Joy Hodges, 88; Dancer, Big-Band Singer Helped Reagan’s Acting Career

Joy Hodges, 88, a big-band vocalist and dancer in Broadway musicals and motion pictures who once encouraged a young radio announcer and aspiring actor named Ronald Reagan, died Jan. 19 in a Palm Desert nursing home after a stroke.

A native of Des Moines, Iowa, Hodges was on screen from the mid-1930s, beginning with a role as leader of a girls’ musical group in “To Beat the Band” in 1935. Over the next five years she made a dozen films, appearing usually as a showgirl or singer, and, in 1939’s “Boy Meets Joy,” as herself.

Hodges befriended Reagan in Des Moines, where he was an announcer and sportscaster and she sang on radio station WHO. When he was assigned to cover the Chicago Cubs’ spring training on Catalina Island in 1937, he stopped in Hollywood to visit Hodges and ask her advice about getting into acting.

She arranged an interview for him with her agent’s boss, Bill Meiklejohn, who negotiated a Warner Bros. contract for him. Reagan kept in touch with Hodges by letter and telephone for 60 years, and invited her to the White House when he was president.

The singer performed with bands led by such well-known figures as Ozzie Nelson, and during World War II with the Glenn Miller Orchestra.

On Broadway, she was proudest of her role in George M. Cohan’s 1937 “I’d Rather Be Right,” in which she introduced the song “Have You Met Miss Jones.” Hodges also appeared in such shows as “Best Foot Forward” in 1941 and “No, No Nanette” in 1978.