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I was that writer, and Flanagan wasnt precisely correct.
My piece said nothing about a romantic relationship between Didion and Noel.
For the rest, people would have to read between the lines.
I wouldnt be doing this if I didnt think it would help you.
And just down the road from my parents!
As funny in person as he was on the page, Noel also made me laugh without trying to.
Of Kisss Gene Simmons, he said the same.
No, hed just met him during the period when Simmons was dating Cher.
We didntdo lunch, Noel said.
Prufrock Pictures, I told him.
Cant be all bad, he chuckled.)
At the top of the page, hed written Religion.
Money: She was generous with it, though she didnt have any.
Dunne: A better editor of her work than I ever was.
His idea was for his friend Walker Percy to review it.
Walker said no: Lily [the protagonist] is a bad girl!
You know Walker family man.
I said, Walker, how about Madame Bovary?
But on more than one occasion, he talked to me about it entre nous.
Why didnt you marry Joan?
Vivian told me shed asked Noel toward the end of his life.
Id already failed at marriage, he said.
Heres another way to look at it, one that admittedly has nothing to do with literature or careers.
Noel assured both me and Didions biographer that he never had the means or the serious intention to sue.
In our 1996 interview, Noel said, Im not sore anymore.
More often than not, they were, in the eyes of the connected, big or little nobodies.
a 1995 letter to the editor read in full he was a great friend to all underdog institutions.
In short, the money is somewhere else …
There is a sense in which magazines taught America how to live.
Above all, magazines have made America think.
So tireless an advocate was Noel that several of my friends wondered why he hadnt become an agent.
Somehow, though, he always got and came through.
But these were the years when he strove to be a better man, and he succeeded.
So much is made of his drinking, so little of his quitting!
And he was still funny.
Noel had one objection: We shoulda swapped Trump.
