There is a phone call that Jack Nicholson has described as one of the most dramatic moments of his life. It did not come from a studio, a director, or a producing partner. It came from a reporter at Time magazine.
The year was 1974. Nicholson was thirty-seven years old, among the most talked-about actors on the planet, a man whose face had graced more magazine covers in the previous five years than almost anyone else in Hollywood. He was, by every external measure, a person who knew who he was and where he had come from.
Then the reporter told him something that rearranged the basic facts of his existence.
The woman he had called his sister for thirty-seven years was actually his mother.
The woman he had called his mother for thirty-seven years was actually his grandmother.
And neither woman was alive to explain it.
June Nicholson, born 1918, the person he had known as his older sister — the gap between them always explained as the wide spread between siblings — had died of liver cancer in 1963, when Jack was twenty-six. By the time the phone call came in 1974, she had been dead for eleven years. Whatever she had wanted to say to him, whatever she had thought about saying, was now permanently unsayable.
Ethel May Nicholson, the woman who had raised him as her son, the woman he had called his mother and meant it, had died in 1970. She had been the last living person who had been present at the beginning, who had known every layer of the arrangement and chosen, to the end, not to disturb it.