ROSEMIA'S BOO-BOO

ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968)
dir: Roman Polanski

ROSEMIA'S BOO-BOO
MAD #124, January 1969
w: Arnie Kogen
a: Mort Drucker

Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her husband Guy (John Cassavetes) move into the Branford Apartments in New York City. Their friend Hutch (Mauice Evans) warns them that their witchcraft, led by Adrian Mercato, was practiced in their apartment years ago. Later, when Rosemary is doing her laundry, she meets a neighbor Terry (Angela Dorian), who the Woodhouses later found out has committed suicide from jumping out the window, wearing a necklace made from tannis root that neighbors, the Castavets, had given her.

Rosemary and Guy befriend Minnie and Roman Castavet (Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer), who seem overly kind to them, as do the other neighbors, including Laura-Louise (Patsy Kelly). Rosemary is given the same tannis necklace Terry had been given.

Panels are full of devil and hell jokes. “Satan Place” is a reference to Peyton Place, a TV show Farrow had previously appeared on.

The chocolate mousse the Castavets have made for the Woodhouses has a weird aftertaste for Rosemary and gives her a weird hallicunatory dream. The couple had talked about conceiving and Guy turns out to have done the deed while she was sleeping. (We all know about Roman Polanski's dubious morals. I know that's putting it lightly, but I've been misconstrued in the past for saying more.)

The Frank Sinatra reference is about how Mia Farrow was married to her at the time, and he apparently controlled her on the set. They're featured prominently on the cover of the Drucker-drawn The New First Family below this article.

When Rosemary becomes pregnant and they give the news to their neighbors, the Castavets suggest they fire their obstetrician, Dr. Hall, and instead go to Dr. Sapirstein (Ralph Bellamy). He's unorthodox for a doctor, not prescribing typical medications and asking her to ignore reading the usual texts, instead recommending his own potions. The potions emaciate her and cause her unbearable pain. Hutch has ideas about what's going on.

Hutch died before being able to meet Rosemary, but willed her a book about witchcraft that contains clues. One of the clues is an anagram, which she figures out with Scrabble tiles. Ahe finds a name in the book, Steve Mercato, is an anagram of 'Roman Castavet'. Steve is the son of Adrian Mercato, and putting two and two together, she figures out there is a conspiracy by everyone to take her baby. Guy forbids her to read the book and she suspects him to be on it too. She convinces Dr. Hill (Charles Grodin) to rescue her, he thinks she is delusional.

Rosemary blanks out and wakes up to find she has given birth. The baby is in the room next door and all of the neighbors are surrounding it. The baby is Satan.

I'm not sure what the Sessue Hayakawa reference is except that one of the neighbors is Asian. It may be a racist caricature and joke but the movie went there first with the stereotype of Japanese people always having cameras.

I've never heard this album so I'm not sure if it's a sequel to The First Family, a comedy album from a few years earlier about the Kennedys that you can find for $1 at any thrift store. It may or may not have people doing impressions of Louis Armstrong, Marlon Brando, Gregory Peck, Dean Martin, Ed Sullivan, Jack Benny, Richard Burton, Liz Taylor, Sammy Davis Jr, Joey Bishop, Kirk Douglas, Robert Stack, Cary Grant, Boris Karloff, LBJ, Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater, Hubert Humphrey, or RFK Jr.'s father. Or maybe it's actually them.

ROSEMARY'S BABY DEVLIN
Cracked #76, May 1969
a: Lugoze (Luis Zegarra)

There was a made-for-TV sequel called Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby.