That is four people — June, Ethel May, John, and Lorraine — who held the same secret across three decades. That is, by any measure, a remarkable act of collective silence.
The one person who gives some specificity to the household’s atmosphere and relationships is Nicholson himself, in the various interviews he has given over the years. He has described Ethel May with particular warmth, sometimes with something close to wonder — a woman who kept her beauty salon, painted in oils, maintained a household, and apparently never once cracked under the pressure of the fact she was living with. He has described her as someone with genuine artistic sensibility, someone who encouraged his own imaginative tendencies.
He has described June less often, and with a somewhat different register. She was his sister, in his experience, and she died when he was twenty-six. Whatever complexity the retrospective understanding of their relationship would later add, his experience of her at the time of her death was as an older sibling. The grief was real. The category it was filed under was not.
Part Three: June as a Person, Beyond the Family Arrangement
June Frances Nicholson was born in 1918 and died in 1963. She was forty-four or forty-five years old when she died. Those dates contain a life that has often been reduced, in the telling of this story, to a single fact: she was Jack Nicholson’s biological mother, not his sister. But she was more than the arrangement her family made with her pregnancy.