Episode 186: Rosemary’s Baby Too

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• From rosemary’s Baby, Film Site, 2018: Rosemary’s Baby is Polish director Roman Polanski’s first American feature film and his second horror film “Repulsion” in 1965, about a mentally-unstable, sexually-terrified woman left alone in her apartment. Polanski served as the scriptwriter and based the darkly atmospheric “Rosemary” upon Ira Levin’s best-selling novel of the same name. The film was produced by Paramount Studios and veteran, low-budget horror film maker William Castle, best known for gimmicky films such as House on Haunted Hill (1959), and Mr. Sardonicus (1961). A young newlywed move into a rambling old apartment building in Central Park West and become friendly with the next-door neighbors, an overly-solicitous and intrusive elderly couple, and soon the struggling husband’s acting career improves. But after a nightmarish dream of making love to a horned Beast, the paranoid, haunted, and hysterical Rosemary believes herself impregnated so that her baby could be used in the elderly New Yorkers’ evil cult rituals. She consults with a longtime friend who sends her a book about witchcraft, with suggestions that their neighbor was the son of a famous witch. After the birth of a baby boy, she ventures into the Castevet’s apartment and observes a coven celebrating the birth of the Antichrist. The creepy film ends with the devil’s flesh-and-blood baby being cared for by the new mother. The big-budget horror film grossed about $33.4 million on a budget of $2.3 million and received an Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, and Ruth Gordon won the Best Supporting Actress award for her performance as one of the “everyday” NYC neighbors. Quite a few of the smaller supporting roles were played by venerable actors, such as Ralph Bellamy as Rosemary’s doctor, Sidney Blackmer as Roman Castevet, and Tony Curtis, who makes a cameo as only a voice on the phone. It has been said that the film was one of the first horror films to be widely accepted by the public. This critically-acclaimed and commercially successful film was followed by an inferior, made-for-TV movie sequel in 1976 entitled Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby, aka Rosemary’s Baby II, with Ruth Gordon reprising her role. https://www.filmsite.org/rosem4.html 

• From Afterword To rosemary’s Baby, Ira Levin, 2003: Having observed that the most suspenseful part of a horror story is before, not after, the horror, I was struck one day by the thought (while not listening to a lecture) that a fetus could be an effective horror if the reader knew it was growing into something malignly different from the baby expected. Nine whole months of anticipation, with the horror inside the heroine! I tried to figure out exactly what that fetus was growing into. I could imagine only two possibilities: my unfortunate heroine had to be impregnated either by an extraterrestrial or the Devil. E.T.s had already fathered children in The Midwich Cuckoos, a novel by John Wyndham, so I was stuck with Satan, in whom I believed not at all. But I had no other intriguing ideas and a family to support. I read up on witchcraft, and late in 1965 set to work. I anchored my unbelievable story in the reality of Manhattan in that season — as much to make myself believe it as to win the belief of readers. I saved the daily newspapers, checking back through them on the transit strike, the incoming shows, the mayoral election, writing always a few months ahead of Rosemary and Guy’s calendar. I wasn’t at all sure how the book would be received: I was well aware that what I was doing was standing the story of Mary and Jesus on its head, and I feared that editors and publishers might run me out of town. When I checked back through the newspapers for the events of the optimal date for the baby’s conception — so he would arrive exactly half the year ’round from Christmas — I found, on October 4, 1965, Pope Paul’s visit to New York City and the Mass he celebrated at Yankee Stadium that night. I took it as a sign — though I don’t, of course, believe in signs — and kept writing. Sure enough my editor loved the new Baby. He suggested that Rosemary might be hit by a taxi on the way to a hospital and the baby disappear somehow, but I didn’t think that was a good idea. The book was favorably reviewed and became a best seller, thanks in large part to a generous quote from Truman Capote which Random House cannily printed on the front. The movie rights had been sold before publication. The result was possibly the most faithful adaptation ever made. It incorporates whole pages of the book’s dialogue and even uses specific colors mentioned. Rosemary’s Baby attracted some of the hostility I had worried about while writing the book: A woman screamed “Blasphemy!” in the lobby after the first New York preview, and I subsequently received scores of reprimanding letters from Catholic schoolgirls, all worded almost identically. The Legion of Decency condemned the film, but when it became a major hit despite or because of its rating the Legion disbanded. Lately I’ve had a new worry: If I hadn’t pursued an idea for a suspense novel almost forty years ago, would there be quite as many religious fundamentalists around today?

• From The Satanic Screen, Nick Schreck, 2001: Strangeness had long been Alfred Hitchcock’s cup of tea. However, the galleys for this unpublished novel were going too far even for the master of suspense. The unshockable Hitchcock had, after all, been brought up as a good Roman Catholic. William Castle had none of Hitch’s moral misgivings: Castle placed his bet on Beelzebub and purchased the film rights for Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin for $100,000. Although it wasn’t a particularly accomplished work in terms of style, Levin’s book resonated with an undetected shadow zone in the 1960s zeitgeist. The tremendous commercial and artistic success of ROSEMARY’S BABY transformed the film into an unprecedented cultural phenomenon. Thanks to Rosemary’s Luciferian labour pains, housewives and harried hubbies were chatting about Devil worship at suburban cocktail parties. Like all media events that touch the collective unconscious, a mythology of its own was generated, which still has a life of its own. One of the most persistent of these romantic concepts is that Roman Polanski is himself a devotee of the Black Arts, and that his film was constructed as a diabolical manifesto. In fact, possessed of a deep European existentialist pessimism, Polanski has never evidenced the least interest in Satanism or witchcraft; it was the story’s themes of alienation, betrayal and isolation that attracted him. It’s interesting to note that many viewers of the film have reported seeing such traditional Satanic features as cloven hoofs and horns in the final shot of the baby despite the fact that nothing of the kind was actually filmed. Occultists and Christians of different stripes have looked in the film for hidden magical messages and authentic Satanic lore. Rumours have spread that the film-maker must have sought technical advice from “real” Satanists to imbue the film with authenticity. When he was interviewed by police after the Manson murders, Polanski speculated: “It could be some kind of witchcraft.” The pregnant woman menaced by supposed devil worshippers was seen by many as an example of life imitating art. That the true motives for the crime had nothing to do with Satanism did not dissuade these wild theories. 

• From Little Book of Satanism, La Carmina, 2022: The dawn of the age of Satan coincided with the rise of diabolical novels and films. Ira Levin wrote his best-selling rosemary’s Baby in 1967. In the story, Rosemary and her actor husband moved into a New York apartment next door to an eccentric old couple; the plot turns to terror as she discovers that her husband is in league with the neighbors to claim her baby as their Antichrist. Rosemary’s Baby introduces audiences to the plausibility of devil worshipers next door, shouting “Hail Satan!” while weaving the plots to snatch your children. Then came The Exorcist, a novel that became one of the most profitable films of all time. Viewers were shocked by the possessed girl’s antics as she yelled blasphemies, spewed green vomit, and spun her head 360°. In 1975, would come The Omen, along with a growing societal paranoia about Satanism. The film focuses on a child who is in fact the Antichrist prophesied by The Book of Revelation. The Omen popularized the idea the Antichrist could be walking among us. Songs about Satan skyrocketed: Parents of course had long labeled teenage music Satanic: Jazz was the devil’s own orchestra in the Roaring Twenties. The following decade, blues guitarist Robert Johnson allegedly met the devil at the crossroads and sold his soul. In the 1950s, the thrusting rock of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis was similarly regarded. In 1966, The Master of Margarita was published for the first time: It followed the devil as he arrived in Moscow with a naked witch and talking black cat and inspired the Rolling Stones’ 1968 song Sympathy for the Devil. Ironically, the fearful public was oblivious to the works actually connected to Satanism: LaVey ​​released several albms and avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger created the erotic and demonically charged “Invocation of my Demon Brother” and “Lucifer rising.” Media succeeded in painting a shocking picture of Satanism that became deeply embedded in popular imagination. Over the following decades, heavy metal horror would inspire and be inspired by the culture of organized Satanism and also feed the anxieties that gave rise to the social chaos of the Satanic Panic.

• From The Church of Satan, Michael Aquino, 1989: Rosemary’s Baby appeared at a time when a new topic of conversation was demanded, and now we encounter the legend that Anton LaVey served as advisor for the film and played the role of the Devil in it. In the early days of the Church of Satan this claim was accepted as fact, and because of the movie’s sensational impact was even paraded as one of Anton’s magical coups. Upon close examination, Rosemary’s Baby Producer William Castle devoted three chapters of his autobiography to the filming of that movie and nowhere is LaVey mentioned. In fact, Castle repeatedly stresses director Polanski’s insistence on filming the novel exactly as it was written by Levin, omitting only any sight of the baby on camera. Nor has any other member of the cast or crew ever mentioned any LaVey involvement. In uncut versions of the movie, two “Devil” eyes momentarily appear that were rumored to be Anton’s. When Rosemary’s Baby  was eventually released as a videocassette, it became possible to freeze those frames and examine the eyes closely. They are clearly artificial cat’s eyes. As for the devil suit, I had an opportunity to examine it closely: because of its small size, the six-foot, 200-pound LaVey could not possibly have worn it. Many years later ,Nikolas and Zeena Schreck chanced to meet the father of the actress who played Mia Farrow’s body-double. He recalled that a young, very slender professional dancer had worn the suit. The Schrecks also met Polanski’s close friend Gene Gutowski, who had worked with Polanski on producing the film. Gutowski confirmed that there was no “technical advisor.” None of the ritual scenes reflects practices of the Church of Satan, and the chanting of the coven is not one of the Enochian Keys. Nevertheless the timing of the story – and its highlighting of 1966 as the “Year One” of the reign of the Antichrist – made a lasting impression upon the Church: Long after the motion picture disappeared from theaters, Christopher Komeda’s famous lullaby, sung on the soundtrack by Mia Farrow, would inspire sentimental emotions in the most worldly of Satanists.

• From Rosemary’s Body, Miranda Corcoran, 2018: Inserted into the Irish Constitution in 1983, the 8th Amendment, which supposedly affords equal protection to the right to life of both the mother and the unborn child, ushered in three decades of callous disregard for the lives of women and all those capable of becoming pregnant, as young girls with crisis pregnancies, rape victims, and couples diagnosed with fatal foetal abnormalities were forced to travel abroad for basic reproductive care. Beyond its inherent cruelty, the Irish prohibition against abortion has always been an intrusion of religious agendas onto the individual body. The invasive power of patriarchal authority and Catholic dogma have inhabited and taken root deep within the bodies of women. There was never safety or comfort, never a place of warmth or retreat, to be found in one’s own body: only shame, alienation and a cold, distant law. I mulled over the shifting Irish attitude towards reproductive rights while re-reading Rosemary’s Baby. I have long felt that Ira Levin infuses his work with an overtly feminist rhetoric that rivals anything produced by more contemporary genre-creators. Indeed, based on their initial reading of Levin’s other major contribution to popular culture, The Stepford Wives, many of my students assume the author must be female. So many of Levin’s male characters start out as loving, supportive husbands before transforming into abusers out of a desire for some signifier of conventional masculine dominance. In The Stepford Wives, Walter is entranced by the archetypal subservient ‘50s housewife; in Rosemary’s Baby, Guy relinquishes his wife’s freedom in exchange for a successful career. Constructing the desire for the accoutrements of hegemonic masculinity as inherently corrupting, Levin’s work repeatedly underscores how the demands of patriarchy, and the attendant requirement that men adhere to dominant notions of masculinity, can damage men and women. Rosemary’s autonomy is gradually undermined and eroded, as it becomes increasingly clear that her body is not her own but rather a vessel to be primed, manipulated and constrained: she is drugged by geriatric Satanist Minnie, and when Rosemary refuses the [suspect] dessert, Guy essentially gaslights her; already Rosemary’s ability to trust her own body is undermined. The trivialisation of sexual assault evidenced here and the flippant suggestion that such a violation is a minor infraction on the part of a husband who is, by default, entitled to access his wife’s body at any time reinforces the notion that Rosemary’s body is not her own, that she does not have the power to prevent the transgression of her corporeal boundaries. When Rosemary becomes pregnant, her capacity to exert any form of control over either her body or her life is radically curtailed. The neighbouring Satanists encourage her to stay at home, and her body is constantly scrutinised. When Rosemary opts to get a stylish Vidal Sassoon haircut, aesthetically removed from the lengthy tresses that are generally held up as feminine beauty, her husband berates her. She is forbidden from reading books about pregnancy or speaking to her friends about their experiences. Levin, who was not Catholic and did not believe in the Devil, crafted a deeply unsettling tale out of the darkest facets of Catholic lore. As an Irish woman reading Rosemary’s Baby in the weeks after the referendum on the 8th Amendment, the novel spoke to me afresh. https://amiddleagedwitch.wordpress.com/2018/06/08/rosemarys-body-reproductive-rights-and-diabolical-deeds-in-ira-levins-rosemarys-baby/ 

• From Rosemary’s Baby Was a Jewish Horror Movie, Nathan Abrams, Forward, 2018: Rosemary’s Baby” is laced with references to Catholicism: its protagonist, Rosemary Woodhouse, is a lapsed Catholic who dreams of nuns; the Pope’s visit to New York in October 1965 is discussed, as is the Kennedy family. But something in it stirs a sense of Jewish cultural identity as well:

•  Polanski adapted [Jewish novelist] Ira Levin’s 1967 novel of the same name.

• The film starred Mia Farrow, whose famous pixie haircut was provided by British Jewish hairdresser, Vidal Sassoon.

• Jewish actor Tony Curtis voiced the actor Donald Baumgart whose sudden blindness allows Guy to replace him in the play that sets him on the path to success. 

• Guy and Rosemary’s friend tells them about the Bramford and how “World War II filled the house up again,” to suggest that émigrés fleeing Nazism had taken over the apartment building. This group, in seeking to procure a child for Satan, echo age-old Judeophobic canards. 

• The overbearing Castevets resemble nebbishy, loud, pushy, New York Jewish stereotypes. Their lack of decorum contrasts with Rosemary’s politeness and acquiescence. 

• Roman is a wanderer, who has been “everywhere.” He has “piercing eyes,” and we learn that he has changed his name to hide his origins. The fact that he and Polanski have the same name seems too significant to avoid mentioning. 

• In the first draft of the screenplay he describes Minnie as “big-nosed, with a sullen fleshy underlip. She wears pink-rimmed eye glasses on a neckchain that dips down from behind plain pearly earrings.” Minnie cooks and kibitzes, browbeating Guy and Rosemary until they cannot refuse. She nags her henpecked husband: “Just watch the carpet.” At one point, she can be heard through the walls of the apartment shouting at Roman.

• Minnie manifests other stereotypical Jewish tics: Rosemary observes, “She’s the nosiest person I’ve ever seen. You know she actually asked the prices of things.”Gordon would go on to play a series of Jewish women, including a demented, overbearing Jewish mother in “Where’s Poppa?” 

• Rosemary’s obstetrician, Dr. Abraham Sapirstein, is more obviously Jewish. In the novel, Minnie describes him as “A Jewish man who delivers all the Society babies,” while Roman says, “He’s a brilliant man with all the sensitivities of his much-tormented race.” When Guy asks Rosemary if Sapirstein is in the coven, she replies, “No, I don’t think he’s one of them, he’s Jewish.” 

• Minnie introduces Rosemary to a “famous dentist” named Dr. Shand at a New Year’s party; Shand has made the chain for the charm that Minnie gave Rosemary earlier in the film. Both dentistry and jewelry were professions in which Jews enjoyed a significant presence. Phil Leeds, a well-known Jewish comedian, plays Shand. 

• Rosemary’s friends, distraught over her appalling physical appearance during pregnancy, compare her to a concentration camp victim. Polanski layered the film with allusions that are hard not to interpret as autobiographical: He had survived the Holocaust by hiding, and the claustrophobia of this traumatic childhood returns in the film’s images of a victimized woman trapped in an apartment, compelled to be quiet out of grave fear of the neighbors, staying alive or being betrayed because of whom she chooses to trust. The image of a pregnant woman being dragged away by muscular male representatives of authority has echoes in the memory of his mother, who was taken to a camp when he was eight. https://forward.com/culture/398478/why-rosemarys-baby-was-really-a-jewish-horror-movie/ 
• From Awakening to Satanic Conspiracy: Rosemary’s Baby and the Cult Next Door David Frankfurter University of New Hampshire, 2008: In the 1960s, before the “cult” scare, at a time when Christian demonology was still quite marginalized, and set in a city where nobody could expect cultural homogeneity anyway, Rosemary’s plight could almost be read as a sendup of the various weird and conflicting encounters pregnant women will have in urban society. By the late 1980s, however, everybody seemed to know what dangers Satanists next door might pose to the innocent and unsuspecting. A cacophony of media revelations, from Geraldo Rivera to the recovered-memory narrative Michelle Remembers, created a mood in which Satanism and Devil worship became a familiar and modern discourse. Satanism had come to serve, on the one hand, as a “symptom” of a culture in decline, and on the other hand as a cluster-point for perennial social anxieties, like child safety, the nature of the family, and the identification of deviance. In this historical context, Levin’s work, especially his evocation of suspicion and intimate Satanic conspiracy, becomes quite prescient and to a limited degree causal. America, we should recognize, has long had an obsession with themes of conspiracy. As organizations flourish and institutions get more powerful, we have kept an eye perpetually cocked for suggestions of suspicion, deceit, and even counter-institutions behind it all. We might recall not only the appeal of movies like The Manchurian Candidate (1962) but also the popularity of stories of international white-slavery rings and the perpetual rumors of Catholic, Masonic, Mormon, Jewish, and even extraterrestrial conspiracy over American history. In the 1960s, when Levin wrote Rosemary’s Baby, it was traditional institutions—communists, Catholics, corporations—that posed the threats. From at least the early Roman period, the epitome of conspiracy and moral subversion lay in illegitimate, subversive rituals especially when they seemed to function cohesively for some alien group. But by the late 1970s, in the face of a great variety of discomfiting events, Americans began to feel an increasing strain: Despite our austere Puritan legacy, social scientific enlightenment would not allow us to cast Charles Manson, Jim Jones, and David Berkowitz out of the realm of moral comprehensibility. We very much craved a discourse of evil to which we could relegate these most extreme figures. Satanism became the perfect conspiracy. Rosemary’s Baby was ahead of its time in offering such a revelation of Satanic conspiracy; many of the ideas it raises were picked up 20 years later. The revelatory experience it offers the audience—that psychological shift from innocence to “cultic” predation—is one that arose time and time again for television viewers, therapists and their patients, and law enforcement specialists over the 1980s and early 1990s. Conspiracy offers not only terror but also the likelihood that there exists something else beneath the experiences and encounters we have, that randomness is not the way things work, but that another, more powerful realm is at work, controlling things. Maybe it’s a positive realm—God and his angels, or aliens, as many believe—or maybe an inverse, evil realm, but [either way] the excitement comes in peering into it.

• From Vidal Sassoon? I did my pixie cut myself, says Mia Farrow DAILY MAIL STAFF,  2013: It is one of the best-known haircuts of all time: In 1968 British stylist Vidal Sassoon was acclaimed for creating the ‘pixie cut’ for actress Mia Farrow in her career defining role in Rosemary’s Baby. The urchin style look became an instant hit and today is still copied, most recently by Emma Watson. When Sassoon died last year at the age of 84 almost all the obituaries mentioned the role in the 1968 horror film. Now after almost 50 years Farrow says she came up with the boyish look and used a pair of nail scissors to cut her own hair: “I intend no disrespect to Mr Sassoon, but he had nothing to do with my haircut.” She said he was only responsible for trimming her hair as part of a publicity stunt for the film, as his name was mentioned in it. (When asked about the cut, Farrow’s character says, ‘It’s Vidal Sassoon. It’s very in.’) The actress set the record straight after the New York Times newspaper carried a recent article about career changing haircuts. It said Farrow had long, blonde hair until Sassoon gave her the pixie cut for the film.  It also said her husband at the time, Frank Sinatra, was so against the boyish look that he divorced her. After Farrow’s daughter-in-law contacted the paper to ask for a correction, editors on the paper reached out to Farrow. She wrote to the paper to set the record straight and they published her reply. Sassoon never said anything to dispel the myth that he had created the pixie cut for Farrow. He said he was invited to Hollywood to give Farrow a new style for the film. Farrow’s two year marriage to Sinatra ended shortly after the film came out, but she says it was unrelated. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2269357/Vidal-Sassoon-I-did-pixie-cut-says-Mia-Farrow-hairdressers-signature-style.html 

 

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