Noel E. Parmentel Jr., a splenetic polemicist and political apostate 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, was credited with distilling Americans’ doubts about Richard M. Nixon into a single question — “Would you buy a used car from this man?” — died on Saturday in West Haven, Conn. He was 98.
His death, in a Veterans Affairs hospital, was confirmed by his longtime partner, Vivian Sorvall.
A hard-drinking transplant from New Orleans who sported implausibly decorous white suits, Mr. Parmentel leaned heavily toward libertarianism and the political right in both his polemics and his palaver.
As a much sought-after conversationalist in saloons and salons, though, he figured less as an influential partisan than as an intellectual provocateur.
As a freelance essayist and film reviewer for magazines and as a sometime documentarian, he sowed uncomfortable truths that were certain to engage listeners and attract readers by amusing or infuriating them.
“Noel personified mid-20th century Manhattan,” said Sam Tanenhaus, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review and a biographer of William F. Buckley Jr. — “a kind of brawler’s Forrest Gump.”
“In uptown salons and downtown barrooms, making friends, starting brawls, turning friends into enemies, sometimes pitting them against one another and then brokering truces,” Mr. Parmentel was ubiquitous, Mr. Tanenhaus added, in an email.
Mr. Parmentel defined himself as a “reactionary individualist” who, as Dan Wakefield recalled in his book “New York in the ’50s” (1992), “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.”
His literary role as a promoter of Ms. Didion might have been legacy enough, but she was not his sole protégé. Another mentee, her future husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne, wrote in his essay collection “Quintana and Friends” (1978), that Mr. Parmentel was “a respecter of no race or tradition or station,” his style “that of an axe-murderer, albeit a funny one.”
Mr. Parmentel was quick to characterize people with whom he disagreed (or who disagreed with him) as “phonies,” an ever-expanding category.
He distinguished them from those he found more or less unassailable, and to whom he gave the benefit of the doubt — an eclectic elite that included Senators Barry Goldwater, a conservative Republican, and Eugene McCarthy, a liberal Democrat; Mr. Buckley, a founder of National Review; the sociologist C. Wright Mills; Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr., a Harlem Democrat; and Carmine De Sapio, the Tammany Hall boss.
As Ms. Didion’s “éminence grise, her taskmaster,” in the words of one friend, Mr. Parmentel introduced her to New York’s literati, inculcated her with a healthy skepticism and helped elevate her into a leading novelist and exponent of the so-called New Journalism. It was Mr. Parmentel, a former boyfriend of Ms. Didion’s, who introduced her to Mr. Dunne.
“From him I developed an eye for social nuance,” Mr. Dunne wrote, “learned to look with a spark of compassion upon the socially unacceptable, to search for the taint of metastasis in the socially acceptable.”
The very titles of Mr. Parmentel’s essays were a giveaway that social acceptability was never his goal.
During the 1969 New York mayoral campaign, he lambasted the incumbent, John V. Lindsay, a fellow Republican, in Esquire under the headline “Less Than Meets the Eye” — although by joining Gloria Steinem and the journalist Jack Newfield in persuading the liberal Mailer to enter the Democratic primary, Mr. Parmentel unwittingly eased Lindsay’s re-election that November after a conservative candidate, Mario Procaccino, the city’s comptroller, won the party’s nomination.
“Everyone is for Lindsay,” Mr. Parmentel wrote. “All the Right people and most of the Wrong ones.”
He harpooned Henry A. Kissinger in a 1971 Village Voice profile titled “Portnoy on the Potomac,” in which he described 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 the Ecstasy,” Mr. Parmentel eviscerated the Young Americans for Freedom, an ascending conservative group, as “probably the most fratricidal political grouping since the International Brigades” were established by Communists during the Spanish Civil War.
He and the humorist Marshall Dodge III published a satirical book (illustrated by the caricaturist David Levine) and produced a companion record album in 1964, both called “Folk Songs for Conservatives.” Its acerbic lyrics probably left right-wing audiences tittering less robustly than their liberal counterparts.
He was credited by Carey McWilliams, editor of The Nation, with comparing 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 had wrested the presidential nomination from the Republican establishment; “Chiefs” (1968), about a police convention; and “Ku Klux Klan: The Invisible Empire,” broadcast 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 a segregated Victorian neighborhood, Algiers. His father was listed in the 1930 census as a car dealer and later worked for the city government.
After a stint in the Marines 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 with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1949.
Though he was one of only four enrolled Republicans in Algiers, he showed his contrarian side early on, casting his first vote, in 1948, for a Democrat, President Harry S. Truman.
“Party loyalty was not part of my DNA,” he said in an interview for this obituary 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 viveur, he insinuated himself into its literary scene and soon found outlets for his writing.
“I could have gotten my Ph.D. at Columbia,” he told Tracy Daugherty, the author of “The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion” (2015), “but instead I got my education at the West End Bar — a much better choice.”
Mr. Wakefield wrote, “My principal image of Noel is of him pacing my small, cluttered apartment on Jones Street, rattling the ice cubes in his glass of bourbon, clearing his throat with a series of harrumphs, and pronouncing who was a phony and who was not, like some hulking, middle-aged Holden Caulfield with a New Orleans accent.”
In addition to Ms. Sorvall, his survivors include a son, Fielding O’Niell, from his marriage to Peggy O’Niell, which ended in divorce. He lived in Fairfield, Conn.
Mr. Parmentel claimed to consider most people boring but would nevertheless make guest appearances at as many as six soirees in a single night. (“That’s how I met people,” he once explained. “My wife finally filed for divorce, and who could blame her?”)
After meeting them, he never tired of writing about them, even the boring ones, skewering his friends and political fellow travelers with as much gusto as he did his avowed adversaries.
Mr. Parmentel was fervidly anti-Communist but despised the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a bunch of prying Cold War snoops. He also opposed the United Nations. Once asked about the U.N.,he replied, “I want to give Red China a seat in the U.N.: ours.”
He may have come closest to specifying his political platform in a 1962 Esquire essay.
“The New Conservatism has become a Dadaist collage, where Libertarians consort with intellectual untermenschen to abolish personal choice and abridge the right of privacy; where civilized minds seek out the company of Yahoos; where honorable men enjoy social intercourse with political hustlers; where the official voice in the wilderness dissipates its space on trivia; and where Upper-case Individualists find it necessary to organize.”
Still, for all its flaws, he added, the conservative movement remained “the only defense remaining to individualists and libertarians against the bureaucratic clicheist, the encroacher, the snooper, the planner, the egalitarian, the joiner, the phony, the leveler, the utilitarian, the race-mixer, the conformist, the censor, the mass-cultist.”
And what of Mr. Parmentel, the man? Ms. Didion was said to have personified him in the character of Warren Bogart in her satirical novel “A Book of Common Prayer” (1977).
“He was raised to believe not in ‘hard work’ or ‘self-reliance,’” she wrote, “but in the infinite power of the personal appeal, the request for a favor, the intervention of one or another merciful Virgin. He had an inchoate but definite conviction that access to the mysteries of good fortune was arranged in the same way as access to the Boston Club, a New Orleans institution to which he did not belong but always had a guest card.
“He belonged to nothing,” Ms. Didion wrote. “He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.”
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