The marriage between Furcillo and his first wife, actress Shannon O’Connell, was apparently either failing or formally dissolving by the time he and June were together. According to some accounts, he and June married in 1936, the year before Jack’s birth — but if that marriage occurred, it was technically bigamous at the time, because Furcillo’s prior marriage had not yet been legally dissolved. The sequence of relationships here is difficult to pin down precisely, and some secondary sources conflict on the details.
What is not disputed is that June became pregnant, and that the question of who the father was was not cleanly resolved even at the time. Furcillo later claimed paternity. But biographer Patrick McGilligan, who wrote a detailed biography of Nicholson titled Jack’s Life, identified another candidate: a man named Eddie King, born Edgar A. Kirschfeld, who was Latvian-born and who served as June’s manager in the entertainment world. McGilligan suggested that King may have been the actual biological father.
The picture that emerges from these details is of a young woman in her late teens and early twenties living in a world of entertainment venues, romantic entanglements with older men, and the specific kind of precariousness that attached to women who tried to build careers in performance in the 1930s. June was not living a sheltered life when she became pregnant. She was living a complicated one.
What happened when the pregnancy became visible is not captured in any document that has been made public. The family decision to raise the child as Ethel May and John’s son must have been made, in the family’s telling of events, at around the time of the birth or sometime in the months preceding it. The decision required June’s cooperation — or perhaps more than cooperation, perhaps active participation in her own redefinition as a sister rather than a mother.