I first came across the name Noel Parmentel Jr. in 2022, when I found a letter Eve Babitz had written to her cousin Patricia Helton in 1976. “There are certain people who never actually venture into my scanning region, people [like] Noel Parmentel Jr. who I’ve heard about all my life from various people who’ve been torn to shreds by him and his charm,” she wrote. “Joan Didion’s next novel is apparently about Noel Parmentel Jr.”
Immediately I reached out to the writer Dan Wakefield, close to both Joan, whose friend he’d been since the late ’50s, and Eve, whose boyfriend he’d been in 1971 and whose friend thereafter. The people they knew, he knew.
“Haven’t you heard about Noel Parmentel Jr.?” he asked after I read him the relevant portion of the letter.
“No,” I said.
“Oh, well, Noel Parmentel Jr. was the great love of Joan’s life.”
I leaned in and cupped an ear. Say what and say who?
Noel Parmentel Jr. seems more plausible as fiction than fact, a character out of a novel or movie: one of Hemingway’s heroes but higher born; Rhett Butler, only from New Orleans instead of Charleston. He’s too dashing, too devastating, built on too grand a scale to be real.
“Noel was a few years older than the rest of us,” said Wakefield. “He was from some well-to-do Louisiana family. Graduated from Tulane. Married or had been, had a couple of kids. He’d served in the Marines—Iwo Jima, I think. He was very tall, shambling, good-looking. You’d see him on MacDougal Street in a white suit, the kind Tom Wolfe wore, only Noel wore it first. He was very influential in political journalism circles. He was a writer, of course.”
Didion in San Francisco in 1955.BOB WEIDNER.
A writer, of course, but really a swashbuckler, a pen in his hand rather than a sword. “Noel was famous for putting down the right in the Nation, putting down the left in the National Review, and putting down everybody in Esquire,” said Wakefield. “And he did it brilliantly. But Noel would call people phonies, get into fights, and a lot of people hated his guts. They got mad at me for even liking him. He was always holding a drink, a bourbon, rattling around the ice cubes in a glass as he held forth. He was always involved in some project that didn’t get off the ground, but there’d be a party for it, to raise funds, you know? He’d get one of his rich-girl girlfriends to throw it in some big Park Avenue apartment. And he was always borrowing money. He even borrowed money from me, and I didn’t have any money.”
Parmentel, who didn’t answer letters but who did answer the phone, let me come visit him in Connecticut, where he’d been living for the past 30 years, in early summer 2023. Though he’d turned 97 the week before, he retained his presence and force, to say nothing of his charm. His hair was snow-white and sparse, his eyes ironical, gamesome, and brightest blue. That he’d been Mr. Cool and a lady-killer was something I could feel. There was to him a remote quality, an inner detachment or reticence. Yet under this detached reticence, I sensed a romanticism and a melancholy—a permanent hurt. He was still wounded by the way it had ended with Joan.
Parmentel recalled meeting Joan, 22, fresh out of college, fresh to New York, in 1957. “She was writing promotional copy for Vogue. Her last year at Berkeley, she’d won something called the Prix de Paris. You know who’d won the Prix de Paris before Joan? Jackie Kennedy, Jackie Bouvier back then.”
A note on Joan, Vogue, and the Prix de Paris: An ambitious female writer coming of age in the 1950s, an aspiring bluestocking or bohemian, would no more have considered entering an essay contest held by America’s premier fashion magazine than entering a beauty contest. The periodicals in which an ambitious female writer would wish to appear were the so-called “high-serious” quarterlies—the Partisan Review, for instance, or the Kenyon Review, places where art was presumed arduous, intricate, not for everybody. Joan, though, was a different kind of ambitious female writer, one who had little interest in becoming a bluestocking or bohemian. She wanted to make good in the slicks (she’d already applied for—and received—a guest editor position at Mademoiselle) while maintaining her elevated standards. In short, she wanted two incongruous things: the democratic fame of a popular hack and the aristocratic grandeur of an acknowledged literary genius.
