The decision the magazine reportedly made was to contact Nicholson before publishing. Whether this was out of professional courtesy, ethical consideration, or the practical recognition that a cooperative subject makes for a better story, the result was that Nicholson learned what the magazine had found through a phone call from a reporter or researcher rather than through the published text.
That phone call is the moment that multiple accounts converge on, with some variation in detail. What is consistent: someone from Time called Nicholson. They told him what they had found. The information included at minimum the claim about June’s biological relationship to him, and it also apparently included information about his biological father — a claim that someone was alive who might be his father, a detail that surprised him and that added another dimension to what was already a significant revelation.
Nicholson’s immediate response, by accounts he himself has given, was not disbelief but verification-seeking. He reached out to his aunt Lorraine — the woman he had always known as his sister Lorraine — and confronted her with what the reporter had told him. Lorraine confirmed it. She did not deny that June was his biological mother. She acknowledged the arrangement that had been in place for thirty-seven years.
One source — the Grunge.com summary drawing on multiple biographical accounts — describes Nicholson saying he called Lorraine’s husband, known by the nickname Shorty, in shock after the phone call: “A guy calls me on the phone, and says that my father is still alive, and that Ethel May wasn’t really my mother, that June was my mother.” Whether these are his precise words or a paraphrase of an account he gave in an interview is not entirely clear from secondary sources, but the emotional content — the combination of shock at the revelation about June and Ethel May, and additional shock at the claim about a potential living biological father — is consistent across accounts.