Noel Parmentel Jr., a literary gadfly with some famous friends, dies at 98

NEW YORK (AP) — Noel E. Parmentel Jr., an essayist, pundit, filmmaker and man about town who satirized politicians across ideology, dated and helped promote a young Joan Didion and otherwise charmed and infuriated New York’s literary elite, has died at age 98.

Parmentel’s longtime partner, Vivian Sorvall, told The Associated Press that he had been in failing health in recent weeks and died Saturday at the West Haven VA Medical Center in Connecticut.

A New Orleans native and World War II Marine who moved to Manhattan in the 1950s, Parmentel was an influencer in the city’s political and cultural scene without ever completing a full-length book or otherwise becoming widely known. He had the clout to advance the careers of Didion and other younger writers, and the nerve to help convince Norman Mailer to run for mayor in 1969, a wild campaign that ended with Mailer and running mate Jimmy Breslin losing decisively. Around the same time, Parmentel appeared in two Mailer films and collaborated with director Richard Leacock on the acclaimed documentaries “Chiefs” and “Inside the KKK.”

Among friends, the white-suited Parmentel was so much a character that they couldn’t help writing about him. Dan Wakefield, in the acclaimed memoir “New York in the Fifties,” remembered him as a “tall, shambling New Orleans freelance pundit” and “the most politically incorrect person imaginable.” Author-journalist Thomas Powers thought him the kind of man who “would finish the bourbon and smoke your last cigar while your wife fumed in the kitchen, but he was quick to do anything he could for a friend.” Didion’s husband, author John Gregory Dunne, regarded Parmentel as a mentor who taught him ”to accept nothing at face value, to question everything, above all to be wary.”

“From him I developed an eye for social nuance, learned to look with a spark of compassion upon the socially unacceptable, to search for the taint of metastasis in the socially acceptable,” Dunne wrote, adding that Mailer once told him: “I must love him, otherwise I”d kill him.”

In the late 1980s, filmmaker Jim McBride named a wily, white-suited defense attorney after Parmentel in “The Big Easy,” a New Orleans-based thriller in which the Parmentel character is played by Charles Ludlum.

Didion was the most famous of his many companions. They met at a New York party in the mid-1950s, when Didion had just graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. Parmentel, who would remember Didion as uncommonly gifted and ambitious, was well placed enough to help her get her essays in the conservative National Review and to find a publisher for her debut novel, “River Run,” which she dedicated in part to “N.” In an Esquire article from 1962, he referred to her as “Joan Didion, the fantastically brilliant writer and Vogue editor, who, at 26, is one of the most formidable creatures heard in the land since the young Mary McCarthy.”

But by the mid-1960s, Didion and Parmentel had broken up and Didion, at Parmentel’s suggestion, was seeing Dunne. Didion and Dunne would move to the West Coast, and she would look back unforgettably in the widely read essay “Goodbye to All That,” in which she wrote of Parmentel, “It was very bad when I was 28. I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other.” Parmentel later contended that he and Didion parted after he told her he didn’t want to get married and have children.

Now living on opposite ends of the country, Didion and Parmentel remained in touch, whether through letters, visits or in Didion’s imagination. She had featured a charismatic womanizer in “River Run,” and did so again in her breakthrough work of fiction, “Play It As It Lays.” In Didion’s “The Book of Common Prayer,” published in 1977, the similarities between Parmentel and the character Warren Bogart were so obvious that friends called him to sympathize and Parmentel considered suing.

“In the end I wouldn’t do it,” he told author Lili Anolik for her 2024 book, “Didion and Babitz,” adding that he never forgave her. “After the book came out, she tried to call me, she tried to write me, but I wouldn’t take her calls or write her back.”

Parmentel never quite settled down professionally. He attempted and abandoned numerous film projects and wrote for various newspapers and magazines, including Commonweal, Newsweek, the National Review and the liberal weekly The Nation, adapting his approach to the tastes of his assumed readers. He didn’t specialize in narrative, but in parody, with such essays as “The Acne and the Ecstasy” and takedowns of public figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to John Lindsay, the young New York City mayor whose glamorous public image Parmentel likened to an “effluvia of total goo-goo.”

Parmental was married in his 20s to Peggy O’Neill, with whom he had two children. In his latter years, Parmentel lived in suburban Connecticut and retained a wry, elevated style, even when writing to a local newspaper. In one letter to The Hour in Norwalk from 2017, titled “There’s No Place Like Home,” he praised government officials for preventing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from deporting Nury Chavarria, a mother of four who had been offered sanctuary from the Rev. Reverend Hector Ortero of New Haven’s Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal Church.

“While full of admiration for Pastor Otero and his congregation (who taught us what the noun ‘Christian’ really means), I was disappointed that no Norwalk church was first to come forward. Accordingly, for penance, (and since today is the Sabbath) let’s hear your bells ring in triumph,” he wrote.

“One more thing: I hope the matchless Norwalk Mattress Company will offer Ms. Chavarria one of their ‘Finest Sleeping Substances Known to Man’ (in this case ‘Woman’) so she can finally get the night’s rest she deserves.”