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before liquor brought him down. We used to
all be friends. My husband Eugene I. Slocum was friends with Jack. We used to
have a lot of good times. But the grandfather got real down from drinking.
That's the way he died. The alcohol killed him.
"He was good to his kids, good to
Jack too, when he wasn't drinking.
"When they brought that baby in, I
was there. When they brought little Jack in. They
didn't tell me anything. They said it belonged to some girl that lived with
Ethel but I knew."
* * *
"I used to live two doors from the
Furcillo family," mused Eva Poinsette Adair, a halo of wispy white hair
framing her fragile face. "They were my best friends. Don's sister Mary
was one of my best friends. Don was the father, Don Furcillo. There were many
people that knew the story.
"I knew the story when he'd sit in my
lap. He was so adorable. He used to sit on my lap while she was doing my
hair. He was a doll. He was a good little boy. He was a little doll.
"Said she adopted him from a family
that had too many children. I played dumb. I didn't want to get involved,
kept my mouth shut that I knew anything.
"She told the people that she adopted
him from another family. Don't say anything. It's something that happened
that's all over.
"I wasn't a gossip.
"I knew when June was carrying
him."
* * *
The old timers remember, the old timers
always knew.
"I used to cut your son's hair,"
mused Red the Barber to Don Rose in the autumn of 1989, Red, a piece of Asbury Park history now. "I remember the grandfather
would bring the boy in, the old man haggard and drunk, half-crocked, and I
used to cut the boy's hair.
"I cut the hair of the grandfather,
the father and the son."
"We always knew about that son of
yours," he would tell Don Rose 52 years after the fact.
Fred Traverso, whose friendship with Don
went back to the old days, the Asbury Park days:
"He really loved that girl and she
loved him. Believe me when I tell you. I can remember June running through
the casino of the Monterey Hotel in Asbury Park to check up on Don. She loved him a lot.
"Don was a striking guy. He was a
woman's man, a woman's man. He used to fix me up on dates. We were what you
call 'womanizers', just like Jack. Now we've settled down. They make the best
husbands, you know.
"Don was going crazy at the time.
'You know I'm in trouble,' he told me and I can remembering him gesturing the
big belly with his hands -- 'June,' he whispered. 'I'm worried about my
mother, ' he told me. 'She's a good Catholic and doesn't want any scandal.'
"I used to give June $50 a few times
from Don.
"I remember Jack would come into
Mom's Kitchen to eat pizza after a basketball game. You know whose kid that
is? That's Don Rose's kid. It was Peyton Place. Everybody knew but Jack."
Louise Gatt, one of the original weekly
bridge players, a close cronie of Ethel Nicholson:
"Oh the women used to whisper,"
she would admit.
* * *
From the beginning Jackie was surrounded
by women and the adoration of women -- his mother Mud, his older sisters,
June, 18 years his senior and Lorraine, older by 16, grandmother Ella, and,
of course, the beauty parlor contingent, the cacophony of women in and out of
the house.
But there was something about men,
something about men that seized him.
For no sooner would a man come into the
house than little Jackie would have his hat on. He loved hats and he loved
men. If the baker came to the door or any man entered the house, Jack would
immediately want his hat to put on his head.
He was a natural from the beginning, a
magnetic child. And there it was, his premiere performance in the guise of
another as a two year old child, his first playful expedition into character
acting.
Jack, a great sentimentalist, still
collects hats, has a vast collection of hats, and hats have been striking and
significant in many of his films; the battered old football helmet of Easy
Rider proclaiming "M" for his own Manasquan High, the shiny
blue hard hat of Five Easy Pieces, the characteristic sailor cap of The
Last Detail, the fedora of 1930's Chinatown, the knitted watch cap
inside the Cuckoo's Nest.
Like John Joseph Nicholson, hats made the
man.
* * *
He would reappear like one of the ghosts
of Ironweed, at holiday and special family gatherings, John Joseph
Nicholson, with a baseball hat and glove for the boy, take him to the movies,
and he remained a part of their lives, his bond with Mud indestructible. They
never divorced.
But even to Jack's innocent young eyes,
his father was a ruin, a spectre that pained and quickly vanished.
The child would accompany the old man on
his excursions into obliteration at the local saloons.
"I used to go to bars with him as a
child and I would drink 18 sarsparillas while he'd have 35 shots of Three
Star Hennessey.
"But I never heard him raise his
voice; I never saw anybody be angry with him, not even my mother. He was just
a quiet, melancholy tragic figure, a very soft man," Jack was to gently
recall many years later, looking back at the haunted figure so deep in his
mind, the actor born out of the pain, somewhere in his soul, putting on a
performance to hide the hurt.
nicholson photo gallery
table of
contents
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