Theirs was not an ethic of wholesale design; on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which won him his first Oscar, Sylbert had personally selected each book on George and Martha’s shelves. Here realism and precision went hand in hand: The book titles elevated the characters from generic types to actual, specific individuals. As designers, the Sylberts were psychologists. Anthea aimed not for beauty or for chic—as Edith Head and costumers of an earlier generation so often did—but to amplify character. In her work there were no accidents. “By nature, I am a very analytical person,” Anthea said, but she could have been speaking for both of them. “Nothing that I do in my life is arbitrary. It’s all thought out. Even making breakfast. Everything’s lined up. Then I cook.” The object was to convey, visually, as much as possible as quickly as possible. To do that, she said, “you have to marry reality to drama. What will make the audience instinctively know this character as who they are? That was always the motivation.” The Sylberts synchronized their visual intellects. “I would always get a photo of the location,” Anthea said, “to know what the background was colorwise.” They united under a kind of aesthetic thesis statement, an overall dramatic notion, generally formulated by Richard, that they would tie to the look of the film.
Thus was Rosemary’s Baby—or any film by the Sylberts—given a visual story, in this case, in conjunction with Polanski. They decided: (1) The film was to look real, not like a horror movie—in other words, contrary to convention, pleasantly colorful. Per Ruth Gordon’s outrageous outfits, “Roman’s instruction,” Anthea said, “was you don’t suspect people who are loud,” and (2) “Roman insisted Rosemary be kept the year the pope came to New York, so it was a period film but only two or three years before. [The film] was set the year that every three weeks you had to shorten your skirt. It didn’t happen all at once, the miniskirt, it happened in increments. So all during the movie, as her pregnancy goes on, her skirts get shorter and shorter. That was the period. All young women, especially in New York, follow the trends, especially if your husband is an actor. That’s who Rosemary was.”
Mia Farrow was cast as Rosemary. For the part of her husband, Polanski auditioned a young actor who had appeared in a couple of Roger Corman films. Polanski liked him, but his roguish air was deemed wrong for the character, and Jack Nicholson was dismissed. The part went to actor/filmmaker John Cassavetes.
Production of Rosemary’s Baby began in the summer of 1967.
Polanski’s perfectionism suffused the set. Filming took time, not because he didn’t know what he wanted, but because he did. As much as his meticulousness, Polanski’s expertise with every office in the production, his total hands-on investment in the mechanics of things, slowed the process down to the pace of careful consideration. Everything—behind and in front of the camera lens—he put under the microscope of his own eyes. “Roman understood more about the camera than any director of photography that I worked with,” recalled first assistant director Howard Koch Jr. “He understood the grip and the electric. He understood all of it. He could do—and did—everything on the set.” He manned the camera, he acted for the actors. What some called controlling, Anthea Sylbert called direction. “Roman, like all great filmmakers, was a dictator,” she said, “a benevolent dictator.” He did not curb his creativity to meet the pressures of the schedule. His allegiance, in the end, was to the work. “[Cinematographer] Billy Fraker would take an hour and a half to light the hallway of the Dakota,” Koch said, “and Roman would tear it out and say, ‘This is how it should be done! I want this here and I want that there!’” And so “the movie went on and on,” Koch said, “and the studio was all over him to hurry up—a fifty-five-day schedule went into something like eighty days.”
Robert Evans, responsible for protecting Paramount’s investment, was summoned to location in New York a week into production. The call had come from Bill Castle, producer: He wanted Polanski off the movie. Evans balked; he had seen the dailies. They were fantastic.
“Listen,” Evans said to Polanski, away from the crew. “You better pick up the pace. The first ten days, you’re ten days late.”
“I can’t work this way.”
“Start working this way.”
Evans’s ass was on the line too. The year 1966 had been a terrible one for Paramount, and ’67, so far, wasn’t looking any better. Of course, Evans couldn’t be blamed for the box-office duds—Is Paris Burning?, This Property Is Condemned, El Dorado—he had inherited from the previous regime, but for Blake Edwards and Otto Preminger, two top directors currently working on new projects for Evans (Darling Lili, Skidoo), he had no excuse. Their dailies stunk—and in Edwards’s case, stunk very expensively. Was Evans doing something wrong? Just as baffling was the possibility that he was doing something right: The success of 1966’s biggest hit for Paramount, Alfie, which Evans had helped along in London, utterly defied conventional good sense; the movie (a) starred a newcomer, Michael Caine, and (b) cost almost nothing. Yet it soared. Why? To Paramount’s old guard, who held fast to their prestige formula of stars and spectacle—two assets they figured TV couldn’t offer—Alfie looked like a fluke; but to Evans it looked interesting. In the same spirit—fresh talent, new stories, reasonable budgets—he had green-lighted the audacious political satire The President’s Analyst. But it tanked. Why? Was it really because, as Evans argued, the FBI wanted it buried? Or had Evans buried it to save himself?
To show the New York money he was in control of their asset and show Polanski he supported him, Evans would appear—infrequently but meaningfully—on set to demonstrably endorse his director before the entire cast and crew. “He stuck his neck out for me,” Polanski said, “and showed himself to be quite courageous.” Assuaged, Polanski continued to make Rosemary’s Baby at his pace, and Evans guarded him, at his own peril, every step of the way, careful throughout to keep his distance from the production, out of respect to Polanski, and keep close, out of respect to Paramount. So it was that both sides were kept in balance and that Polanski could explore, without compromise and to his satisfaction, the Hollywood of his boyhood dreams. “Hollywood was just the name of the place,” he said, “but it happens that this Hollywood is giving me the tools to do what I want to do.” On Rosemary’s Baby, at Paramount, he learned “how to drive this machine” of “the best technicians in the world.” They allowed him, for the first time in his career, to rise to the very peak of his imaginings. Richard Sylbert showed him how a set could be built to maximize camera placement. Sam O’Steen taught him more than he ever knew about editing. Evans, signing the checks, gave him—them—the time. “Hollywood is the best place!” Polanski told a journalist after he completed Rosemary. “It’s like asking Michelangelo, ‘Would you like to live in Carrara?’”
* * *
Roman and Sharon opened their home to new friends, collaborators, Sharon’s ex-boyfriend Jay Sebring, Polish writers and filmmakers, and Sharon’s family. No one was denied. “Sharon couldn’t turn any friendship down,” Polanski said. “Every time I came home from the studio there was Sharon, the dogs and friends.” Having spent the bulk of her life traveling, first as an army brat and later as an actress, Sharon savored home life, and Roman in it. She doted on him. She cut his hair, packed his bags (placing tissue paper between the layers), cooked dinners for all to enjoy, on the beach, under the Malibu moon. They sang aloud to “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and “Suzanne,” their music presiding over “the radiance of those California evenings,” as Polanski recalled them. They were golden, their friends were golden, and with so much gold to go around, all were happy at one another’s shine. Even apart, Polanski, the Sylberts, Beatty, Evans, and Nichols seemed to work together. “I never knew life could be a luxury,” Polanski said. “It had always been hotel rooms and struggle,” he added, “and now I loved this life, I loved the place, I love the people, I loved the work.” Polanski paid his maid more than two hundred dollars a week—probably what a Polish laborer earned in six months. “We wanted to settle for good in Los Angeles,” he said. “We had big plans. It seemed to be a kind of peculiar, happy dream.”