Summertime, and the living is far too easy. We leave the city, invigorated by the evanescent scent of spring, determined to get that intellectual wallpapering done—it’ll be Marcuse this summer —but the THI rises, the IQ dips, and by Labor Day, all we’ve done is to rake up a few Flemings. The road to Martha’s Vineyard is paved with good intentions.
The intellectual peak for this summer’s readers and moviegoers seems to be Ira Levin’s urban horror story, Rosemary’s Baby, which William Castle and Roman Polanski have made into a film starring Mia Farrow. Subliterate matrons and postliterate trippies have discovered the novel (the mother of a friend of mine reported, with ill-concealed pride, “I read a whole book”); the bridge-clubbers and telly freaks, who in the last five years have seen The Sound of Music, Born Free and, just maybe, The Graduate (dragged to it, but Katharine Ross was lovely), are going voluntarily to see Rosemary’s Baby, and telling their friends to do the same.
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