Noel Parmentel was as for Joan moving to Los Angeles as he was for Joan marrying John Gregory Dunne. “I believed L.A. was an experience that Joan, of all people, needed,” he said. “Glamour, flash, extravagance—those were things she could use.”
Though he remained in New York, Parmentel often came to L.A., establishing himself in various bohemian circles—movie, rock ’n’ roll, literary—and in no time flat, another indication of control and force: he didn’t require introductions or connections, was socially self-sufficient. “Noel was here for a few days in the summer,” wrote Joan to a friend in a 1968 letter, “& actually seemed pretty good, probably because he had just spent a week in Honolulu with Ricky Leacock doing exactly what he does best in the world, making friends with people (in this case police chiefs, on a convention) so that they wouldn’t mind having Ricky around with a handheld camera at all hours of the day and night.”
Parmentel was a collaborator of documentarian Richard Leacock (in ’68, he and Leacock were working on Chiefs, about the seventy-fifth conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, held in Hawaii), and of Norman Mailer, then attempting to direct (he appeared in two of Mailer’s movies: 1968’s Beyond the Law and 1970’s Maidstone). Was the drinking companion of singer Cass Elliot (“Cass was for me because I’d helped out a boyfriend of hers who got busted for dope in Wyoming—I knew a congressman”), and filmmaker Agnès Varda (“Agnès was what we used to call pushy, but I loved Agnès”), and Howard Hughes aide Chuck Waldron (“Chuck was a jack Mormon. Know what a jack Mormon is? It’s a Mormon who drinks. Hughes kept cabins at the Beverly Hills Hotel for his starlet girlfriends, and when one was empty, Chuck would let me have it”). And he spent a good part of the seventies trying to get an adaptation of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer off the ground. “Walker didn’t need the money and I didn’t have the money, so I got the rights practically free. Robert Mitchum was an old friend of mine, and he agreed to play the role William Holden played in the book—remember, when the protagonist spots William Holden in the French Quarter? All you really need to do a movie is a script and a check. I could never get the script. Billy Hale tried, Ulu Grosbard. Even Joan offered to try. She didn’t think you could make a movie out of that book, but she would’ve done it for me because she would’ve done anything for me. I told her no. Why? For personal reasons. I didn’t think it was a good idea for us to be working together like that.”
Usually he’d stay with Joan and Dunne. “Noel would show up at their place in Hollywood,” said Dan Wakefield. “He wouldn’t say he was coming. They’d just wake up and there he’d be. I have this memory of him at the Franklin Avenue house. It was morning and he was in the kitchen in his button-down shirt, his brown and white shoes, his tan socks, and his underwear—no pants—holding a drink with lots of ice in it.”
Joan described a visit from Parmentel in a letter:
It was like having a caged animal in the house, & one who became aggrieved at any visible evidence of daily routine; he was deeply insulted one day when I finally excused myself to go wash a three-day accumulation of dirty dishes. When he finally leaves… I think we will just go down and lie on the beach & let the tide come in for a week or so, & then we’ll start missing him again.
Joan’s tone here is exasperated, affectionate. Clearly time has passed, emotions have cooled. Where she once felt fury, frustration, and passion toward Parmentel, she now feels fondness. Fondness tinged with regret, yes, but only tinged. It’s all worked out: she’s wound up with the right guy, and Parmentel’s still in her life, a beloved friend to her and her husband.
Parmentel was more even than a beloved friend to Joan and Dunne, was a member of their family. His oldest boy, Fielding,I then a teenager, lived at Franklin Avenue for nearly a year. (“Fielding wanted to be in California, and I needed some place to park him.”) And he was named Quintana’s godfather. “After Quintana’s christening, there was a party at a house in Beverly Hills,” he said. “I got into a silly argument with some guy there who was half my size—the writer Brian Moore. I told him he looked like Leonard Lyons—you know, the gossip columnist—and he tried to sock me. Well, he did look like Lenny Lyons. No, Joan didn’t get mad. She just laughed.”
And if Parmentel wasn’t before Joan’s eyes as much as he’d been, he was on her mind more than ever. She kept him on her mind by making him a character in her next novel, Play It as It Lays: he’s Ivan Costello, the man from Maria Wyeth’s past who won’t stay there. Ivan Costello is the same kind of bastard as Ryder Channing. (“[Ivan] used to call [Maria] in the middle of the night. ‘How much do you want it,’ he used to say. ‘Tell me what you’d do to get it from me.’ ”) Maria tries to shake free of him, can’t quite. “In every book of Joan’s—at least the first couple—there’s Noel,” said Wakefield. “He’s the guy in the white suit, the handsome cad who treats women badly but gets them anyway.”
Parmentel wasn’t any wilder about Ivan Costello than he’d been about Ryder Channing. Once again, though, he held his tongue. “Yeah, I ignored it,” he said. “I just kind of wished she and Greg would meet some new people.”
Yet he didn’t altogether approve of the new people they were meeting. “I remember saying to Joan, ‘You have a lifestyle, not a life.’ First of all, there were too many drugs on that scene. Drinking is one thing, but I hate drugs, and dope had hit Hollywood. And then there was that Earl McGrath, a name-dropper and a leech. He used to get himself paged at the pool at the Beverly Hills Hotel to look important. I once told him something he didn’t want to hear. I said, ‘These people are never going to have any respect for you. You’re not in their league or their class.’ I should’ve kept my mouth shut but I’d had too much to drink and he annoyed me.”
Joan learned her lesson from Run River, a historical novel and a little sleepy, a little beside the point. Her follow-up, 1968’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, felt, in contrast, urgent, as if it were breaking cultural news. And it gave her what had eluded her in New York: recognition. This attention, though, didn’t always bring her pleasure. “Greg was more affected by California than Joan,” said Parmentel. “The things he was thinking about became more Californian. Joan might have been from California, but she wasn’t any California chick. Her parents were gentlefolk, old-fashioned people, knew how to behave. And that’s how Joan was—a native daughter of the Golden West. Her serious work didn’t suffer, which is what I thought might happen if she started writing scripts. But something was wrong. She told me people wouldn’t leave her alone. People she didn’t respect were calling her up, asking her questions, for favors. See, she wanted her name out there, wanted the editorial space, wanted the praise, only she didn’t want to have to participate.”
It was, according to Parmentel, more than the demands of celebrity getting her down. “I know L.A. was hard for her because she was at her unhappiest there. She would sometimes talk to me when she wouldn’t talk to anyone else. Now, Joan was a lady, so she was courteous, had manners. But she wasn’t easy to know. I was one of the few who did know her. She let me know her. Why me? Well, I think some of it was that she was her father’s daughter. She liked men, trusted men.” Ah, so Joan, same as Eve, was a man’s woman. It was men with whom she felt a strong and reciprocated affinity; men in whom she confided her vulnerabilities and secrets. Back to Parmentel: “Once she called me up at the Beverly Hills Hotel. ‘Can you meet me?’ she said. I said, ‘Come on, we’ll go to the Polo Lounge.’ She brought Quintana. It must’ve been 1972, maybe 1973, because Quintana was only about five years old. And the three of us had a four-hour lunch. Joan was thinking about divorcing Greg. She was worried about violence. He was drinking and acting very crazy. And he was threatening to go to court to take Quintana from her. I said, ‘You should take Quintana and go to Sacramento. Your father has enough power and influence there, and you’re the apple of his eye, and he will not let anybody get near you. You’ll be protected.’ It made me sad to say this because I’d brought her and Greg together. But I wouldn’t have if I’d known about his crazy Irish temper. And he should not have threatened her with Quintana. Joan asked me my advice and I gave it.”
The question is: why didn’t Joan take it? Why would a woman of such strength, determination, and accomplishment put up with the bruised ego and black rages of a man less gifted than she?
The writer David Thomson was a Joan watcher and a sharp-eyed one, and this memory of his contains a kind of answer: “I saw Joan and John do an event together once. They had this double act going. Someone asked Joan a question, and she waved a hand at John, and he answered for her. It was quite extraordinary, really. He did all the talking, but all the attention was on her. And then, she, as you know, went out of her way to defer to him in public.”
I did know. A telling detail: Joan’s stationery. While researching this book, I dipped into many an archive. I’d see notes she’d written to people over the years. Engraved at the top of her stationery was JOAN DIDION DUNNE, but she always—at least in the notes I saw—ran a line through the DIDION. If “Joan Dunne” was how she wished to be known, why didn’t she order stationery with a JOAN DUNNE engraving? Was it because she wanted to call attention to the fact that she, a major writer, was allowing her identity to be subsumed by that of her husband, a minor writer? Self-assertion in the guise of self-abnegation. Rebellion masquerading as compliance.
Thomson continued: “This seemed a kindness, and maybe it was one, but it also rankled him. You could feel a pent-up energy in John, the smell of gunpowder. Part of it, of course, was very understandable envy.”
Surely, though, another part was frustration, equally understandable. (I’m going to address the gunpowder Thomson smelled, the crazy Irish temper that Parmentel didn’t know Dunne had. Only not now, Reader, not yet. In a later chapter.) Dunne must’ve known at some level that her deference to him wasn’t real. He might’ve been ready to fly off the handle at a moment’s notice, but his anger and volatility were an obvious cover for fear and weakness. And she might’ve been skin and bone, but she was, too, iron and steel.
Yet for all her iron, all her steel, she couldn’t manage without him. If living was for her merely preparation—that is, material—for the real thing—that is, writing—then he was invaluable. Since marrying him, her fortunes had reversed, and in so many ways. One way: Slouching, her first post–New York, post-Parmentel book, her first book edited by him, was a smash; Play It, her second post–New York, post-Parmentel book, her second book edited by him, was a bigger smash. Another way: The Panic in Needle Park, scripted by her and him, was an official entry at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. Still another way: she was given a several-page spread in the October 1, 1972, issue of Vogue, and was advertised on the magazine’s cover, “Joan Didion’s living/working house.” (See what I mean? In the rewrite, her early career really was one long near frictionless ascent.)
Joan simply couldn’t afford to lose Dunne. All of this was doable because of him. He helped her secure the pinnacle. Talent wasn’t enough, not by a long shot. Neither was will. You needed cunning too. You had to be on the make but on the make on the sly. Dunne, never in contention for the top spot, was an operator, candidly. (“On my application for admission [to Princeton], there was a question that asked, ‘Why do you wish to attend Princeton?’ I puzzled over the answer for a few days before writing, ‘To make contacts for later life.’ ”) Therefore Joan could be an operator, stealthily. Said Susanna Moore, a friend to both Joan and Dunne, “John was dominant, and Joan was happy to have him so. Their relationship was a bit good cop/bad cop. She’d let him execute the cut or the criticism, make the attack. That way she could stay above it all.”
You’d have thought Dunne couldn’t afford to lose Joan either. Magazine writing was a key source of income for the couple, especially in their first years in L.A., before they were making a killing from screenplays. “The Saturday Evening Post wanted Joan to do a column called ‘Points West,’ ” said Wakefield. “She said she would, but only if she could alternate writing the column with John, and only if she and John could each have their own separate bylines. She said that because that’s what Noel told her to say. She and John were going through a rough spot, I guess, and she went to Noel and asked him how she should handle the situation. And he said, ‘You’ve got to bring John up to where you are.’ And she tried to. Did you know it was Joan who got John to stop calling himself Greg? She thought ‘Greg’ made him sound like a college boy. She thought people would take him more seriously if he was known as ‘John Gregory Dunne,’ and so about a year after they married, that’s what he began calling himself. Anyway, Joan and John did that column for years. 1964 to 1969, I think.”
And Joan gave Dunne something worth more than money. Gave him what he craved most: access.
A story told to me by Susanna Moore:
I’d give a dinner party and Warren Beatty would call me up and say, “Seat me next to Joan.” This amused me, so I’d tell Joan and John. Joan wouldn’t say anything, maybe she’d give a little smile, but John would always want to know more. Like, “What exactly did Warren say about Joan?” and “Really?” It excited him that a movie star wanted to sleep with his wife.
Yet it seemed Dunne was willing to lose Joan anyway. By the early seventies, their bond had frayed to the breaking point. That her writing was superior to his was evident to anyone able to read, a problem she could do nothing about. That the recurring male lead in her writing was based on a man who wasn’t him was evident to anyone able to read between the lines, a problem she could do something about.
And so she did.
Parmentel might have been the one grand passion of her life, but he’d served his purpose. What she needed from him—sustained and fruitful inspiration—he’d provided. She’d already turned him into a character, into multiple characters. And, perhaps more importantly, she’d already turned him into an abstraction. “You can feel in Joan’s work a longing for a man who is strong in thought as well as action,” said David Thomson. “Some worldly, older man, a Hemingwayesque figure who’d look after her. That man isn’t John Gregory Dunne. And yet I always felt she was writing to impress him, to impress that man.”
In short, Joan had the immaculate ideal, so could do without the messy human behind it. Parmentel, precious though he was to her, was, finally, expendable.
“In the end,” said Wakefield, “Joan and John turned against Noel.”
The end began in the summer of 1973, when Joan jotted down notes for what would become her third novel, A Book of Common Prayer. “When it came out,” said Wakefield, “the guy who was the editor of Harper’s, Lewis Lapham, excerpted it in the magazine. He called up Noel and said, ‘Have you read A Book of Common Prayer?’ And Noel said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Well, you’d better. It’s all about you.’ ”
One of the principals in A Book of Common Prayer is Warren Bogart. (The return of that Casablanca fantasy.) Warren Bogart is Ryder Channing and Ivan Costello, except even more egregious. And more egregious because he takes up more pages. (Ryder Channing is offstage for much of Run River; Ivan Costello only makes cameos in Play It as It Lays.) And more egregious because, as a character, he’s more egregiously personal. Warren Bogart, the former love of the Joan character—Charlotte Douglas—comes to stay with the Joan character and the Joan character’s husband—Leonard Douglas—in California. (Evidence that Joan found being in the simultaneous company of Dunne and Parmentel a more fraught experience than she let on: “[Charlotte] was incapable of walking normally across the room in the presence of two men with whom she had slept. Her legs seemed to lock unnaturally into her pelvic bones. Her body went stiff, as if convulsed by the question of who had access to it and who did not.”) Warren Bogart is also the father of the Joan character’s child. He and Charlotte share a daughter: Marin, eighteen, part of a band of far-left militants, and wanted by the FBI for detonating a bomb in a San Francisco office building.
Had Joan not miscarried in 1958 but given birth in 1959, that baby would’ve been eighteen in 1977, the year A Book of Common Prayer was published. And the novel can be read as, in the words of journalist-critic Thomas Powers, “an account of an imagined life with [Parmentel]”—a sort of extended what-if. What if they’d had their baby? What if that baby had grown up to be Patty Hearst? (Joan, incidentally, was fascinated by Hearst, the California newspaper heiress who, in 1974, as a teenager, was kidnapped by a terrorist group, coerced into participating in the group’s criminal activities, including making explosive devices. Hearst was subsequently arrested by the FBI, charged, and Joan had wanted to cover the trial for Rolling Stone. Ambivalence, though, tripped her up. In 2016, she’d write, “I never wrote the piece about the Hearst trial, but I went to San Francisco… while it was going on and tried to report it. And I got quite involved in uncovering my own mixed emotions.”)
Parmentel’s irony and detachment could withstand Ryder Channing and Ivan Costello. Warren Bogart, though, blew both to bits. “I hit the ceiling,” said Parmentel. “Walker Percy was the first to call me up. He said, ‘Hello, Warren.’ And then people from all over the world—London, Paris, Singapore—were doing it. ‘Hello, Warren. Hello, Warren. Hello, Warren.’ I was so angry at Joan. I thought it was the height of disloyalty. Worse, I thought it was the betrayal of a friend. To show me, but me at my absolute worst. And it was me and nobody but me. Things I said were in there verbatim. [Ed. note: I know this to be true because what Parmentel told me he told Joan—“You have a lifestyle, not a life”—Warren tells Charlotte, “You don’t have a life, you have a ‘lifestyle.’ ”] I’m not blaming Greg for what she wrote, although he read and edited every word. He could’ve stopped it if he’d said something.”
Parmentel was out for blood. “I knew a lot of lawyers, and they smelled a headline lawsuit.” And then he wasn’t. “In the end, I wouldn’t do it. The gossip columnists kept calling me up to ask about a suit. My answer was, ‘I’ve never sued anybody in my life.’ ”
When I asked Parmentel if it was Joan’s failure to warn him that bothered him most, he sighed, shook his head. “If she’d told me in advance, I’d have said, ‘Take it out,’ and then I would’ve been ashamed of myself for ruining her novel. I couldn’t win. I didn’t like that she kept putting me in that position. After the book came out, she tried to call me, she tried to write me, but I wouldn’t take her calls or write her back. She’d lost me as a friend, and Joan didn’t really have any friends. I was her friend.” Another sigh. “Years later, people tried to bring us back together. Mary Bancroft [socialite, novelist, spy] had a dinner party and invited us both, and then I didn’t show. I regret all of it now. Joan was stupid and I was stupid. And the saddest part is, we were both stupid to the person who was closest to us in the world. It’s just—” He cut himself off. I could see from his face that he was falling down a rabbit hole of second thoughts. “You know,” he said after a minute or so, “years went by, and even the people who’d told me to sue at the time were telling me I’d overreacted. I told myself I’d overreacted, that it wasn’t such a big thing she’d done, that she’d just acted like the novelist she was. But it didn’t matter. I couldn’t get over it. I tried”—raising his hands, dropping them helplessly—“but I couldn’t.”
My guess is that he couldn’t because only on the surface was what she’d done not such a big thing, a novelist acting like a novelist. No, he had it right the first time. A Book of Common Prayer was a betrayal, the ultimate. Joan had taken something between them that was so private they couldn’t even say it out loud to each other and turned it into a publicly projected story. Had taken, too, the physical manifestation of their love—a child that never quite was—and turned it into an abomination. Marin is a terrorist, violent and unhinged. “Fuck Marin,” Warren Bogart says.
Up until A Book of Common Prayer, Parmentel, not Dunne, had been Joan’s true husband. That he was the first man she’d given herself to sexually made him, by her logic—the logic of the unconscious, of dreams, and therefore irrefutable—her true husband. (Of Charlotte Douglas she wrote, “I have never known anyone who regarded the sexual connection as quite so unamusing a contract…. Some women lie easily in whatever beds they make. They marry or do not marry with equanimity…. They can leave a bed and forget it. They sleep dreamlessly, get up and scramble eggs. Not Charlotte. Never Charlotte.”) It didn’t matter that she and Parmentel had separated because they would always be together, were mated for life. Consequently, it was his counsel she’d sought, his lead she’d followed.
And then, all of a sudden, she no longer did. She was casting him aside for the sake of her marriage to Dunne, though really for the sake of her career with Dunne since getting married to Dunne was, at least in part, a career move, Dunne her business partner as much as her domestic. (Not as cold an arrangement as it sounds. Joan and Dunne are proof that a marriage of convenience can be a warm connection.)
Warren Bogart was Joan making an offering to Dunne: the head of the rival he would never have dared challenge on a plate. Or, rather, the page.