That gap — between the experienced relationship and the biological one — is at the center of everything that makes the Jack Nicholson story worth understanding.
Part Two: The Household He Understood As a Child
Neptune City sits on the Jersey Shore, in Monmouth County, about fifty miles south of New York City. In the 1930s and 1940s it was a modest working-class town, part of a shore community that swelled in summer with day-trippers from Newark and Trenton and shrank back to its permanent population in autumn. The ocean was there, but it was not the glamorous ocean of the Hamptons. It was the working ocean, the Sunday-afternoon ocean, the ocean that people rode buses to reach.
The Nicholson household on the Jersey Shore was, by most available accounts, a functional and warm one. Ethel May was by all descriptions a woman of formidable personality — strong, opinionated, not easily pushed around. She had a beauty salon in the home, which meant the house had a steady flow of neighborhood women coming and going, and Ethel May was the center of that social world. John was quieter, more background, the window dresser who came home in the evenings and occupied the edges of a household that Ethel May ran.
June, born in 1918, was the older of the two daughters by about eleven years — she was approximately eleven years older than her supposed sibling Jack, nineteen years older than him in reality. Lorraine was the other daughter, born somewhere between June and Jack in the family’s official timeline. The actual birth order and ages have been described somewhat differently in different sources, but what is consistent is that there were two women Jack believed to be his sisters, and that both were older than he was, and that both were part of the household he grew up in.