While delirious in the hospital, he hallucinated scenes from the film and was said to have yelled, “Rosemary, for God’s sake, drop the knife!” Castle recovered, just barely, and never made a Hollywood hit again. In April 1969, producer William Castle, sick with worry from the hate mail he received constantly, was suddenly stricken with severe kidney stones. Komeda never regained consciousness and died in Poland the following year. Details of his death are still scarce, but Polanski told it this way: in autumn of 1968, then 37-year-old Komeda was roughhousing at a party when he fell off a rocky escarpment and into a four-month coma-the very same affliction Levin’s witches used to kill Rosemary’s suspicious friend in the book. Religious counterculture was already swirling: the Church of Satan was soon to be established in San Francisco, and in April 1966 Time magazine had just famously asked on its cover: “Is God Dead?” the “number of the beast,” as predicted in the New Testament’s Book of Revelation. He plopped every would-be parent’s feelings of anxiety atop an imminent historical moment: June 1966, or 666-a.k.a.
In 1965, struggling as always for his next big idea, Levin looked no further than his pregnant wife in their New York apartment. Like all good scary stories, this one starts out very ordinary. Did Levin’s tale of lapsed-Christian Rosemary, who unknowingly carries and births the devil in return for her actor husband’s stage success, really jinx all those who got near it? And if so, why did Levin himself stay so seemingly unscathed? But with every hit came a flop, and success always seemed to come with a cost-a theme rooted deeply in all his best works, especially Rosemary’s Baby.Ī hit novel turned iconic film, Rosemary’s Baby was a massive success that, according to half a century of pop-culture lore, is also cursed.
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At 21, he’d sold two TV scripts to NBC soon after, a Broadway play garnered a Tony nod and his first novel-in which a ruthless young man murders his pregnant lover-won the 1954 Edgar Award. In 1967, Ira Levin was already, by most anyone’s standards, a very, very successful writer.
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