Word: bailey
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Bailey, won't you please come home?" These days, any enterprising traveler in the Far East can hear the answer-a firm no-from Bill Bailey himself...
Well, almost himself. Billy Bailey is 73 and runs Singapore's Coconut Grove, an obscure and homey bar (no unescorted women allowed) next door to a Buddhist nunnery on Singapore's Cuppage Road. A guitar keeps the air moving. The drinks are on the level, and the talk is good, since Iowa-born, ex-Vaudevillian Bailey does most...
...Bill Bailey ought to know. Born in 1886, the son of a patent-medicine hawker, he learned song-and-dance routines to help sell the family product: Bailey's Gypsy Liniment. At 120-proof, the stuff worked like magic. Later, in vaudeville, Bill hoofed up with a singer named Dave Hodges, who changed his name to Barnum so the pair could work their way around the country as Bailey & Barnum. They were a sort of circus minimus until a Manhattan impresario gave them a five-minute spot in Fred and Adele Astaire's Lady, Be Good. The playbill...
From the circuits and the speakeasies, Bailey & Barnum began picking up about $900 a week. But as Bill tells it now, in 1929 he saw the stock-market crash coming at him one way and talkies the other, so he broke up the old act and left the country. With his wife, he drifted east via South Africa and Australia, did routines in Peking, Tsingtao, Manila, Java and Shanghai. Then he put in two weeks at Singapore's famed Raffles Hotel, looked over the city and decided: "This is the place...
Like Old Black Joe. When the British liberated Singapore in 1945, the Baileys wandered out of prison and into town, found a house marked ENEMY PROPERTY. Bill added a note of his own-"Occupied by Bill Bailey"-and moved in. The couple liked the place, settled down, soon turned it into the Coconut Grove. Old Trouper Bailey had come home at last...