ALL HER OWN

Joan Didion's marriage was one of the most revered in American letters. But before there was John Gregory Dunne, there was Noel Parmentel Jr.-the man who broke her heart. As LILI ANOLIK reveals in this excerpt from Didion and Babitz, the devastation lasted a lifetime

BLUE DAYS Joan Didion, photographed by Bob Weidner in the 1950s.

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.”