Rosemary's Baby Read online

  Rosemary’s Baby

  By Ira Levin:

  Novels

  SON OF ROSEMARY

  SLIVER

  THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL

  THE STEPFORD WIVES

  THIS PERFECT DAY

  ROSEMARY’S BABY

  A KISS BEFORE DYING

  Plays

  DRAT! THE CAT! (Music by Milton Schafer)

  CRITIC’S CHOICE

  GENERAL SEEGER

  INTERLOCK

  NO TIME FOR SERGEANTS (From the novel by Mac Hyman)

  Rosemary’s Baby

  IRA LEVIN

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  ROSEMARY’S BABY

  Pegasus Books LLC

  80 Broad Street

  5th Floor

  New York, NY 10004

  Copyright © 1967 by Ira Levin

  Introduction copyright © 2010 by Otto Penzler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN: 978-1-605-98148-2

  www.pegasusbooks.us

  COMPLETED IN AUGUST, 1966,

  IN WILTON, CONNECTICUT,

  AND DEDICATED TO GABRIELLE

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  PART 2

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  PART 3

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  INTRODUCTION

  by Otto Penzler

  The argument could be made that Rosemary’s Baby is one of the half-dozen most influential horror novels of all time, up there with Frankenstein for inventing the genre, Dracula for creating the single most iconic creature who ever lived…and lived…and lived, and Carrie, for launching the career of Stephen King, the greatest and most popular horror writer in history. The downside, as Ira Levin often stated, is that the novel and the excellent film adaptation spurred a virtual flood of exorcists, omens, demon seeds, changelings and other hackneyed copycats.

  “It’s one thing to refer to the book,” Levin wrote of Rosemary’s Baby, “as being ‘generally credited or blamed for having sparked the current revival of occultism,’ and another to recognize, as I have in the past few years (writing in 1990), that the blame may be real and weighty.”

  The preponderance of horror in fiction and on film led to a time, Levin noted, “when people, presumably schooled, detect backward demonic messages in rock music and Satan’s symbol on bars of soap.”

  Levin was not a believer—not in any organized religion, not Satanism, not witchcraft, not in any of the myths or charismatic real-life figures who have engendered worship. In fact, he had rather hoped that his novel would help to increase the skepticism that had always resided with him. It wasn’t to be. Not only did the book become a publishing phenomenon, rushing to the top of best-seller lists, but it was the basis for a faithful motion picture version that also was a staggering success at the box office and one of the few horror films of the 1960s that holds up to repeated viewing, even today.

  Hollywood directors are famous for signing on to make a motion picture based on a novel and then changing it so dramatically that even the author wouldn’t recognize it. This was not the case with Roman Polanski, who was almost obsessive about following the author’s story. He met regularly with Levin, pages marked in the book, asking such questions as, What do you think is the color of Rosemary’s dress in this scene? and What is the date of the issue of The New Yorker in which Guy Woodhouse sees a shirt he wants?—all very flattering to the author, who had no idea how to answer. It was uncommonly wise of the director, who also wrote the screenplay for the 1968 masterpiece starring Mia Farrow as the young woman who slowly becomes convinced that her husband (John Cassavetes) has become involved with a coven of witches who live in their apartment building.

  Ira Levin (1929–2007) was the genius whose brilliant first novel, A Kiss Before Dying (1953), won the Edgar Allan Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America in the Best First Novel category. Never a prolific novelist, his next novel was Rosemary’s Baby (1967), which he followed with the dystopian science fiction thriller This Perfect Day (1970). He then added a phrase to the language with The Stepford Wives (1972) before writing the huge best-seller, The Boys from Brazil (1976), then concluded his novel-writing career with two less well-regarded books, Sliver (1991) and Son of Rosemary (1997). All but This Perfect Day and Son of Rosemary have been filmed at least once.

  Levin’s success as a playwright equaled or exceeded that of his books, notably his adaptation of Mac Hyman’s No Time for Sergeants to the stage in 1955; it starred Andy Griffith, launching his career. He also wrote the book and lyrics for the musical Drat! The Cat! (1965). But it is his 1978 tour-de-force, Deathtrap, that brought him his greatest acclaim. It was nominated for a Tony and won the Edgar, becoming the all-time longest running thriller in the history of the American theater, with 1,809 performances over a four-and-a-half-year period.

  What a career! At the age of 23, while most recent college graduates are still living at home and trying to figure out what they want to do, Levin had written one of the greatest mystery novels of all time. A couple of years later, he had a hit Broadway play. He wrote the lyrics for one of Barbra Streisand’s signature songs, “He Touched Me.” After some television work (Lights Out, The U.S. Steel Hour), he had another hit on Broadway, and then the horror novel to end all horror novels. He wasn’t yet forty.

  Although somewhat reclusive in later life, Ira Levin was, perhaps contrary to expectation, a delightful companion who loved to laugh and hear other people’s stories. We happened to be at the same Christmas party one year and he was as genial as could be. But he was also a little troubled. The party was at the home of America’s greatest comic crime novelist, Donald E. Westlake, and, not surprisingly, there were many authors and book people in the room. It had been almost fifteen years since he had written The Boys from Brazil and he said he felt like a fraud, that he was listening to conversations and realized that everyone else had books recently published or books on which they were working. He went home and wrote Sliver in a few months and, as was usual for him, it hit the best-seller lists.

  He should have realized that he was not a fraud, not for an instant, and that no one sane could ever have thought he was. He wrote brilliantly in every literary field in which he worked, his sentences models of precision, making up what they lacked in velvety, mandarin, overripe prose with clarity and forward movement, with never a wasted word. He was justly proud of his achievements—except, perhaps, in the case of Rosemary’s Baby, because of the books and films by others for which it had been a catalyst. He once wrote that he regarded his novel the way he might have felt about “an offspring who regularly sent home money that I’d begun to suspect was ill-gotten.” He was dismayed that “it helped boost the universal stupidity quotient.” But, like that
hypothetical offspring’s offerings, he never felt compelled to send back the money. Nor should he have. He enriched those readers fortunate enough to have picked up this perfect classic, and we would never give back the experience.

  PART 1

  CHAPTER 1

  ROSEMARY AND GUY WOODHOUSE had signed a lease on a five-room apartment in a geometric white house on First Avenue when they received word, from a woman named Mrs. Cortez, that a four-room apartment in the Bramford had become available. The Bramford, old, black, and elephantine, is a warren of high-ceilinged apartments prized for their fireplaces and Victorian detail. Rosemary and Guy had been on its waiting list since their marriage but had finally given up.

  Guy relayed the news to Rosemary, stopping the phone against his chest. Rosemary groaned “Oh no!” and looked as if she would weep.

  “It’s too late,” Guy said to the phone. “We signed a lease yesterday.” Rosemary caught his arm. “Couldn’t we get out of it?” she asked him. “Tell them something?”

  “Hold on a minute, will you, Mrs. Cortez?” Guy stopped the phone again. “Tell them what?” he asked.

  Rosemary floundered and raised her hands helplessly. “I don’t know, the truth. That we have a chance to get into the Bramford.”

  “Honey,” Guy said, “they’re not going to care about that.”

  “You’ll think of something, Guy. Let’s just look, all right? Tell her we’ll look. Please. Before she hangs up.”

  “We signed a lease, Ro; we’re stuck.”

  “Please! She’ll hang up!” Whimpering with mock anguish, Rosemary pried the phone from Guy’s chest and tried to push it up to his mouth.

  Guy laughed and let the phone be pushed. “Mrs. Cortez? It turns out there’s a chance we’ll be able to get out of it, because we haven’t signed the actual lease yet. They were out of the forms so we only signed a letter of agreement. Can we take a look at the apartment?”

  Mrs. Cortez gave instructions: they were to go to the Bramford between eleven and eleven-thirty, find Mr. Micklas or Jerome, and tell whichever they found that they were the party she had sent to look at 7E. Then they were to call her. She gave Guy her number.

  “You see how you can think of things?” Rosemary said, putting Peds and yellow shoes on her feet. “You’re a marvelous liar.”

  Guy, at the mirror, said, “Christ, a pimple.”

  “Don’t squeeze it.”

  “It’s only four rooms, you know. No nursery.”

  “I’d rather have four rooms in the Bramford,” Rosemary said, “than a whole floor in that—that white cellblock.”

  “Yesterday you loved it.”

  “I liked it. I never loved it. I’ll bet not even the architect loves it. We’ll make a dining area in the living room and have a beautiful nursery, when and if.”

  “Soon,” Guy said. He ran an electric razor back and forth across his upper lip, looking into his eyes, which were brown and large. Rosemary stepped into a yellow dress and squirmed the zipper up the back of it.

  They were in one room, that had been Guy’s bachelor apartment. It had posters of Paris and Verona, a large day bed and a pullman kitchen.

  It was Tuesday, the third of August.

  Mr. Micklas was small and dapper but had fingers missing from both hands, which made shaking hands an embarrassment, though not apparently for him. “Oh, an actor,” he said, ringing for the elevator with a middle finger. “We’re very popular with actors.” He named four who were living at the Bramford, all of them well known. “Have I seen you in anything?”

  “Let’s see,” Guy said. “I did Hamlet a while back, didn’t I, Liz? And then we made The Sandpiper…”

  “He’s joking,” Rosemary said. “He was in Luther and Nobody Loves An Albatross and a lot of television plays and television commercials.”

  “That’s where the money is, isn’t it?” Mr. Micklas said; “the commercials.”

  “Yes,” Rosemary said, and Guy said, “And the artistic thrill, too.”

  Rosemary gave him a pleading look; he gave back one of stunned innocence and then made a leering vampire face at the top of Mr. Micklas’s head.

  The elevator—oak-paneled, with a shining brass handrail all around—was run by a uniformed Negro boy with a locked-in-place smile. “Seven,” Mr. Micklas told him; to Rosemary and Guy he said, “This apartment has four rooms, two baths, and five closets. Originally the house consisted of very large apartments—the smallest was a nine—but now they’ve almost all been broken up into fours, fives, and sixes. Seven E is a four that was originally the back part of a ten. It has the original kitchen and master bath, which are enormous, as you’ll soon see. It has the original master bedroom for its living room, another bedroom for its bedroom, and two servant’s rooms thrown together for its dining room or second bedroom. Do you have children?”

  “We plan to,” Rosemary said.

  “It’s an ideal child’s room, with a full bathroom and a large closet. The whole set-up is made to order for a young couple like yourselves.”

  The elevator stopped and the Negro boy, smiling, chivied it down, up, and down again for a closer alignment with the floor rail outside; and still smiling, pulled in the brass inner gate and the outer rolling door. Mr. Micklas stood aside and Rosemary and Guy stepped out—into a dimly lighted hallway walled and carpeted in dark green. A workman at a sculptured green door marked 7B looked at them and turned back to fitting a peepscope into its cut-out hole.

  Mr. Micklas led the way to the right and then to the left, through short branches of dark green hallway. Rosemary and Guy, following, saw rubbed-away places in the wallpaper and a seam where it had lifted and was curling inward; saw a dead light bulb in a cut-glass sconce and a patched place of light green tape on the dark green carpet. Guy looked at Rosemary: Patched carpet? She looked away and smiled brightly: I love it; everything’s lovely!

  “The previous tenant, Mrs. Gardenia,” Mr. Micklas said, not looking back at them, “passed away only a few days ago and nothing has been moved out of the apartment yet. Her son asked me to tell whoever looks at it that the rugs, the air conditioners, and some of the furniture can be had practically for the asking.” He turned into another branch of hallway papered in newer-looking green and gold stripes.

  “Did she die in the apartment?” Rosemary asked. “Not that it—”

  “Oh, no, in a hospital,” Mr. Micklas said. “She’d been in a coma for weeks. She was very old and passed away without ever waking. I’ll be grateful to go that way myself when the time comes. She was chipper right to the end; cooked her own meals, shopped the departments stores…She was one of the first women lawyers in New York State.”

  They came now to a stairwell that ended the hallway. Adjacent to it, on the left, was the door of apartment 7E, a door without sculptured garlands, narrower than the doors they had passed. Mr. Micklas pressed the pearl bell button—L. Gardenia was mounted above it in white letters on black plastic—and turned a key in the lock. Despite lost fingers he worked the knob and threw the door smartly. “After you, please,” he said, leaning forward on his toes and holding the door open with the length of an outstretched arm.

  The apartment’s four rooms were divided two and two on either side of a narrow central hallway that extended in a straight line from the front door. The first room on the right was the kitchen, and at the sight of it Rosemary couldn’t keep from giggling, for it was as large if not larger than the whole apartment in which they were then living. It had a six-burner gas stove with two ovens, a mammoth refrigerator, a monumental sink; it had dozens of cabinets, a window on Seventh Avenue, a high high ceiling, and it even had—imagining away Mrs. Gardenia’s chrome table and chairs and roped bales of Fortune and Musical America—the perfect place for something like the blue-and-ivory breakfast nook she had clipped from last month’s House Beautiful.

  Opposite the kitchen was the dining room or second bedroom, which Mrs. Gardenia had apparently used as a combination study and greenhouse. Hund
reds of small plants, dying and dead, stood on jerry-built shelves under spirals of unlighted fluorescent tubing; in their midst a rolltop desk spilled over with books and papers. A handsome desk it was, broad and gleaming with age. Rosemary left Guy and Mr. Micklas talking by the door and went to it, stepping over a shelf of withered brown fronds. Desks like this were displayed in antique-store windows; Rosemary wondered, touching it, if it was one of the things that could be had practically for the asking. Graceful blue penmanship on mauve paper said than merely the intriguing pastime I believed it to be. I can no longer associate myself—and she caught herself snooping and looked up at Mr. Micklas turning from Guy. “Is this desk one of the things Mrs. Gardenia’s son wants to sell?” she asked.