To have a child and then spend the rest of one’s life referring to that child as a sibling is not a small thing. It is a daily act of suppression, or perhaps, over time, of redefinition so complete that the suppression no longer feels like suppression. How June experienced those years — the years when Jack was a child and she was present, at least some of the time, as his older sister — is not accessible through the historical record. She did not write a memoir. She did not give interviews about the arrangement. She died of liver cancer in 1963 before anyone in the outside world had asked the question publicly.
The stage name she used, June Nilson, is significant in one small way: it was a professional separation, a name that allowed her entertainment career to exist somewhat apart from the Nicholson family identity she presented at home. In the entertainment world she was June Nilson. In the family house on the Jersey Shore she was June, Jack’s sister. These were not identities that necessarily needed to collide.
Her death at forty-four or forty-five from liver cancer placed a specific limitation on everything that came after. She died in 1963, eleven years before the Time reporter made the phone call. She died before Jack Nicholson became a recognizable name in American culture — before Easy Rider, before Five Easy Pieces, before Chinatown. She died, in other words, before the level of fame that prompted magazine researchers to dig into an actor’s family background with enough rigor to uncover what had been hidden.