Nancy Reagan married well. A starlet who never came close to shuffling free of the suffix, she wed a marginally more successful Hollywood player who graduated from the studio system to the political machine. He enjoyed shocking success, first in the California Governor’s mansion and then the White House.

As an older First Lady, she always displayed grace and looked the part, advised the children to simply “just say no” the way a grandmother can because she doesn’t have the responsibility of actually raising the kids. She was a mixed blessing for the country, asinine with astrology and awful on AIDS but admirable with Alzheimer’s. Perhaps most importantly, she was on the right side of history when a thaw in the Cold War seemed possible. The stars were aligned correctly.

The opening of the great critic Tom Carson’s MTV obituary of the First Lady:

Once upon a time, a now-forgotten saloon singer named Francis Albert Sinatra recorded a tune called “Nancy (With the Laughing Face).” A sentimental fellow whenever he wasn’t threatening mayhem to anyone who dared to criticize him, Frank thought it had been composed in honor of his newborn daughter, and the songwriters decided they’d let him roll with that illusion. It wasn’t the truth, but it was only a song. 

Decades later, “Nancy (With the Laughing Face)” entered political history. Now a lot burlier, more reliant on toupees, and even more prone to threatening mayhem to anyone who dared to criticize him, the self-same Frank Sinatra sang it — with revised lyrics — at Ronald Reagan’s inaugural. What’s a bungled notion of hailing your daughter compared to celebrating the new first lady of the United States?

The sad thing is that Nancy Reagan’s face was never exactly renowned for its bubbly gift of childish laughter. She did have a nice smile, like a superbly arranged bunch of white bullets greeting you below two anxious, frozen blueberries. But spontaneity wasn’t her specialty. The facial expression she was most famous for — others had tried, but she perfected it — was the Adoring Wife as Ronnie made one more of his gazillion speeches. At least on TV, her signature was tension disguised as pride.

She had reasons for the tension. Yet she also had reasons for the pride.•

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Sinatra, that erstwhile Liberal Democrat, supporting his Hollywood buddy Reagan at the 1980 Republican Convention. “Harry Truman played the piano…Nixon played the piano…they could entertain you also,” he said in defense of the aspiring Actor-in-Chief. Chris Wallace and Lynn Sherr do the honors. Lousy audio, but still worth it.