Part Eleven: How the Story Became a Celebrity Legend
In the five decades since 1974, the story of Jack Nicholson’s family secret has moved through several phases of public circulation, each phase adding its own distortions and simplifications.
The first phase was the original Time coverage and its immediate aftermath in 1974. At this point, the story was new, the source was a credible publication, and the specific details — which the magazine had evidently verified before printing them — were the most accurate version available.
The second phase was the inclusion of the story in biographical accounts of Nicholson that appeared through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Patrick McGilligan’s Jack’s Life, published in 1994, is the most substantive of these — a full biographical treatment that included research into June, into the possible candidates for biological paternity, and into the specific circumstances of the Nicholson family on the Jersey Shore. McGilligan’s work is generally cited as the most carefully researched biographical account of Nicholson’s early life.
The third phase was the transformation of the story into a “celebrity mystery” that circulated in popular media — entertainment news, trivia lists, celebrity biography television, and eventually online listicles — in simplified form. In this phase, the story tended to be compressed into a few sentences: Jack Nicholson thought June was his sister and Ethel May was his mother; he found out at 37 from a Time magazine reporter; it happened in 1974 during Chinatown.
The compression is not wrong, but it drops important nuance. It drops the genuine uncertainty about biological paternity. It drops the fact that June had been dead for eleven years before the revelation, and Ethel May for four years — details that change the emotional texture of what happened significantly. It sometimes attaches the revelation too tightly to the film Chinatown itself, implying a dramatic thematic resonance between the film’s incest plot and Nicholson’s family secret that is, at best, a coincidence of timing rather than a meaningful connection.