Despite this, the film is so often miscredited with having introduced elements and themes that come straight from the book, we thought it would be helpful to provide several representative comparisons between the two, as below.
We greatly encourage anyone seeking an accurate understanding of the relationship between the two works to read the book – and not rely on potential past misattributions.
By two o’clock everyone had gone and they were alone in the living room, with dirty glasses and used napkins and spilling over ashtrays all around. ("Don’t forget," Elise had whispered, leaving. Not very likely.)
He said nothing, looking at her.
"I want him to examine me," she said. He drew together all his surprise and anger and, pointing back over his shoulder toward the kitchen, cried it at her. "You’re not changing doctors," Guy said. "Just now." She managed to smile at him. "Sherry," she said, trying to make it sound non-toxic.
"How much sherry?" he asked.
Something moved in her.
"A lot?"
Again, where nothing had ever moved before. A rippling little pressure. She giggled.
She reached for Guy, not looking at him; snapped her fingers quickly for his hand. He came closer and gave it. She put it to the side of her stomach and held it there. Obligingly the movement came.
He jerked his hand away, pale. "Yes," he said. "Isn’t it?" She held her stomach again, looking down at it.
It's Alive
On the following Monday morning Rosemary was putting away the last of a double armload of groceries when the doorbell rang; and the peephole showed Mrs. Castevet, white hair in curlers under a blue-and-white kerchief, looking solemnly straight ahead as if waiting for the click of a passport photographer's camera.
Minnie Through the Peephole
He put her down on the bed and sat beside her, taking her hand and stroking her forehead sympathetically. She closed her eyes. The bed was a raft that floated on gentle ripples, tilting and swaying pleasantly.
“Missing the mass.”
“Sleep. Get a good night’s sleep. Go on . . .”
Guy had taken off the top of her pajamas.
He undid the snaps at her side and slowly drew off the bottoms. Thought she was asleep and didn’t know. Now she had nothing on at all except a red bikini, but the other women on the yacht—Jackie Kennedy, Pat Lawford, and Sarah Churchill—were wearing bikinis too, so it was all right, thank goodness. The President was in his Navy uniform. He had completely recovered from the assassination and looked better than ever. Hutch was standing on the dock with armloads of weather-forecasting equipment.
“But what about Sarah Churchill?” Rosemary asked.
She turned to point, but Sarah Churchill was gone and the family was there in her place: Ma, Pa, and everybody, with the husbands, wives, and children. Margaret was pregnant, and so were Jean and Dodie and Ernestine.
Guy was taking off her wedding ring. She wondered why, but was too tired to ask. “Sleep,” she said, and slept.
It was the first time the Sistine Chapel had been opened to the public and she was inspecting the ceiling on a new elevator that carried the visitor through the chapel horizontally, making it possible to see the frescoes exactly as Michelangelo, painting them, had seen them. How glorious they were! She saw God extending his finger to Adam, giving him the divine spark of life; and the underside of a shelf partly covered with gingham contact paper as she was carried backward through the linen closet.
But the President was gone. Everyone was gone. The deck was infinite and bare, except for, far away, the Negro mate holding the wheel unremittingly on its course.
Rosemary went to him and saw at once that he hated all white people, hated her.
Below was a huge ballroom where on one side a church burned fiercely and on the other a black-bearded man stood glaring at her. In the center was a bed. She went to it and lay down, and was suddenly surrounded by naked men and women, ten or a dozen, with Guy among them. They were elderly, the women grotesque and slack-breasted. Minnie and her friend Laura-Louise were there, and Roman in a black miter and a black silk robe. With a thin black wand he was drawing designs on her body, dipping the wand’s point in a cup of red held for him by a sun-browned man with a white moustache. The point moved back and forth across her stomach and down ticklingly to the insides of her thighs. The naked people were chanting—flat, unmusical, foreign-tongued syllables—and a flute or clarinet accompanied them.
Jackie Kennedy came into the ballroom in an exquisite gown of ivory satin embroidered with pearls.
Rosemary explained about the mouse-bite, minimizing it so Jackie wouldn’t worry.
Jackie smiled warmly at her.
Rosemary slept a while, and then Guy came in and began making love to her. He stroked her with both hands—a long, relishing stroke that began at her bound wrists, slid down over her arms, breasts, and loins, and became a voluptuous tickling between her legs. He repeated the exciting stroke again and again, his hands hot and sharp-nailed, and then, when she was ready-ready-more-than-ready, he slipped a hand in under her buttocks, raised them, lodged his hardness against her, and pushed it powerfully in. Bigger he was than always; painfully, wonderfully big. He lay forward upon her, his other arm sliding under her back to hold her, his broad chest crushing her breasts. (He was wearing, because it was to he a costume party, a suit of coarse leathery armor.) Brutally, rhythmically, he drove his new hugeness. She opened her eyes and looked into yellow furnace-eyes, smelled sulphur and tannis root, felt wet breath on her mouth, heard lust-grunts and the breathing of onlookers.
The hugeness kept driving in her, the leathery body banging itself against her again and again and again.
The Pope came in with a suitcase in his hand and a coat over his arm.
Rosemary kissed it and the Pope hurried out to catch his plane.
'Dream' Sequence
Rosemary looked outside the door. She could see only the end of the living room that was bridge tables and file cabinets; Guy and Mr. Castevet were at the other end. A plane of blue cigarette smoke lay motionless in the air.
Guy and Roman Seated 'Out of Frame'
Not long after telling Dr. Sapirstein about the nearly raw meat, Rosemary found herself chewing on a raw and dripping chicken heart—in the kitchen one morning at four-fifteen. She looked at herself in the side of the toaster, where her moving reflection had caught her eye, and then looked at her hand, at the part of the heart she hadn't yet eaten held in red-dripping fingers. After a moment she went over and put the heart in the garbage, and turned on the water and rinsed her hand. Then, with the water still running, she bent over the sink and began to vomit.
Midnight Snack
She looked at them watching her and knife-in-hand screamed at them,
They stirred and looked to Roman.
She looked at him, looked at Guy—whose eyes were hidden behind a hand—looked at Roman again.
She shook her head.
Minnie said,
You Maniacs