Jack
The Great Seducer
Chapter OneThe Prince of Summer
Just as Nicholson ultimately became remote and unattainable for Cynthia Basinet, so were his parents forever distant from Nicholson. "I became conscious of very early emotions about not being wanted," he said, "feeling that I was a problem to my family as an infant." Quite literally, his parents would never permit him to know them -- not even their real names or exact relationships.
According to one theory, his father was a man named Don Furcillo-Rose, who impregnated Nicholson's mother, June Frances Nicholson, then a beautiful, red-haired, seventeen-year-old New Jersey girl and aspiring movie star, who'd been courted by gangsters and prizefighters, and appeared as a showgirl in a Leonard Sillman revue on Broadway. Furcillo-Rose, a song-and-dance man who'd worked the Jersey Shore with various bands, was married to another woman and had already fathered a son. Angry and outraged, June's mother, Ethel May, banished him from her pregnant daughter's presence in 1936, months before the birth of Jack Nicholson.
According to another theory, Nicholson's father was a bandleader/pianist/dance-studio owner who'd played the Jersey circuit with Jackie Gl ... read full excerpt from Jack: The Great Seducer ebook
