None of this is to suggest that any of June’s relationships were coercive or exploitative in a documented way. The record does not support that specific claim. What it does support is the general picture of a young woman in her late teens and early twenties working in an environment that was considerably more complicated than a conventional job, with older men in positions of professional influence, in circumstances where personal and professional entanglement was not uncommon.
Donald Furcillo, the Italian-American showman whom June married in 1936, was nine years older than her. He was already married at the time, to actress Shannon O’Connell, though that marriage was apparently dissolving. The claim of bigamy in the Furcillo-June marriage, if accurate, reflects both the informality of marriage and divorce proceedings in that world and the specific complications of a young woman becoming legally attached to a man whose prior attachment had not been fully dissolved.
Furcillo’s later claim of paternity for Jack was made many years after the relevant events and was never confirmed by genetic testing. He lived until 1997, giving him ample time to observe Jack Nicholson’s career and to make a claim in the context of that career’s success. Whether his claim was sincere, or was motivated by connection to celebrity, or was an accurate statement of biological reality that he held throughout his life, is not resolvable from the available record.
June’s entertainment career, whatever form it took in the years between 1936 and her marriage (if the 1936 date is accurate) and the 1937 birth of Jack, effectively required her to continue after the birth — because she was not, in the family’s arrangement, raising a child. The child was Ethel May’s. June was, at least formally, the older sister in the household. Her ability to continue pursuing performance work was, in a certain reading, partially enabled by the arrangement that removed from her the daily obligations of motherhood.