Before Joan Didion Had John Gregory Dunne, There Was Noel Parmentel Jr.—A First and Searing Love
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.”
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.
Parmentel continued: “I was at a party, which I was far too often in those days. It’s why Columbia finally gave up on me and I never got my doctorate. I was at a party every day and every night for about 50 years. This one was for John Sack, a New Yorker writer. He’d invited the woman I was seeing at the time—a wonderful woman, her family was a very blue-blood, social family, I’d never dream of discussing her in public—and she’d invited me. It was a room full of New York cocktail-party types, and there was this little girl sitting by herself. That was Joan. She was so shy, she couldn’t talk. You had to get her to say boo. Now, everybody talked to everybody at that party, but Joan only talked to me. Right away I knew she was something special. And she knew I was something special, if you want to call me that. We were different from the rest of them. We talked all night, and we were still talking the next morning. We didn’t leave each other’s sides the whole weekend.”
Joan already had somebody by her side, even if he was in California. Bob Weidner, her boyfriend of five years. They’d met at a beer bust on the Sacramento River shortly after high school graduation. “We drank Sankapooho punch, which was a local thing, made from rum and vodka and maybe muscatel,” Weidner told me over the phone. “Nice on a first date.” He and Joan were a couple throughout her time at Berkeley, where he was also a student. “I remember walking across campus with her. My roommate had just married his long-term girlfriend. She and I just assumed that we were next. The husband of my mother’s younger sister owned a Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Bakersfield. They didn’t have kids, and he was about to retire, and there was talk about me taking over the business once Joan and I were done with Berkeley.”
Only once Joan was done with Berkeley, she headed to New York. She didn’t break up with Weidner, stayed with him. But not enthusiastically. To friend Peggy LaViolette, she wrote, “Bob and I are getting along fairly well but I want to GET AWAY from California and school and my family and Bob and make something all my own.”
And not for long. “Joan was in New York working at Vogue, but she’d come home to visit her family, to visit me, often,” said Weidner. “I’d pick her up at the airport in San Francisco and drive her to Sacramento. I’d done this I don’t know how many times—four, five, six. The last time, I did like I’d always done. I parked next to the garage at her parents’ place. And Joan and I were standing there, talking, and she started telling me about the sexual experience she’d had with this guy—Noel, I guess. ‘Fucking,’ that was the word she used, the only time she ever used that word in my presence. And I could see from her face that she’d really, really enjoyed it. Now, I haven’t told this to many people, but she said to me, ‘When it was over’—she meant the sex—‘he slapped me on the ass.’ And she loved that. I was seriously stunned. Joan and I had been together for so long. We did all kinds of sexual touching, but we’d never had sexual intercourse. I believed that sex before marriage was the wrong thing to do, that I’d be spoiling the girl. So Joan and I had lots of fun together, but no sex. Anyway, after that conversation, I didn’t try to contact her. She told me that story to let me know it was over, and it was over. I never saw her again. I was devastated.”
Having cut ties with the boy back home, Joan was now free to pursue a relationship with a man of the world.
It was easy for Joan to fall in love with Parmentel. He was insolent, reckless, unafraid, self-inventing, with an excess of vitality and authority. “I was the most romantic figure in the world to Joan,” he said, then added with a laugh, “That’s her line, by the way, not mine.”
Having cut ties with the boy back home, Joan was now free to pursue a relationship with a man of the world.
It was easy for Joan to fall in love with Parmentel. He was insolent, reckless, unafraid, self-inventing, with an excess of vitality and authority. “I was the most romantic figure in the world to Joan,” he said, then added with a laugh, “That’s her line, by the way, not mine.”
It wasn’t easy, however, for Joan to be in love with Parmentel. He was turbulent, caustic, wayward, his only constant unpredictability. “I might call Joan and tell her I was on my way over, and then show up two weeks later. I think I was dependable when it came to what I regard as the big things. But I wasn’t worth a damn nine-to-five.”
And any woman who believed he’d forsake all others was setting herself up for a letdown. “Noel romanced every woman he met,” said Wakefield. “He was a ladies’ man. Joan might have been his number one, but she wasn’t his only one. And he could be just awful with women. He and I would be at a party, and he’d find the weak point of some woman, and then he’d go after her until she was in tears. He was the classic example of a man who attracted women by insulting them.”
Joan, though, was hooked on Parmentel, in spite of his occasional cruelty, because of his occasional cruelty, which had for her, I suspect, an erotic charge. She wouldn’t give him up. “He was her first mentor, her first lover, her first everything,” said Wakefield.
Her first promoter too. “Noel’s the one who told me about Joan because Noel was telling everyone about Joan,” said Wakefield. “ ‘The correspondent from Vogue’ is what Murray Kempton [editor of the New Republic] called her. She was writing these wonderful pieces for Vogue, but I wasn’t looking at Vogue, so I had no idea how brilliant she was. Noel gave me some of her work and said, ‘Read it. You’ll love her writing.’ He was like a superagent. He’d just go up to people and make the case for Joan until they listened. He really made it happen for her.”
Crucial since she wasn’t going to make it happen for herself. “It wasn’t that the men Joan was working with underrated her,” said Parmentel. “It was that they didn’t notice her. I called her Mouse because she was so small, so quiet—timorous, really. But, my God, was she ambitious. She worked 28 hours a day. One sentence, which was already almost perfect, she wrote again, and she wrote again, and she wrote again. She was compulsive but not stupidly compulsive. The sentence was always better the next time. I was the most important person in Joan’s life, Joan’s career. I knew everything and everybody. She knew everything and nobody. And so I introduced her to people who were useful to her, people like Bill Buckley [editor of the conservative weekly the National Review], and she performed beautifully, as you’d expect.”
In fact, it was Buckley who gave Joan her start, putting her writing in his magazine. “Before I got my first byline at Vogue,” said Joan in 1992, “I was sending things to other magazines. The first piece I ever published was about a quiz show I’d been on. I sent it to the Reporter first and got a nice note back, but they didn’t take it. Then Noel, who had written for the National Review, sent it to NRand they published it.”
And Parmentel was getting Joan’s name in print in more ways than one. For the August 1962 issue of Esquire, he wrote a waspish piece about the literary establishment. “The Acne and the Ecstasy,” he titled it. To a list that included Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, and Evelyn Waugh, he added Joan, along with a capsule description: “Joan Didion, the fantastically brilliant writer and Vogue editor who, at twenty-six, is one of the most formidable little creatures heard in the land since the young Mary McCarthy.”
Nor were Parmentel’s efforts on Joan’s behalf limited to magazines. “Somebody once said I was to Joan what Boswell was to Dr. Johnson, and it’s true. I got her first novel, Run River,published. That book was turned down by everybody. Joan took it hard. She cried for one week, for two weeks—a fortnight. It really messed her up. Finally I said to her, ‘You’ve got to cut this out. Let me see what I can do.’ I took the book to Ashbel Green, the greatest editor since Maxwell Perkins, and he gave it to Judith Jones [Knopf editor], who passed on it—which I never let Ash forget. Then I said, ‘I’m going to try Ivan [Obolensky of Ivan Obolensky Inc.]’ And Ivan fell for it. Now, every Russian says he’s a prince, but Ivan really was one, or would’ve been one if he’d stayed in Russia. He didn’t want to publish Joan’s book, didn’t like it or understand it, but then neither did anyone else. I just sort of nagged him into it. ‘Buy the thing,’ I told him. ‘It’s breaking her heart.’ ”
“Ivan was lukewarm at best about Joan’s novel,” said Wakefield. “But Noel knew he could bludgeon Ivan into buying it, and that’s exactly what he did.”
Joan dedicated Run River to Parmentel, though readers wouldn’t know it. “For my family and for N,” she wrote. He forbade her from claiming him in a more direct way. “Originally she used my whole name,” he said. “I told her, ‘Just N,’ because I preferred to remain private. For somebody who did as many newsworthy things as I did back then, privacy was an unreasonable request, but I made it anyway. Didn’t matter, of course. Everyone knew I was N. Norman Mailer and I were great friends. We were amused by one another’s outrages, I think. I was writing for The Mike Wallace Interview [television show, 1957–1960], and I booked Norman as a guest. A short while later, he invited me over to his apartment for a party. It was the one where he stabbed his wife Adele, though I missed that part. Allen Ginsberg and I left early—too many mean drunks, and Norman was showing off his muscles. And did you know that I was the one who invented Norman’s candidacy? That’s right. It was Jack Newfield [journalist] and I who suggested he run for mayor of New York. ‘Vote the Rascals In,’ that was our slogan. Gloria Steinem was going to run as his controller, but then she got cold feet. Anyway, Norman used to say that he was N. It was sort of a joke between us.”
***
Run River was written for Parmentel. Run River was also written about Parmentel. He’s Ryder Channing, the book’s heartthrob and archvillain. Ryder is an adventurer, a smooth-talking, down-at-heel Southerner who “convey[s] the distinct impression that he [can] live by his wits alone.” Ryder is, as well, a dandy, a lush, a scoundrel, a brute, and, by the story’s end, a corpse, shot by the husband of his lover, Lily Knight McClellan. Lily can’t keep away from Ryder. That doesn’t mean that she likes him, though, or even respects him. How could she? He’s a man of magnetism but no principles.
“That’s me, Ryder Channing,” said Parmentel lightly.
Maybe so, but Ryder is Parmentel stripped of his redeeming features—nobility of spirit and disinterested generosity among them—his irredeemable ones expanded and distorted. (If it’s a portrait, it’s strictly of his bad side.) I asked him whether he and Joan ever talked about Ryder. He replied, “I didn’t say anything to Joan about Ryder Channing, and Joan didn’t say anything to me about Ryder Channing. I tried to ignore the situation. I didn’t like what she was doing, except I figured it’s an author’s right to use people she knows.”
To use or abuse? It isn’t much of a stretch to see Ryder as Joan revenging herself on Parmentel. In art, she could control him, punish him: He was at her mercy. (“Setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully,”she once wrote.) In life, it was the other way around.
Or so it must’ve felt to her.
She wanted him to drink less, write more. “Joan did what she could to get me sober and behind a typewriter,” he said. “Both hopeless causes.”
She wanted him to give her a baby. In her 2011 memoir, Blue Nights, she flashes back to December 1958, a panicked visit to “the Voguedoctor.” She was afraid she was pregnant. A rabbit test confirmed her fear. The next day, she started bleeding and then couldn’t stop crying. The tears, to her surprise, were not from relief. “I thought I was regretting having missed this interesting moment in Havana [Editor’s note: In the ’50s, Havana was known as an abortion destination], but it turned out the surge had hit and what I was regretting was not having the baby,” she wrote. In late 1958, Joan was with Parmentel. That it was his baby she was carrying—miscarrying—seems certain.
Above all, she wanted him to marry her. “Joan was like a Southern girl about being married,” he said. “You know, if you aren’t married by 18, you’re an old maid. And Joan wanted children. She was choked up about that. But I’d already been married, and I’d had children, and I’d messed that up. One of my lines to women was, ‘Get married? No, no, I’ve tried that.’ ”
Parmentel sounded like he was joking. He wasn’t. He was serious. And one night, he made Joan understand how serious. Afterward, he stopped by Wakefield’s place. “I was in a three-story walk-up on Jones Street,” said Wakefield. “I heard Noel clomping up the stairs. He told me he’d said something to Joan like, ‘There’s not going to be a baby-makes-three or a you’d-be-so-nice-to-come-home-to.’ He gave it to her straight—no marriage—and that was it for the romance. They were done. He said she went to pieces.”
In her swan song to New York, “Goodbye to All That,” Joan detailed what going to pieces over Parmentel looked like. “It was very bad when I was twenty-eight,” she wrote. “I cut myself off from the one person who was closer to me than any other. I cried until I was not even aware when I was crying and when I was not, cried in elevators and in taxis and in Chinese laundries, and when I went to the doctor he said only that I seemed to be depressed, and should see a ‘specialist.’ He wrote down a psychiatrist’s name and address for me, but I did not go. Instead I got married.”
Not to Parmentel, obviously, as he was the one she cut herself off from, the reason for her weeping, her depression. Though, at the same time, absolutely to Parmentel. “I introduced Joan to Greg,” Parmentel said. “That’s what John Dunne was calling himself in those days—Greg. The furthest thing from Joan’s mind was marrying Greg, I can tell you that. But I suggested Greg as a possible husband for her.”
More than suggested. According to Wakefield, Parmentel’s exact words to Joan were, “This is the guy you ought to marry.” Wakefield: “Noel said to me, ‘It’s time for Joan to get married. I found a guy and told her what I thought she should do.’ ”
“I liked Greg,” said Parmentel. “He’d write down the things I said. And when I’d ask him what he was doing, he’d say, ‘So I can remember.’ I’d read his stuff in Time [Dunne was a staff writer at the magazine], and I thought he was a pretty good writer. I didn’t think he was great, but pretty good. And I thought he was bright, not brilliant, but bright. He was a good catch for Joan, I felt. He was a gentleman, semi-rich, from a good family—the Dunnes were the Kennedys of Hartford, you know—knew his way around the Ivy League circuit. Also, he’d be at the breakfast table every morning, something I’d never be.”
That was Parmentel on Dunne.
Now for Dunne on Parmentel. From the introduction to Dunne’s collection Quintana & Friends:
***
When I arrived in New York in 1956[,] I was the quintessential Ivy League graduate, a receptacle of received wisdom, a memory drum of fashionable and right-minded and untested opinion. I met [Noel] at a party, he insulted the hostess and most of the guests, and left. It still takes my breath away when I think of that evening… He was like a stick of unstable dynamite, socially irresponsible, a respecter of no race or tradition or station. He was also smart as hell… I was soft and he became the DI of my intellectual boot camp, a professor of life itself.… “I must love him,” Norman Mailer once told me, “otherwise I’d kill him.” I feel much the same way.
***
This description was written in 1978, Dunne a grizzled 46, but it sounds as if it were written by a moony-eyed adolescent. It has none of Joan’s ambivalence or hostility. It is hero worship without sigh or blush.
What, I wonder, was going through Joan’s mind when she consented to let the man she loved fob her off on his little buddy, his sidekick and flunky and second banana, a man she didn’t love? (Why I say Joan didn’t love Dunne: because Joan said it. In 1967, she wrote of the “apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love.” It’s a wildly revealing statement, and she delivers it almost as a throwaway. Blink and you miss it. She’s telling readers that Dunne is the person she married, Parmentel—because who else?—the person she loved.)
Parmentel offered a possible motive: “Joan was the way she was. She was so tiny—just miniature—and super shy. She couldn’t put herself forward. She needed someone to do that for her. And, look, as far as pushing Joan is concerned, I’m the once-and-future all-American. Without me, there might never have been a Joan Didion. I invented Joan Didion. That’s why her father, Colonel Didion, liked me and was grateful to me. And before me, there was her brother, Jimmy, pushing for her. Then Greg pushed for her. Greg certainly did his share.”
Dunne was an acolyte of Parmentel’s and therefore knew the deal, all the ways in which Joan required cosseting and coddling. He could be counted on to take over as her custodian since he’d been de facto groomed for the job.
And maybe there was for Joan something irresistible about the idea of giving herself to a man she didn’t love because the man she did love told her to. It was a chance to stoke the fires of her romantic masochism. To play Ingrid Bergman in the final scene of Casablanca, letting Humphrey Bogart tell her that they’d always have Paris before shoving her into the arms of Paul Henreid. (In “On Self-Respect,” written for the August 1961 issue of Vogue, Joan described her ideal man as “a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons [Dallas businessmen] in a proxy fight.”
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***
Run River was released in the spring of 1963. It didn’t get much of a reception, just a few scattered and unimportant reviews. “If Ashbel Green had listened to me, if Knopf had brought out Run River, it would’ve made a huge difference in the way the book was treated,” said Parmentel. “Ivan Obolensky wasn’t seen as serious. He was seen as a rich boy with the money to form a publishing company. I told Joan she’d written the great American novel. Let’s just say the critics weren’t saying about it what I was saying about it. She was more or less dismissed. And I’ve already told you how hard she took things.”
Joan was thus twice disappointed: in love and literature. New York must’ve felt like a failure to her—to have come so close and then not to have made it.
She needed to get away. From Parmentel. From the city.
***
In 1964, it was on to Dunne. (They married in January.) And on to Los Angeles. (They began renting a house on the Palos Verdes Peninsula in June.)
Joan, in later years, when talking about her early years, gave the impression of one long, near-frictionless ascent: Berkeley to Vogue to a marriage that would become among the most revered in American letters to a first book that made her legitimate to a second book—1968’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem—that made her famous. (In Griffin Dunne’s 2017 documentary, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, is footage of a joint interview of Joan and Dunne. To the camera, Dunne, who so often served as Joan’s mouthpiece, says, “[Slouching] was reviewed by someone in TheNew York Times,” then to Joan, “Boom!—all of a sudden, you were a figure.”) Every step had been a step in the right direction. No wrong turns or dead ends, certainly no benevolent eminence to help her along the way. She’d done it on her own.
That simply wasn’t so.
Joan suffered the usual indignities of a young writer. A first manuscript that was kicked from house to house, going begging, and only after an older man, a boyfriend Svengali, took it on, which he did out of pity, to stop her from blubbering, was it bought, and then as a favor to him, and when it finally was published, it was assessed carelessly, crudely, tossed aside. (She’d admit to getting rejected—“[Run River] got turned down by 12 publishers,” she said in a 2000 C-SPAN interview—but not to getting assistance—she declined to mention in the C-SPAN interview that Noel Parmentel was the reason the 13th publisher said yes.) Joan suffered the usual indignities of a young woman as well. Her first adult love affair was a heartache and a humiliation. (She’d admit to shedding tears over the end of her romance with Parmentel—in “Goodbye to All That” she cried, you’ll remember, in the unlikeliest of places—but not that it was Parmentel who ended the romance—she claimed, you’ll also remember, that it was she who cut herself off from him.)
What’s more, Joan’s self-presentation was undirected, unsure. She didn’t yet know how to be herself—that is, how to perform herself—in the world. How to pair up with someone who’d augment her rather than overshadow. How to turn a gaucherie, her crippling shyness, into a style; go from Mouse to Mona Lisa.
That was about to change.
***
An excerpt from the book Didion and Babitzby Lili Anolik © 2024 by Writerish LLC, published by Scribner on November 12, 2024 and Atlantic Books on November 14, 2024.
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