Noel E. Parmentel Jr., an acerbic essayist, prankster and political gadfly who, despite never completing a full-length book, became an outsize presence in New York’s mid-century literary scene, mentoring Joan Didion and encouraging Norman Mailer to run for mayor, died Aug. 31 at a hospital in West Haven, Conn. He was 98.
His longtime partner, Vivian Sorvall, said he had heart trouble and had been in declining health in recent months.
A tall New Orleans native with a fondness for bourbon and off-color jokes, Mr. Parmentel was often spotted ambling through 1950s and ’60s Manhattan in a crisp white suit, on his way to one of a half-dozen parties he would attend on any given night.
He freelanced for national magazines, collaborated with filmmaking friends including Mailer and Richard Leacock, but was perhaps best known as a wit and raconteur, an irreverent joke-teller who never seemed to mind if his punchlines got him thrown out of parties.
“Noel was the most politically incorrect person imaginable,” author Dan Wakefield wrote in “New York in the Fifties,” a 1992 memoir. “He made a fine art of the ethnic insult, and dined out on his reputation for outrageousness. In print, 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.”
Although he leaned toward the right, Mr. Parmentel was not easily pigeonholed. He called himself a “reactionary individualist” and skewered institutions as varied as the United Nations (“I want to give Red China a seat in the U.N. — ours”), public libraries (“an extension of socialism”) and the anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee (“a bunch of cheap, tacky, self-serving politicians”).
According to his friend Carey McWilliams, the longtime editor of the Nation, Mr. Parmentel was the first to impugn the character of Richard M. Nixon with a gag line — “Would you buy a used car from this man?” — that was later popularized on posters during the 1960 presidential campaign.
Mr. Parmentel went on to eviscerate another conservative bastion, the newly formed group Young Americans for Freedom, in a 1962 Esquire article headlined “The Acne and the Ecstasy,” and partnered with humorist Marshall Dodge to put out a 1964 parody book and accompanying album, “Folk Songs for Conservatives,” that featured down-home tunes like “Won’t You Come Home, Bill Buckley.” (Buckley, the founder of National Review, later described Mr. Parmentel as “an amusing verbal brawler who is probably the most tasteless polemicist in America.”)
To some younger writers, Mr. Parmentel’s work represented a model for skeptical, irreverent commentary and a refreshing departure from prim political writing.
“He taught me to accept nothing at face value, to question everything, above all to be wary,” John Gregory Dunne wrote in the introduction to his essay collection “Quintana & Friends.” Mr. Parmentel, he added, “was like a stick of unstable dynamite,” with a writing style like “that of an axe-murderer, albeit a funny one.”
For a time, Mr. Parmentel mentored Dunne as well as Didion, who credited him with getting her first magazine article published at National Review and shepherding her debut novel, “Run River,” to publication in 1963. The book was dedicated in part to “N.”
Mr. Parmentel, who was romantically involved with Didion, introduced her to Dunne, whom she later married. Many readers saw veiled versions of Mr. Parmentel in her fiction, notably in the character of Warren Bogart, the hard-drinking ex-husband in Didion’s 1977 novel “The Book of Common Prayer.”
“He belonged to nothing,” Didion wrote of Bogart. “He was an outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.” (Mr. Parmentel, who thought the characterization was defamatory, threatened to sue but decided against it, according to Tracy Daugherty’s 2015 book “The Last Love Song: A Biography of Joan Didion.”)
Alongside his magazine writing, Mr. Parmentel often collaborated with Mailer, the pugnacious novelist, journalist and independent filmmaker, who disagreed with Mr. Parmentel’s “arch-conservative” political views but otherwise found him delightful. “I must love him,” Dunne quoted Mailer as saying, “otherwise I’d kill him.”
Mr. Parmentel had small roles in Mailer’s movies “Beyond the Law” (1968) and “Maidstone” (1970) — he said the film shoot devolved into a chaotic “seven-day cocktail party” as booze and pot were passed between cast and crew — and helped cook up the Mailer for Mayor campaign in 1969, in which the author ran on a platform of turning New York City into the 51st state.
Developed with help from muckraking reporter Jack Newfield and feminist writer Gloria Steinem, the campaign kicked up headlines as Mailer toured the city alongside his streetwise running mate, newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin. The candidates lost in the Democratic primary, badly, although Mr. Parmentel was delighted to note that Mailer finished second-to-last instead of at the very bottom.
He was less happy that the winner was incumbent Mayor John V. Lindsay, whom Mr. Parmentel lampooned as a “Scarsdale Galahad” who “could easily pass muster as a scoutmaster in Peoria.” His views were summed up in the headline of his 1965 Esquire essay about the politician: “John V. Lindsay: Less Than Meets the Eye.”
The older of two children, Noel Edward Parmentel Jr. was born in New Orleans on June 21, 1926. His father was an entrepreneur who struggled through the Depression before finding a job in city government; his mother managed the home.
After a stint in the Marines, serving in the Pacific during World War II, Mr. Parmentel returned home to study history at Tulane University, receiving a bachelor’s degree in 1949. He attended the University of Minnesota, pursuing a master’s degree in American studies, before moving to New York in the 1950s and launching his literary career.
Mr. Parmentel had a parallel interest in filmmaking and worked with his friend Leacock, the renowned documentarian, on projects including “Chiefs,” an 18-minute short that he co-directed about an annual gathering of police chiefs. He also acquired the movie rights to several books, including Robert Penn Warren’s “Night Rider” and Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer,” a spiritual coming-of-age novel about a dissolute New Orleans stockbroker. None of the projects ever made it to the screen.
“Noel once told me that ‘The Moviegoer’ destroyed him,” his son Fielding O’Niell said in a phone interview. “He poured his heart and soul into it.”
In addition to his son, from an early marriage to Peggy O’Niell that ended in divorce, Mr. Parmentel is survived by Sorvall, his partner of 40 years, with whom he lived in Fairfield, Conn. Another son from his marriage, Stephen, disappeared in 1979 and is believed to have drowned while trying to swim across the Mississippi River, a feat he achieved three times before, according to Fielding O’Niell.
Interviewed in recent years about his famous friends, Mr. Parmentel sounded a wistful note while looking back on his rakish time in New York’s literary “it” crowd.
“Full days every day and full nights every night,” he told Daugherty. “I drank too much. Everybody drank too much. Sometimes I was over the top. But, oh! What a memorable time it was!”
