Part Eight: The 1974 Reporting and the Evidence Behind It
The Time magazine investigation that uncovered the Nicholson family arrangement came during the preparation of a profile tied to the release of Chinatown. The film was released on June 20, 1974, and Time ran a cover story connected to that release. In the preparation of that story, researchers were doing what profile researchers do: building background on the subject, examining family history, cross-referencing publicly available records, following up on details that did not add up.
What did not add up, in the Nicholson background, was the family chronology. The specific mechanism by which the discrepancy was identified is not fully documented in the public record. But the general process of such investigations in the 1970s was straightforward: researchers would check birth records, census records, newspaper archives, and similar documentation. A birth certificate that listed parents differently from the story a subject had been telling would be one way the discrepancy could surface. An age gap between siblings that, when checked against records, did not correspond to what the subject believed would be another.
Whatever the specific trigger, the Time researchers found something that contradicted the family narrative Jack Nicholson had been living with. They found that the woman he had been calling his sister was not his sister. They found that the woman he had been calling his mother was not his mother.
This discovery put the magazine in an unusual position. They were not exposing a crime or a public wrongdoing. They were not uncovering something that bore directly on Nicholson’s public conduct or professional integrity. They had stumbled onto a private family secret, one that the family had maintained for decades, and whose revelation would primarily affect the person who had been excluded from knowledge of it — the subject of their profile.