This was a practice documented in many families across many communities and decades. The historical and sociological literature on family secrets and illegitimacy contains numerous examples of grandparents raising grandchildren as their own while the biological mother occupied a sibling role in the household. It was not unique. It was, in many communities, one of the standard responses to a situation that the dominant social framework made impossible to handle openly.
The sealed-records architecture of mid-twentieth century American adoption law reinforced this broader culture of secrecy. Beginning in 1917, states began sealing adoption records to protect the legal fiction of biological parentage. Amended birth certificates — documents that listed adoptive or raising parents as biological parents — became the norm. Original records became inaccessible. The architecture of law backed the architecture of family silence: both were built on the same premise, that the truth of origins was something that should be contained rather than disclosed.
Ethel May filing a false or amended document that presented Jack as her son rather than her grandson was, in this context, a legally supported act. The state apparatus for managing these situations was designed to make the redefinition official and permanent. Whatever document exists or existed recording Jack Nicholson’s parentage reflects the legal solution that was available and frequently used in exactly these circumstances.
For June, the pressures were different but not lighter. She was the person who had to continue living inside the arrangement — who had to be June the sister rather than June the mother for the rest of her life, whenever she was in proximity to the household she had come from. Her entertainment career gave her a measure of distance from the family’s daily life; she was not always present, not always in Neptune City, not always in the role of the older sister watching a child she had borne grow up and call someone else Mom.