The Death of a Character

The references are as dated as “Quemoy” and “Matsu” but, like the man who wrote the lyrics, they still deliver a good deal of polemical wallop. How’s this, to the tune of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”?

Hang Earl Warren from a sour apple tree,

His impeachment still won’t fill the bill,

For folks like you and me,

We’ll soon cast off the yoke of his judicial tyranny,

As we go charging on!

The lyricist was the late Noel E. Parmentel, Jr., from his one and only album, Folk Songs for Conservatives, performed by Noel X and His Unbleached Muslims. Released to no fanfare in 1964, at the heyday of the hootenanny, the album’s purpose, according to Parmentel and his co-conspirator, the “Maine humorist” Marshall Dodge, was “to liberate this traditional American art form from the tyranny of assorted Beatniks and Pinkos.”

How much liberating it did is hard to say—conservatives were never Peter, Paul and Mary enthusiasts, and few folksingers were Joe McCarthy groupies—but probably damned little. Consider it one more admirable, if loopy, effort to upend our political culture by Parmentel, a sometime writer, even more sometime movie actor, and full-time character, who died August 31 in West Haven, Connecticut. 

He was 98 and had somehow managed to outlive all his old frenemies—and there was no shortage of them among the literati of New York, where in the 1950s he attained a dubious celebrity that far exceeded his any actual achievement. His longevity was itself a mystery, as he recognized. “No one can figure it out,” as he told me the last time we spoke, “because I have led a very dissolute life.”

An Algiers, Louisiana, native born in 1926, Parmentel showed up in New York’s Greenwich Village during its heyday, where he quickly became an unlikely VIP. “I went to a lot of parties when I first came to New York,” he told me. “That’s why I never got much writing done. I was tall and single, so I got a lot of invitations to parties.” 

A brilliant conversationalist—and scary drunk—Parmentel impressed younger people with literary ambitions, and he took a generous interest in their careers. Dan Wakefield, in New York in the Fifties, remembers 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.” 

Wakefield says Parmentel was 

easily spotted along Fifth Avenue or MacDougal Street, decked out in white suits and other Rhett Butler–type menswear, with a shock of light brown hair, falling over his wide brow [and] considered the ultimate in masculine charm by many of the girls who succumbed to his southern charms, which were spiced with put-downs that seemed to engage as well as enrage the ladies. Even for his time, Noel was the most politically incorrect person imaginable. He made a fine art of the ethnic insult, and dined out on his reputation for outrageousness.

He seemed to know everybody—Buckley, Norman Mailer, Walker Percy, Gloria Steinem, C. Wright Mills, Carey McWilliams, and Gore Vidal, among others. His feuds were as famous as his friendships. There are tales of a fistfight with Henry Kissinger at Elaine’s on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and a falling out with Mailer, whom he supposedly convinced to run for mayor of New York. “I must love him,” Mailer told Dunne, “otherwise I’d kill him.” Parmentel and Joan Didion were an item. He helped launch her career and introduced her to his friend John Gregory Dunne, whom she of course married. Parmentel would appear, as Warren Bogart, in Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer.

Dunne said he was 

like a stick of unstable dynamite, socially irresponsible, a respecter of no race or tradition or station. He was also as smart as hell. He called himself a writer, but he seldom wrote, for all the typewriters he borrowed and never returned…. His style, when he did write, was that of an axe-murderer, albeit a funny one.

A self-described “reactionary individualist,” he was also an equal-opportunity irritant, poking merciless fun at both right and left. His lampooning of Young Americans for Freedom—“The Acne and the Ecstasy”—is still a hoot. YAFers, he wrote in Esquire,

are hopelessly schizoid as a disciplined political group. On the one hand, they display orthodox Fuhrer-prinzip, fawning upon the New Right’s big guns to the point of bystander discomfort. But this embarrassing servility is more than counterbalanced by their ‘stilettos-out’ intramural policy….

While patriotism appeals to these boys, the rest of us will have to manage to keep it a Republic without much assistance from YAF. They drink beer but are poor Putsch material. Mainly, the YAF’s couldn’t punch their way through a soaking wet copy of Human Events.

His literary output was disappointingly meager, but he made more of a splash with his writing than in movies. He appeared in Norman Mailer’s Maidstone and Beyond the Law, which flopped. “Norman must have lost a million dollars out-of-pocket for those movies,” Noel told me. “He thought he was going to be a great film director.” 

Parmentel supposedly bought the film rights to A.J. Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana with the idea of making a musical, but nothing came of it. He worked with documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock on Campaign Manager, Chiefs, and Ku Klux Klan: The Invisible Empire. 

In his last years Parmentel was a link to a time when, as Lionel Trilling put it, liberalism was “not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition.” In the 1950s and 1960s, when being a conservative intellectual took guts, and no one better embodied the brainy audacity that would give rise to National Review, for example, than Noel. 

There wasn’t even a “conservative movement” back then, and the energies that went into what would become a movement had not yet become organized, sanitized, and monetized. All that might be crashing down these days, and Noel—were he around to watch that happen—would probably be pleased if it did.

He knew Donald Trump, or at least knew of him, before the rest of the country did, and was no fan. “He was a buffoon, but he was a clever buffoon,” he told me. “He became rich and famous being a buffoon.” A few weeks before his death, when Noel learned that the U.S. had arranged a prisoner exchange with Russia involving the Wall Street Journal’s Evan Gershkovich, Radio Free Europe’s Alsu Kurmasheva, and the former Marine Paul Whelan, he said he had only one objection: “We shoulda swapped Trump.”

You might assume that a character like this would come to a bad end, drinking himself to death in a shabby single-room-occupancy hotel from a William Kennedy novel. Well, not so. For the past several decades, Noel lived a gracious, comfortable, and sober life on a horse farm in Connecticut owned by his longtime lady love, Vivian Sorvall—and was almost always eager to talk.

The last time I saw him, he had come to visit me in the Capitol Hill office where I was then employed. I wasn’t there the moment he showed up, so the Congressman’s chief of staff, whose desk sat just outside the door to the boss’s inner sanctum, told me what followed. When Noel learned that I was not there and the boss was back in the district, he proceeded to brush right by the chief of staff’s desk, stride into the inner sanctum, plop down behind the Congressman’s desk and begin making long-distance phone calls. The hubris, while astonishing, was thoroughly in character and, looking back, rather endearing. The congressman in question has since died, too, and, reflecting on their respective careers, it occurs to me that the country would be in better condition if we had more Noels sitting behind congressmen’s desks and fewer of the unimaginative men and women who manage to get themselves elected. This is absurd, of course, as there could never be more than one Noel Parmentel. He was sui generis, God rest his bumptious soul.