General
Noel Parmentel Jr., Essayist, Polemicist and Apostate, Dies at 98
A self-described “reactionary individualist,” he mentored Joan Didion and was credited with famously comparing Nixon to a used-car salesman.
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.
