in 1970.

With digital collections specialists at the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University, Wilson digitized the scrapbooks’ pages in a way that gave the digital files a handheld paper feel.

The online version of “The Pearl Bailey Showcase” features six digitized albums and was launched last December.

“The way she constructed the albums are performances within themselves,” Wilson said. “Through the process of digitization I learned more about her life and that became a narrative I wanted to share,” Wilson said.

Eighteen framed photos of Bailey and her famous friends line the Pearl Bailey Wall of Fame on AAMP’s second floor. Among them are baseball player Willie Mays — Bailey was an avid baseball fan — comedians Bob Hope and George Curry, and Las Vegas superstars Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra.

Yet the museum exhibit is anchored in Philadelphia.

A life-size pencil sketch of a young Bailey by Philadelphia artist Jonathan Pinkett anchors the room. There are five memorabilia cases filled with scrapbooks and 45 RPM records.

“No matter how large Pearl was, we get to anchor her in Philadelphia in a very special way,” Wilson said. “We can tether her to home and it’s not a stretch, but in a very authentic way because her career started in Philadelphia.”

“AAMP Presents: The Pearl Bailey Showcase” will run through Sept. 13. ​701 Arch St., Phila. Pa., aampmuseum.org