Who really fathered Rosemary’s Baby?

Half a century after it was first published on March 12 1967, it’s almost impossible to come fresh to Ira Levin’s supernatural chiller Rosemary’s Baby. Mia Farrow and her pixie cut loom large as scenes from Roman Polanski’s adaptation, released the following year, unspool in the mind’s eye: we see her frantically shuffling Scrabble tiles to decode her demonic neighbour’s anagrammatic pseudonym; or shrieking “What have you done to his eyes?” as she’s introduced to the not-whollyhuman firstborn she’s been carrying for the rest of the movie.

Reading the novel even now, Levin’s prose feels screen-ready, its snappy dialogue a source of frequent humour. Here, for example, is Rosemary hosting a party: And here she is on being called out of the blue from a sister who never left her home town of Omaha: Each of Levin’s seven novels has been filmed – sometimes more than once – and he had a knack for a burning topic. The Boys from Brazil (1976), about an exiled cell of Nazis in possession of Hitler’s DNA, was inspired by a newspaper story he’d read about cloning; while 1972’s The Stepford Wives spun the contemporary backlash against feminism into a science-fiction satire about manipulative husbands replacing their spouses with busty robots.

Rosemary’s Baby was his first bite at a similar theme, and his greatest success, though it’s been Levin’s peculiar fate to be less well-known than his work. He wrote the novel after his latest play had gone belly-up on Broadway. His first wife – Gabrielle Aronsohn, whom he would divorce the following year – was pregnant with their third child and he needed a money-spinner. This multimillion-selling tale of domesticity and devil worship was exactly that. Beelzebub was hot – Levin’s story gathered strength from Anton LaVey’s founding of the Church of Satan in San Francisco in 1966 – but if the novel still burns fiercely, it’s less for the occult plotline than for what it cloaks: a stealthily brutal portrayal of marriage that time has done little to defang.

Rosemary, 24, leaves five siblings and her Catholic upbringing in the Midwest to work in television in New York City – a job she quits to marry Guy Woodhouse, an older, ambitious actor stuck in prime-time commercials but eyeing a future in Beverly Hills via Broadway.

Making their nest in a 19thcentury apartment block adorned with gargoyles – ominous – they fall in with Roman and Minnie Castavet, busybodies whose nightly bickering and chanting – more ominous – waft through their freshly and fashionably papered walls. “Honey, if we get friendly with an old couple like that we’re never going to get them off our necks,” warns Guy, in one of several campy winks. (He surely means “backs”… doesn’t he?)

Although we’re kept in the dark as to exactly how and why Guy then drops his guard, it’s clear that some kind of Faustian pact with Roman is responsible for a turbo-boost to his

Ira Levin’s chilling novel, published 50 years ago, is unjustly overshadowed by Polanski’s film, says Anthony Cummins The occult plotline cloaks a still brutal portrait of marriage

Devilry in the delivery: the elfin Mia Farrow carried a heavy load in the Roman Polanski film of Ira Levin’s 1967 novel