John Nicholson — the man Jack grew up calling his father — appears less clearly in the historical record of this story. He was Ethel May’s husband and Jack’s nominal father, a quieter figure in a household dominated by his wife’s personality. He worked as a department store window dresser, which required a specific kind of visual and creative skill and which was also, in the Depression and wartime years, stable employment rather than glamorous work. Some accounts suggest that John may have known the truth about Jack’s parentage; others suggest he may have been told a version of it without being told the full story. The record does not resolve this clearly.
What is consistent is that the household Jack Nicholson grew up in was Ethel May’s creation. The relationships in it, the identities, the arrangements — Ethel May was the organizing force. When Jack says, in later interviews, that he was impressed by the ability of the people around him to keep the secret, it is Ethel May he is primarily referring to, the woman who held the center of the arrangement together for the longest time, with the most proximity to the person who would eventually need to find out.
Part Five: The Historical Pressures Around the Arrangement
The Nicholson family’s arrangement was not invented in a vacuum. It was one response to a set of social pressures that operated in American life — particularly in working-class Catholic communities in the Northeast — with considerable force in the 1930s and persisted, in varying degrees, for several more decades.