The claim about a living biological father was a separate and additional piece of information, one that carried its own weight. June’s biological relationship to Jack was confirmable by family members. The question of his biological father was harder: it involved the uncertainty that had existed at the time of his birth, the multiple possible candidates (Donald Furcillo and, per McGilligan’s research, Eddie King), and the complication that the person who would have had the clearest knowledge — June herself — was eleven years dead.
The Time magazine story, as ultimately published, apparently reported some version of this discovery. The exact text of the original Time reporting has not been widely reproduced in the secondary sources available for this research, which makes it difficult to state with precision what the magazine printed versus what it held back, what it confirmed through records versus what it attributed to family sources, and what the exact sequence of the reporter’s discovery and its disclosure to Nicholson looked like.
What is consistent across multiple sources is: the magazine’s research triggered the revelation; Nicholson was contacted before publication; he confirmed the truth with Lorraine; and the story became part of the public record. Subsequent biographical work, including Patrick McGilligan’s Jack’s Life, examined the family history with more depth and specificity, adding details about Donald Furcillo, about Eddie King, and about the specific circumstances of June’s pregnancy that the original Time report may not have included.
The falsification of records is mentioned in some accounts: one version holds that a false or amended birth certificate was filed in 1954, when Jack needed identification documentation — perhaps for the military enlistment that followed a few years later, or for some other official purpose. If accurate, this detail means that the documentary apparatus of the arrangement extended beyond the original birth record to a mid-1950s document produced when Jack was a teenager. This would also mean that the false record was created or confirmed not in the chaos of 1937 but at a point when Jack was already seventeen and fully formed in his understanding of his family relationships.