Whether any false document still existed in 1974, and whether it played a role in either the Time researchers’ discovery or the subsequent confirmation of the arrangement, is not established in the available record.
The chain of events in 1974 can be summarized as follows: Time researchers found the discrepancy; a reporter or researcher called Nicholson; he called Lorraine; Lorraine confirmed; the story was reported. The specific moments within that chain — exactly what the researcher found and how, exactly what was said in each call, exactly what Lorraine said — are reconstructed from accounts given after the fact, primarily by Nicholson himself in various interviews, rather than from a contemporaneous document that captured the events in real time.
Part Nine: The Newly Understood Family Relationships
After the confirmation from Lorraine, what Jack Nicholson understood about his family was functionally different from what he had understood before.
The most fundamental change was in the two central relationships of his childhood. Ethel May, whom he had always called Mom, was now understood to be his maternal grandmother. The woman who had cut hair in the beauty salon, painted in oils, run the household, maintained the secret — she was his mother’s mother, and she had raised him as her own son for thirty-seven years. The emotional content of the relationship did not change with this information. What changed was the biological category it belonged to.
June, whom he had always called sis, was now understood to be his biological mother. She had been dead for eleven years. The grief he had felt when she died in 1963 was the grief of a brother, and that feeling was the feeling he had had. But the biological reality was different. She had given birth to him. She had then, for reasons the surviving record does not fully explain in her own words, agreed to or perhaps actively participated in the arrangement that made her a sister.