What is established is that the arrangement was made, was maintained, and produced the specific Jack Nicholson who grew up in Neptune City and Spring Lake and attended Manasquan High School and moved west and made the films he made. That specific man was the product of the specific household Ethel May built and maintained.
Other celebrity cases of similar revelations have been documented, most notably Bobby Darin, who discovered in 1968 at the age of thirty-two that the woman he had known as his mother was actually his grandmother and the woman he had known as his sister was actually his mother — an exact parallel to Nicholson’s situation, four years earlier in chronology and five years earlier in the subject’s age at discovery. Darin reportedly found the revelation devastating in a way that Nicholson has described his own experience as not being. The parallel cases suggest that this kind of family arrangement was not vanishingly rare and that the experience of discovering it in adulthood could produce very different responses in different people.
Extended Section: The Career That Fame Built While the Secret Held
The decade between Jack Nicholson’s arrival in California in the late 1950s and his breakthrough in Easy Rider in 1969 is a study in the specific kind of persistence that distinguishes people who eventually break through from people who do not.
He arrived in a Los Angeles that was in the late years of the studio system — the era in which the major studios controlled not only the films being made but the actors who made them, through long-term contracts that gave studios enormous power over their contract players. Nicholson was not a studio contract player. He was an outsider trying to find his way in, and the path for outsiders in the late 1950s ran primarily through the lower-budget productions, the B-movies, the exploitation films, the independent productions that operated outside the studio apparatus.