New York in the '50s (43 page)

I didn't see the LP he was going to do,
Folk Songs of the Right
, but I did hear him sing new lyrics to “Bill Bailey”: “Won't you come home, Bill Buckley.” He was always threatening to write his autobiography and call it
Uptown Local
, which for all I know may be in the works at last. I hope so, for Noel was able to make us laugh at our own pretensions, especially the political ones.

My principal image of Noel is of 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. Most people, in Noel's harsh opinion, were phonies but he delighted in discovering the few who were not, like C. Wright Mills. “Mills is no phony,” Noel would say. “He means it when he pounds his fist on the desk and says ‘Pow-ah!'” Noel would stop and pound his fist on whatever surface he could find and shout “Pow-ah!” and give out his hearty, deep laugh, rattling the ice cubes madly. Joan Didion was no phony either, and Noel championed her as a writer when she was still known mainly as “the correspondent from
Vogue
.” He took half the manuscript of her first novel around to publishers and editors, pressing it on them, arguing her case as the brightest young literary star on the horizon, cajoling Ivan Obolensky to read it and cheer-leading the publication of
Run River
by McDowell, Obolensky, bringing me and other writers he knew galleys of the book and urging me to read it, guaranteeing I would love it (and he was right, I did).

Perhaps the high point of Noel's own celebrity among the In political-literary journalism crowd was his one-man show,
An Evening with Noel E. Parmentel, Jr
., hosted by the Greenwich Village chapter of the Young Americans for Freedom at the rather seedy old Hotel Earle, off Washington Square, in a room “conveniently adjacent to the bar,” as Stephanie Gervis (future wife of Mike Harrington) reported in her account of the performance in the
Village Voice
. Noel identified himself politically as a “reactionary individualist,” and came up with his trademark quips: when asked about the UN he said, “I want to give Red China a seat in the UN—ours” (getting
the United States to pull out of the UN was a popular notion of the right wing). Concerning the House Un-American Activities Committee he declared, “That isn't my America that needs creeps like that.… They're a bunch of cheap, tacky, self-serving politicians” (this opinion dear to the hearts of liberals). He then switched directions again by opposing public libraries as “an extension of socialism.” With his audience already dizzy from these pronouncements, Noel was asked what he thought about YAF activists who were going into food stores and putting tags on products such as Polish hams to show they came from a Communist country: “If I were a grocer and any of those creeps came into my store, I'd give 'em warning and then give 'em grapeshot.”

In New York, more than the rest of the nation, we journalists tended to see the world not so much as black and white but as left and right, which led us sometimes to overreact to trends, predicting—as most magazines and newspapers did as late as 1963—that the conservative boomlet on campuses was a rising tide that would define the sixties generation. The term “hippie” had not yet been heard, the summer of love was still in the future, and Haight-Ashbury was just another district gone to seed in San Francisco. This was still a year or so before the voice of the Beatles was heard in the land, via “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

“We must assume that the conservative revival is
the
youth movement of the sixties,” Murray Kempton wrote after the big YAF rally in Madison Square Garden in 1962. He tempered the prediction by saying that the conservative youth movement “may even be as important to its epoch as the Young Communist League was to the thirties, which was not very.” Still, the YCL was one of the symbols of the thirties, and it looked as if YAF would make the vest the youth symbol of the sixties. I thought so myself, in a piece I did for
Mademoiselle
in 1963.

It was not until that fall, as I drove to Rockland County with Harvey Swados, that he asked if I'd seen some pieces in the
New York Times
by a young guy named David Halberstam, telling about this ridiculous war we were backing in some little country in Southeast Asia—it was called Vietnam. I couldn't remember hearing the name before.

I'd continued my friendship with C. Wright Mills after I did research for him when I got out of college, and found him always inspiring, witty, and concerned, not only about the world but about what I was up to, and whatever personal or professional problems I might have. Others have spoken of Mills's egotism and selfishness, but with me he was generous, kind, and solicitous. His interest and confidence in me was a source of real strength—or what Mills called “Pow-ah!” Of all my mentors and friends, Mills was one who never let me down.

In the midst of my own angst and troubles—a frustrating psychoanalysis, broken love affairs, and too much drinking—Mills gave me a model for going on with my work no matter what the personal difficulties. I went to visit him when he came home from Europe in 1957. With his family life in turmoil, he was living alone in one of those dingy university apartments near Columbia, which he'd managed to make bright and cheerful, and where he “set up his files”—his metaphor for surviving, moving on.

After a fabulous lunch Mills cooked (this was his gourmet period), and after he questioned me about my own life and work, he asked me what my plans were—and then told me what they should be.

“China,” he said.

“China?”

“A third of the earth's population,” he proclaimed with hushed drama, “and we know nothing about it.”

“But I—”

“You'll be the reporter. We'll also have a photographer, an economist, perhaps a full-time cook, so we won't have to fool with that. I'll be the sociologist and head up the expedition. We'll fit it out with a Volkswagen bus or two and tour Red China—getting real stuff. It has to be done. We'll worry about the State Department when we get back.”

Until then I knew almost nothing about China and had little interest in learning more, but by the time Mills finished his spiel, I could hear the mysterious tinkle of bells in ancient temples and feel the immense weight and drama of the massive landscape. I was ready to pack for Peking. The great project never came off, but like everything else Mills went in for, he could make you believe it was
the most exciting and important thing in the world. He could have done the same for Labrador.

Three years later, Mills made such an expedition on his own, to Castro's Cuba, at the invitation of his fan Fidel. He worked furiously to prepare himself for the trip during the summer of 1960 and set off equipped with every historical fact he'd been able to unearth and also his latest gadget, something still new at the time—a tape recorder. He could no more imagine someone without a tape recorder now than he could imagine someone who didn't bake his own bread.

When he came back, Mills worked with furious energy, writing
Listen, Yankee
in six weeks' time. The book was widely read and attacked in the American press. Its aim—clearly stated and seldom acknowledged—was to present the viewpoint of the Cuban revolutionary about the revolution, and for all the faults of the frankly polemical text, it was the first and I think the last time such an attempt was made by a leading American intellectual. (Mills, of course, was hardly the only American writer to pin great hopes on Fidel. Just after the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, the
Village Voice
published an “Open Letter to Castro” by Norman Mailer, who wrote: “You were the first and greatest hero to appear in the world since the Second World War.… I think you must be given credit for some part of a new and better mood that is coming to America.”)

After the enormous effort of finishing
Listen, Yankee
on that breakneck schedule, Mills drove himself back into high gear to prepare for a nationwide TV debate with A. A. Berle on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. I saw Mills once while he was immersed in this preparation and he was terribly worried, alternately unsure of himself and brashly confident. He seemed to take it as a crucial test that he would either pass or flunk with profound results, as if it were a matter of life and death, which in an odd way it turned out to be. The night before the broadcast, Mills had his first heart attack.

Walter Klink, another of Mills's former research assistants and friends, drove me out to visit him in January 1961. It was a shock to see Mills in a sickbed, and yet his old fire and enthusiasm hadn't deserted him. He was pleased and proud of the sales, if not the
reception, of
Listen, Yankee
, and above his bed was an advertising poster proclaiming that the paperback edition had 400,000 copies in print. Mills delightedly explained that such posters were carried on the side of newspaper delivery trucks in Philadelphia. He was reaching a greater public now than he ever had—“mass circulation stuff,” he happily called it.

He lectured us on publishing, among other things, that day, and emphasized that paperbacks were now the important thing. He also told us how much more intelligently he felt all types of publishing were done in England, and reported that after seeing the English setup, he had told one of the older, more conservative American publishers, “You gentlemen do not understand what publishing means. You think the verb ‘to publish' means ‘to print,' but that is not so. It means ‘to make public.'”

Flat on his back, he kept us entertained and laughing, joking about his pills, praising his doctor (his qualifications included having read some of Mills's work), talking of books and of the world, and even then, in that weakened condition, he spoke of “taking it big.” There was one thing, though, that frightened me. He had, in a drawer by a bedside table, a pistol. He took it out and showed it to us, explaining it was for protection. He feared now the political consequences of his pro-Castro position.

When he was on his feet again, Mills went on a frustrating journey to the Soviet Union and Europe, not finding the answer to his heart problem he had hoped a Russian clinic and specialist might offer, and grappling with unfinished work. When he came home exhausted early in 1962, there were many projects left hanging, including the book I had helped him research, on intellectuals; a political book proposing and hoping to create what he called the New Left; an imaginary dialogue between a Russian and an American intellectual called “Contacting the Enemy”; and plans for a giant, or Mills-sized, “World Sociology.”

I picked up the
Times
one rainy morning that March, and while sipping coffee in Sheridan Square saw two stark lines on the obit page that numbed me:

C. WRIGHT MILLS;

A SOCIOLOGIST

It was the first time I cried for the death of a friend. He was forty-five years old.

Noel Parmentel called and asked if I'd like a ride up to Rockland County for the funeral. He wanted to pay homage to one of the few people he didn't think was a phony, and he'd borrowed a car from a girlfriend to make the trip. Mills proudly considered himself a pagan, but his widow, Yara, had arranged for the one sort of service he might have approved, a simple Quaker meeting at which we sat in silence and anyone could speak from the heart if so moved.

I couldn't say a word, and only years later put something on paper that expressed some of my feelings. I quoted Mills himself when he wrote of James Agee's
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
, commending the author for “taking it big” in writing about the sharecroppers. He said the important thing about the book was “the enormity of the self-chosen task; the effort recorded here should not be judged according to its success or failure, or even degree of success; rather we should speak of the appropriateness and rarity of the objective.”

In that same spirit, I speak of Mills.

His friend Harvey Swados wrote in a personal memoir that Mills was “as combatively exhilarating as any man has ever been, he worked with the contagious wild passion of an inventor or a driven idealist, and when he was really dauntless he was the bravest man I ever knew.”

With his premature passing a part of my youth passed, and part of the New York I loved was gone.

TEN

The New Word, the Old Dream

In the fifties was the word. The word was everywhere. The image was yet to predominate. For my friends and me in New York, television was still an oddity, of little interest except for a few distinguished live drama series like “Playhouse Ninety” and the local interview program “Night Beat,” hosted by a tough-minded interrogator we admired, Mike Wallace. We would sometimes seek out one of the few TV owners we knew or go to a bar with television to watch Wallace, but owning your own set was considered gauche for writers and intellectuals, a sign of decadence and mental sloth.

The only person besides Mike Wallace who drew me to watch a particular TV show was Charles Van Doren, the handsome, charming son of the great Columbia professor. My pal Ted the Horse and I went to Aldo's, a bar on the corner of 10th and Bleecker, to cheer on Charles, then a young Columbia instructor, as he sweated out the right answer in the isolation booth of the quiz show “Twenty-one,” where he became a national idol, symbol of intellectual youth. Enshrined on the cover of
Time
, Charles was hailed by press and parents as the clean-cut alternative to Elvis the Pelvis. Then the scandal broke and we learned that the quiz shows were fixed—that star contestants were given answers. Charles's eventual confession of complicity was a great disillusionment. To my friends and I, it was proof of the inherent danger of the new mass medium—television
had corrupted the son of Mark Van Doren, the Lincoln of academia, the man whose very name stood for integrity.