Both kinds of truth are real. The discovery of 1974 added the biological kind. It did not subtract the experiential kind.
What the New Jersey Shore Produced
Neptune City in 1937 was an unlikely point of origin for one of the most singular screen careers in American film. But origins are often unlike their outcomes.
The child born there to June Frances Nicholson, who was herself only nineteen, grew up in a household whose organizing secret was also its organizing strength: Ethel May Nicholson was a woman of formidable purpose, and that purpose extended to raising a child she had decided, whatever the circumstances, was going to be raised well. The beauty salon ran. The paintings got made. The child grew. The secret held.
Jack Nicholson moved west and spent a decade failing slowly, building toward something that kept receding, until Easy Rider arrived and changed the terms of everything. By the time the Time researcher picked up the phone in 1974, he had already demonstrated the thing that no origin story, however complicated, can fully explain: that he could inhabit a character with an intensity that made other people recognize something true about human experience.
What the family arrangement gave him, in addition to the general shape of his early life, was a specific kind of experience: being raised in a household organized around something that was not quite what it appeared. He did not know this consciously. He was not secretly aware that his family’s presentation differed from its reality. But he was formed in that household, and the household itself was formed around the management of a significant complexity.