Rita Marlowe was named after actresses Rita Hayworth and Jean Harlow. The surname Marlowe is also an homage to 16th century playwright Christopher Marlowe, who wrote the 1604 drama "The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus", which loosely inspired the original play upon which this film is based.
The uncredited woman promoting Tres Chic, one of the fake adverts in the film's beginning, is Majel Barrett. She would later go on to play Nurse Christine Chapel in Star Trek (1966).
The radio announces Rita Marlowe has just completed a picture with Cary Grant mere moments before the appearance of Betsy Drake (Jenny Wells), who was married to Grant at the time.
The film - a 20th Century Fox production - includes several thinly veiled digs at Marilyn Monroe. She was Fox's biggest - and most difficult - star, and the studio had a love/hate relationship with her. When Rita Marlowe mentions to Rock that her studio wants to cast her in a movie about "two Russian brothers," it is clearly a dig at Marilyn Monroe whom the press had widely mocked one year before for holding a press conference during which she expressed her intention to star in a film adaptation of Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov." Even the concept of Rita leaving an athlete (Bobo) for a slighter, more intellectual type (Rock) was a parallel to Marilyn leaving Joe DiMaggio for Arthur Miller...the latter being a union that the press and public was so skeptical of, it was initially perceived to be a publicity stunt by Marilyn.
The commercial parody in which a woman is unable to open a refrigerator is clearly a reference to an infamous live commercial in which June Graham (not Betty Furness) could not open a Westinghouse refrigerator.