NEW YORK– Noel E. Parmentel Jr., an essayist, pundit, filmmaker, and about-town guy who satirized politicians of all ideologies, dated and helped promote a young Joan Didion, and otherwise charmed New York’s literary elite and enraged, died at the age of 98.
Parmentel’s longtime partner, Vivian Sorvall, told The Associated Press that his health had deteriorated in recent weeks and he died Saturday at the West Haven VA Medical Center in Connecticut.
Parmentel, a New Orleans native and World War II Marine who moved to Manhattan in the 1950s, was an influencer on the city’s political and cultural scene without ever completing a full-length book or otherwise becoming widely known have become. He had the power to advance the careers of Didion and other younger writers, and the audacity to convince Norman Mailer to run for mayor in 1969, a wild campaign that ended when Mailer and running mate Jimmy Breslin lost decisively . Around the same time, Parmentel appeared in two Mailer films and collaborated with director Richard Leacock on the critically acclaimed documentaries “Chiefs” and “Inside the KKK.”
Among friends, the white-clad Parmentel was such a character that they couldn’t resist writing about him. Dan Wakefield remembered him in the acclaimed memoir “New York in the Fifties” as a “tall, wobbly freelance pundit from New Orleans” and “the most politically incorrect person imaginable.” Author-journalist Thomas Powers thought he was the kind of man who would “eat the bourbon and smoke your last cigar while your wife is in the kitchen cooking, but he was quick to do whatever he could for a friend.” Didion’s husband, author John Gregory Dunne, considered Parmentel a mentor who taught him “not to accept anything at face value, to question everything and, above all, to be on guard.”
“From him I developed an eye for social nuance, I learned to look with a touch of compassion at the socially unacceptable, to look for the taint of metastasis in the socially acceptable,” Dunne wrote, adding that Mailer once told him, “ I have to love him, otherwise I would kill him.
In the late 1980s, filmmaker Jim McBride named a scheming, white-clad lawyer after Parmentel in “The Big Easy,” a New Orleans thriller in which the character Parmentel is played by Charles Ludlum.
Didion was the most famous of his many companions. They met at a party in New York in the mid-1950s, when Didion had just graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. Parmentel, who would remember Didion as extraordinarily gifted and ambitious, was well positioned to help her get her essays into the conservative National Review and find a publisher for her debut novel “River Run,” which she dedicated in part to ‘N .” In a 1962 Esquire article, he called her “Joan Didion, the fantastically brilliant writer and Vogue editor, who at 26 is one of the most formidable creatures heard in the country since the young Mary McCarthy.”
But by the mid-1960s, Didion and Parmentel had parted ways and Didion, at Parmentel’s suggestion, had a relationship with 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 really bad when I was 28. the one person who was closer to me than anyone else.” Parmentel later claimed that he and Didion split after he told her he did not want to get married or have children.
Now living on opposite sides of the country, Didion and Parmentel remained in touch, through letters, visits or in Didion’s imagination. She had played a charismatic womanizer in “River Run,” and did so again in her groundbreaking 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 clear that friends called on him to sympathize and Parmentel considered filing charges.
“In the end, I wouldn’t do it,” he told author Lili Anolik for her 2024 book, “Didion and Babitz,” adding that he has never forgiven her. “After the book came out, she tried to call me, she tried to write to me, but I wouldn’t take her calls or write her back.”
Parmentel never completely settled down professionally. He attempted and abandoned numerous film projects, and wrote for several newspapers and magazines, including Commonweal, Newsweek, the National Review and the liberal weekly The Nation, adapting his approach to the tastes of his presumed readers. He specialized not in stories but in parodies, with essays like “The Acne and the Ecstasy” and taking down public figures ranging from Henry Kissinger to John Lindsay, the young mayor of New York City whose glamorous public image Parmentel likened to an “outpouring of total goo-goo.”
Parmental married Peggy O’Neill in his twenties, with whom he had two children. In his final years, Parmentel lived in suburban Connecticut and maintained a wry, elevated style even when writing for a local newspaper. In a 2017 letter to The Hour in Norwalk entitled “There’s No Place Like Home,” he praised administration officials for preventing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from deporting Nury Chavarria, a mother of four who had been sheltered by the Rev. pastor. Hector Ortero of Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal Church in New Haven.
“While I was full of admiration for Pastor Otero and his congregation (who taught us what the noun ‘Christian’ really means), I was disappointed that no church in Norwalk came out first. Therefore, in penance (and since today is the Sabbath) let us hear your bells toll in triumph,” he wrote.
“One more thing: I hope the peerless 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 sleep she deserves.”
