Noel Parmentel Jr., the Man Joan Didion Left Behind

Two years ago, in her Atlantic cover story “Chasing Joan Didion,” Caitlin Flanagan claimed that, in 1996, “a writer for New York magazine revealed something that had been carefully protected from the press, and that gives [‘Goodbye to All That,’ Didion’s 1967 essay about leaving New York] a completely different meaning: What’s tearing her apart is a love affair that’s ended.”

I was that writer, and Flanagan wasn’t precisely correct. A 1979 New York Times profile of Didion noted that she had lived with another writer before marrying John Gregory Dunne and quoted what she had written in Life about their breakup: “I remember leaving [him] … one bad afternoon in New York, packing a suitcase and crying while he watched me.” Didion did not name the man, but he was Noel E. Parmentel Jr., who died on August 31 at 98.

“Anyone who knew anything about New York then knew Noel,” Dan Wakefield wrote in New York in the Fifties, where I first learned of him. “He savaged the right in the pages of The Nation, would turn around and do the same to the left in National Review, and blasted both sides in Esquire — and everyone loved it.” In the ’60s, Noel made documentaries with Richard Leacock, wrote speeches for Barry Goldwater, persuaded Norman Mailer to run for mayor of New York, and was credited with what may still be the most famous line about Richard Nixon: “Would you buy a used car from this man?”

My piece said nothing about a romantic relationship between Didion and Noel. He had yet to speak on the record about it, and since he was both a friend of mine and very private about her, I decided to quote a roommate of Didion’s who called Noel “her éminence grise, her taskmaster.” For the rest, people would have to read between the lines.

At the beginning of our interview, Noel was uneasy: “It goes without saying, so I’ll say it. I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t think it would help you.” Helping people was what Noel did, though I didn’t know the half of it when we met in 1993. That was the year I read his piece “The Skim Scam at Stew’s Dairy” in The Nation and was flabbergasted: Parmentel was alive! And writing! And just down the road from my parents! A glorified intern at the ailing Spy, I asked permission to assign Noel a piece, and the editor, Tony Hendra, agreed. Noel wanted to write about the recently disgraced Senator Bob Packwood, assuring me that his expenses would be low “since I don’t drink anymore.”

Spy soon folded, but Noel kept in touch, inviting me to the novelist Robert Stone’s place on the millpond in Westport, where he sometimes house-sat, and to his home in Fairfield, Connecticut, where he lived with Vivian Sorvall and her two children. As funny in person as he was on the page, Noel also made me laugh without trying to. “Nice fellow, bad influence,” he said of Allen Ginsberg, with whom he shared a cab after leaving the party where Norman Mailer stabbed his wife (they’d departed before the stabbing). Of Kiss’s Gene Simmons, he said the same. “You knew Gene Simmons?” my boyfriend asked. No, he’d just met him during the period when Simmons was dating Cher. “We didn’t do lunch,” Noel said. He didn’t do lunch with Roy Cohn, either, but Cohn had once offered to pay for a procedure to correct Noel’s deviated septum. Noel declined, and he sniffed so much throughout the 30 years I knew him that my father referred to him as Snuffleupagus.

Though Noel wrote (“writer’s block permitting,” as he put it) mainly about politics, he and I talked almost exclusively of literature. “You had to be well read in the ’30s and ’40s, ’cause if you weren’t, Edmund Wilson would call you out,” he once said. Noel himself did plenty of calling out, and I once appalled him by not having read H. Rider Haggard’s She. He was equally appalled when some bright young Ivy grad at Harper’s didn’t recognize a T.S. Eliot reference. (When he and Vivian were trying to make a movie of Ole Edvart Rølvaag’s Giants in the Earth, I looked up the name of Meg Ryan’s production company at his request. “Prufrock Pictures,” I told him. “Can’t be all bad,” he chuckled.) Though he had been estranged from Didion since the late 1970s, he still thought no one wrote better, and he said so often. It wasn’t just her sentences he admired but her integrity: “What’s that line? To ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth … that’s Joan.”

In some ways, I was as uncomfortable interviewing Noel as he was about being interviewed, so on the day we finally sat down with a tape recorder, it helped that he had brought along some notes from which he read. At the top of the page, he’d written “Religion.” “Joan used to go to confession at an Episcopal church in the East 70s, and she regularly consulted the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. It was where she got ‘In the Night Season,’ one of the working titles for Run River.” Money: “She was generous with it, though she didn’t have any.” Clothes (the obsession with Didion as a “style icon” hadn’t yet begun, but I told him she’d made a point of telling me she didn’t dress for Vogue): “Joan didn’t dress for success, oh no.” Dunne: “A better editor of her work than I ever was.”

Didion was long associated with The New York Review of Books, but its editors did not publish her until the early 1970s. Noel tried to get her into “the paper,” as Robert Silvers called it, as either a subject or an author, shortly after her first novel, Run River, appeared in 1963. (As is well known, Noel persuaded Ivan Obolensky to publish the book after Judith Jones and almost a dozen other editors had passed.) His idea was for his friend Walker Percy to review it. “Walker said no: ‘Lily [the protagonist] is a bad girl!’ You know Walker — family man. Exemplary. I said, ‘Walker, how about Madame Bovary?’” Since Percy was a name and Joan was not, Noel’s plan B was to get her to write about him for the Review. It was then that the Review’s Jason Epstein told Noel, “What do I want with some little nobody who writes for [William F.] Buckley?”

Neither in our interview nor at any other time did I ask about her struggle to have children with Dunne. But on more than one occasion, he talked to me about it — “entre nous.” A few years ago, he told me he’d been upset by the implication in The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Didion, that if she’d had a baby with him — Noel — she would have been on her own with it. “Why didn’t you marry Joan?” Vivian told me she’d asked Noel toward the end of his life. “I’d already failed at marriage,” he said. (That was in his 20s, a union that produced two children; he did not fail Vivian, however, with whom he spent 40 years.)

To read one recent book about Didion, one would assume Noel’s biggest failure was the way he responded to her novel A Book of Common Prayer. Her basing the character Warren Bogart on him was, he felt, a hostile act, and he had a lawyer send her a letter. “It’s a terrible thing — uncollegial and unprofessional — for a writer to threaten to sue another writer, especially with no legal grounds to stand on,” Evelyn McDonnell writes in The World According to Joan Didion. “It’s beyond despicable to attempt to harm the career of a former lover, one whose success has left you far behind, years after she escaped your control.”

Here’s another way to look at it, one that admittedly has nothing to do with literature or careers. To read a highly recognizable, deeply unflattering fictional portrait of yourself by a woman who is still your good friend, whose husband is still your good friend, and who named you a godfather of her child is beyond hurtful. Noel assured both me and Didion’s biographer that he never had the means or the serious intention to sue. But he did tell Didion at the time that he intended to piss on her grave (“’Cause we both know I’ll outlive you”). The year after the publication of A Book of Common Prayer, Dunne wrote in extravagant praise of Noel and his mentoring, but not naming him, in his collection Quintana & Friends. In 1990, this time in Esquire, Dunne again wrote of Noel without naming him, calling him “a close friend until we stopped speaking for whatever reason.” In our 1996 interview, Noel said, “I’m not sore anymore. I’m just sad.”

There is also a good deal of Noel in Didion’s other books, by no means all of it bad. Run River’s Ryder Channing, for instance, knows how to make a shy woman feel “open and happy” (“Shyness,” Noel repeatedly said, “is an attractive quality”), and he “seemed fascinated by the most minute details of life on the river.” Noel loved to talk about the towns in Iowa where my father grew up, he loved local journalism, and he loved what he called “genuine human beings.” More often than not, they were, in the eyes of the connected, big or little nobodies. And though he must have exasperated both editors of and subscribers to The Nation with his politics and frequently obscure high-low references — “I have one question for Noel E. Parmentel, Jr. Huh?” a 1995 letter to the editor read in full — he was a great friend to all underdog institutions. Here he is, appearing before the Senate in 1962 to decry a postal-rate revision he feared would be devastating to magazines, many of which, even then, were more precarious ventures than they might have seemed:

American magazines are not glamour operations. Most of them are edited out of grubby offices no advertising man, and few inhabitants of the New Senate Office Building, would tolerate. In short, the money is somewhere else …

I believe it would be a national tragedy if such magazines as The Nation, The New Republic, National Review, Commonweal, America, Harper’s, Commentary, and The Atlantic Monthly were to fold. It would be an irrevocable loss to America if such disparate independent voices as The Nation’s Carey McWilliams and National Review’s William F. Buckley were stilled …

There is a sense in which magazines taught America how to live. Magazines inspired the desire for doing things a little better, showed their readers how to cook, how to decorate a room, how to look like a Gibson girl, or Gloria Vanderbilt, or Jacqueline Kennedy, all with a Singer sewing machine and a printed pattern … Above all, magazines have made America think.

So tireless an advocate was Noel that several of my friends wondered why he hadn’t become an agent. To know him, though, was not to wonder at all: He couldn’t handle money; he could hardly keep track of phone numbers. “I’m a little understaffed,” he’d say, calling for the thousandth time for the contact information of a son or daughter or father or mother. Somehow, though, he always got and came through.

When I did a review for Salmagundi of Didion’s South and West: From a Notebook (2017), based on her reporting for two unrealized pieces in the ’70s, I noted that a collection of her later work could be titled After Noel. (In South and West, he is “N.”) Of his decades after Joan — their rupture occurred at almost the exact midpoint of his life — hardly anything, unsurprisingly, was said in the obituaries. But these were the years when he strove to be a better man, and he succeeded. So much is made of his drinking, so little of his quitting! In the second half of his life, Vivian says, he was sober with only a handful of lapses. He was still helping people (the last manuscript he sent me in hopes I could supply publishing leads: Diana de Vegh’s 2021 memoir, “JFK and the Radcliffe Girl”). And he was still funny. This summer, not long before he was hospitalized for the final time, he heard the news of the prisoner exchange with Russia that brought home Evan Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva, and Paul Whelan. Noel had one objection: “We shoulda swapped Trump.”