Noel E. Parmentel Jr., a splenetic polemicist and political renegade who mentored Joan Didion, helped persuade Norman Mailer to run for mayor of New York and, as the son of a part-time automobile salesman, is credited with allaying Americans’ doubts. Richard M. Nixon in a single question – “Would you buy a used car from this man?” – Died Saturday at West Haven, Conn. He was 98 years old.
His death at the Veterans Affairs Hospital was confirmed by his longtime partner Vivian Sorval.
A hard-drinking transplant from New Orleans, who wore a vaguely embellished white suit, Mr. Parmentel leaned heavily toward libertarianism and the political right, both in his controversies and his palaver.
As a much-sought-after conversationalist in salons and salons, however, he counted less as a charismatic partisan than as an intellectual provocateur.
As a freelance essayist and film reviewer for magazines and a part-time documentarian, he sowed uncomfortable truths that were sure to engage audiences and amuse or enrage readers.
Former editor of The New York Times Book Review and William F. “Noel epitomized Manhattan in the mid-20th century,” said Buckley Jr.’s biographer Sam Tanenhaus.
“In uptown saloons and downtown barrooms, making friends, starting fights, turning friends into enemies, sometimes pitting them against each other and then brokering truces,” Mr. Parmentel was ubiquitous, Mr. Tanenhaus added in an email.
Mr. Parmentel defined himself as a “reactionary individualist,” viz and Wakefield recalled in his book “New York in the 50s” (1992), “Wasted the right in the pages of The Nation, the left did the same in National Review and blasted both sides in Esquire, and everybody loved it. It.”
His literary role as a promoter of Mrs. Didion There may have been a substantial inheritance, but it was not his only dependent. Another mentee, her future husband, a novelist John Gregory DunnIn his essay collection “Quintana and Friends” (1978), Mr. Parmentel wrote that Mr. Parmentel was “a respecter of no race or tradition or place,” his style “that of an axe-murderer, though funny.”
Mr Parmentel was quick to characterize those he disagreed with (or those who disagreed with him) as “phonies”, an ever-expanding category.
He distinguished them from those whom he found more or less unapproachable, and to whom he gave the benefit of the doubt—an eclectic group that included Senators Barry Goldwater, a conservative Republican, and Eugene McCarthy, a liberal Democrat; Mr. BuckleyFounder of National Review; Sociologist C. Wright Mills; Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Harlem Democrat; and Carmine Di Sapio, Tammany Hall boss.
As Ms. Didion’s “Grice par excellence, her taskmaster,” in the words of a friend, Mr. Parmentel introduced her to New York literacy, imbued her with a healthy skepticism, and helped elevate her to a leading novelist and so-called exponent. New Journalism. It was Mr. Parmentel, Ms. Didion’s ex-boyfriend, who introduced her to Mr. Dunn.
“From him I developed an eye for social subtlety,” Mr. Dunne wrote, “learned to look with a spark of compassion at the socially unacceptable, to detect the metastasizing stigma in the socially acceptable.”
The titles of Mr. Parmentel’s essays are a testament to the fact that social acceptability was never his goal.
During the 1969 New York mayoral campaign, he published an article in Esquire titled “Less Than Meets The Eye” against fellow Republican John V. condemned Lindsay — though joined by Gloria Steinem and a reporter Jack Newfield By persuading a liberal mailer to enter the Democratic primary, Mr. Parmentel inadvertently scuttled Lindsay’s re-election bid in November, when a conservative candidate, city controller Mario Procasino, won the party’s nomination.
“Everybody is for Lindsay,” Mr. Parmentel wrote. “All the right people and most of the wrong people.”
He Henry A. Kissinger harpooned in a 1971 Village Voice profile “Portnoy on the Potomac,” describing his subject as “more Sammy Glick than Metternich.” (That article led to a breach with Mr. Buckley.)
In a 1962 essay in Esquire titled “The Acne and Ecstasy,” Mr. Parmentel singled out the Young Americans for Freedom, a rising conservative group, as “perhaps the most fraternal political group since the International Brigades” founded by the Communists during the Spanish Revolution. Civil War.
That and the comic Marshall Dodge III Published a satirical book (illustrated by caricaturists David Levine) and produced a companion record album in 1964, both called “Folk Songs for Conservatives”. His acerbic lyrics probably leave right-wing audiences teetering less strongly than their liberal counterparts.
He was credited by Kerry McWilliamsThe editor of The Nation, compared Nixon to a used car salesman.
Mr. Parmentel appeared as an actor in Mailer’s films “Beyond the Law” (1968) and “Maidstone” (1970) and collaborated with the documentarian. Richard Leacock on “Campaign Manager” (1964), which explored how Goldwater won the presidential nomination from the Republican establishment; “Chiefs” (1968), about a police convention; and “Ku Klux Klan: The Invisible Empire,” aired on CBS in 1965.
Noel Edward Parmentel Jr. was born on June 21, 1926, in New Orleans to Noel and Hazel Bliss (French) Parmentel and grew up in the segregated Victorian neighborhood of Algiers. His father was listed as a car dealer in the 1930 census and later worked for the city government.
After a stint as a Marine in World War II serving on a cruiser in the Pacific, Noel returned to New Orleans to attend Tulane University, where he was president of his senior class. He graduated in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in history.
Although he was one of only four registered Republicans in Algiers, in 1948 he defeated Democrat President Harry S. Cast his first vote for Truman and turned against him early on.
“Party loyalty is not part of my DNA,” he said in an interview for this death row in 2022.
Mr. Parmentel later earned a master’s degree in American studies at the University of Minnesota, then moved to New York in the 1950s, where, as a wit and bon vivre, he inserted himself into its literary scene and soon found outlets for his writing.
“I did my Ph.D. could have gotten at Columbia,” he told Tracy Dougherty, author of “The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion” (2015), “but instead I got my education at a West End bar — a better choice.”
Mr. Wakefield wrote, “My main image is of Noel pacing my small, messy apartment on Jones Street, shaking ice cubes in his glass of bourbon, clearing his throat with a series of harrumphs, and uttering who was wrong and who, with some hulking New Orleans accent, The middle-aged Holden was not like Caulfield.”
In addition to Ms. Sorval, her survivors include a son, Fielding O’Neill, who was married in a divorce. They lived at Fairfield, Conn.
Mr. Parmentel claimed to find most people boring but would still host up to six soirées in one night. (“That’s how I met people,” he once explained. “My wife eventually filed for divorce, and who could blame her?”)
After meeting them, he never tired of writing about them, even the boring ones, snarling his friends and political fellow travelers with as much gusto as his adversaries.
Mr. Parmentel was staunchly anti-communist but despised the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a set of Cold War loopholes. He also opposed the United Nations. Once asked about the UN, he replied, “I want to give Red China a seat in the UN: ours.”
The closest he might come to articulating his political platform was in a 1962 Esquire essay.
“The New Conservatism has become a Dadaist collage, where libertarians combine with intellectual Untermenschen to eradicate individual choice and abridge the right to privacy; Where civilized minds seek the company of Yahoo; where honorable men enjoy social intercourse with political hustlers; Where the official voice in the wilderness Disperses its space on trifles; and where it seems necessary to arrange upper-case persons.
Still, for all its faults, he added, the conservative movement remains “the only defense left to individualists and libertarians against the bureaucratic cliché, encroachment, snooper, organizer, egalitarian, joiner, faker, leveller, utilitarian, race-mixer, Conformist, censorious, mass-sectarian.”
And Mr. Parmentel, what about that man? Ms. Didion is said to have embodied him in the character of Warren Bogart in her satirical novel “A Book of Common Prayer” (1977).
She wrote, “He was brought up not to believe in ‘hard work’ or ‘self-reliance,’ but in the infinite power of personal appeal, the begging of favors, the intervention of one or another kind Virgin. He had a vague but certain conviction that the secrets of good fortune Access was arranged similarly to access to the Boston Club, a New Orleans institution to which he did not belong but always had a guest card.
“He was up to nothing,” Ms. Didion wrote. “He was an outsider who lived off his ability to manipulate insiders.”
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