Nancy Reagan Marks 90th Birthday With 'Arc of Grace'

Nancy Reagan will mark her 90th birthday today at a luncheon that longtime friend Ruth Jones is sponsoring to honor the former first lady, according to The Daily Beast.

Nancy’s actual age was a couple of years off until she and husband Ronald Reagan moved into the White House. “I told a little fib,” she acknowledged in 'fessing up to the fact that she had claimed her birthday was July 6, 1923, to make herself younger when she was an aspiring actress named Nancy Davis.

Jones, whose husband headed Northrop Corp., hosts the birthday lunch every year to salute the woman with indomitable spirit, despite the frailties of age.

The Daily Beast’s profile of the birthday girl notes her changing image: “Looking back on the various stages of Nancy Reagan’s life, Carl Anthony, the author of a dozen books about presidential wives and families, finds what he calls ‘an arc of grace’ that has brought her to a very different place in the American imagination than the shallow ‘Queen Nancy’ the public initially saw when she came to Washington wearing designer clothes and wanting new china for the White House.”