Early Life
She was born in Bukovina, Austria-Hungary (of Romanian Gypsy origin as mentioned in Sexus) as either Juliet Smerth or Juliet Smerdt, the daughter of Wilhelm and Frances Budd Smerth. She emigrated with her family to the United States and arrived there on July 10, 1907, aged five.
She would reside in New York City for much of the rest of her life, excepting a tour of Europe and stints in Paris.
She attended public school in New York. In Sexus, Henry Miller writes that June claimed she graduated from Wellesley College, but in Nexus, he writes that she never finished high school. Kenneth Dick, after interviewing June, quotes her as saying "My formal education amounted to about three and a half years of High School. I was working on a scholarship to Hunter College." Somewhere around 1917–1919, she went to work as a taxi dancer at Wilson's Dancing Academy (later, in 1931, renamed the Orpheum Dance Palace) in Times Square.
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