The parallel to Nicholson’s own situation — a man who would later discover he had come from somewhere different than he had believed — is one that commentators have noted over the years. It should be treated with caution: Five Easy Pieces was made before the 1974 discovery, and Nicholson was not playing a version of his own unknown history. He was playing a character created by writer Adrien Joyce (later known as Carol Eastman). The resonance is an interpretive one, and it remains resonance rather than documentary evidence.
What is documented is that by 1974 — by the time the Chinatown coverage was being prepared and the Time researcher was doing background work — Jack Nicholson was among the most discussed actors in American cinema. His face was on the covers of magazines. He was the subject of profiles in publications that paid researchers to dig into the backgrounds of their subjects. The fame that had arrived sideways through Easy Rider had grown into something that made him a person whose life story was considered of public interest.
Fame creates visibility. Visibility invites investigation. Investigation, in this case, uncovered something that three decades of family silence had not.
Extended Section: The Ethics of the Secret and Its Disclosure
The family arrangement that the Nicholsons maintained from 1937 to 1974 raises questions that exist at the intersection of private family ethics and broader social considerations. Those questions do not have clean answers, but they deserve examination.
The decision to raise Jack as Ethel May and John’s son rather than as June’s was made under specific social pressures that have been described earlier in this article. It was a practical response to a situation that the social framework of the time treated as a crisis. The people who made it were not, in any documented account, people of unusual cruelty or unusual selfishness. They were people who made a choice available to them, under pressures that were real, in circumstances that offered them a limited set of options.