The second name was Edgar Kirschfeld, who performed under the name Eddie King and worked as a musician and booking agent. McGilligan described him as a figure in June’s life during the relevant period. The specifics of the claim, and the evidence behind it, belonged to the recorded memory of people close to June during her years in the entertainment world — people whose accounts McGilligan gathered and weighed, and whose testimonies he presented as competing possibilities rather than settled fact.
Nicholson’s own position was stated clearly and has not changed: he declined genetic or documentary investigation into his paternity. His reasons, to the extent he articulated them, related to a settled sense of identity that did not require biological confirmation. He knew who he was. He had become who he was in circumstances that were now more fully understood. The identity of a biological father who had not raised him, and who in most versions of the story had played no role in his upbringing, did not seem to him to be a wound that needed surgical address.
This is a position that some readers have found puzzling, and that others have found admirable. It becomes more legible when placed against the specific facts of his situation: by 1974, he was thirty-seven years old. He had spent those years in a household defined by the women in it. He had left that household at eighteen. He had built a career, a public persona, a set of relationships, a way of being in the world. The biological father, whoever he was, had not participated in any of that. The grandmother who raised him had died four years before. The biological mother who was presented as his sister had died eleven years before.