Noel Parmentel Jr., a literary gadfly with some famous friends, dies at 98
NEW YORK — 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 mid1950s, 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.”