It is not much fun being dubbed the most beautiful woman in the world, as Garbo found out. The current titleholder is Paris-born Catherine Deneuve, 31, who endures from flick to flick, her glory undiminished by bad scripts and usually poor direction. Recently she arrived in the U.S. to start filming Robert Aldrich's Hustle. But before she left Paris, she allowed herself to be used to promote her latest movie, Zig-Zig, by posing in Esmeralda's, an erotic saloon in Pigalle, one of the few locales where a girl can get a laugh these days.

Very soon now the cool campus scene may hot up again. Ron Ziegler, Richard Nixon's press secretary, is going on the college lecture circuit. Federal funds for his $42,500 salary will stop in February, and Ziegler has signed up with the Colston Leigh lecture bureau for a tour that may prove to be a dry run for Nixon's own emergence from seclusion. Ziegler has not yet said what he will talk about, but critics of his past performances cannot wait to watch him taking questions from the floor.

Looking resplendent in furs, Sophia Loren, 40, went skiing in France's Haute-Savoie with Husband Carlo Ponti, 61, and sons Cip`i, 6, and Dodo, 2. Sophia avoided going downhill, however, preferring cross-country, and did so well that she extracted praise from her instructor. "Comme elle est belle," an onlooker was heard to say, more in tribute to Sophia than to her skiing. The rest of the family cautiously kept off the slopes. Apres-ski, Cip`i was Mama's favorite escort, going so far as to take Sophia to a restaurant for fondue.

"That's a fine woman!" exclaimed an admiring Sherlock Holmes onstage at Broadway's Broadhurst Theater as the redheaded villainess was led from the mayhem. Then he added quietly, "Yet her crime is commonplace." In the audience, another redhead was creating her own kind of fuss. In a reclusive mood, Katharine Hepburn, 65, hid her face from autograph seekers at intermission. When an amateur photographer tried to snap her, she shooed him away so fiercely that he fell. "I really thought she was going to belt him," said one impressed observer, who earned a growl from Kate: "Beat it, buster."

Is Jackie Kennedy Onassis going broke? Was she casting about for a way to boost her income when, unasked, she sent in to The New Yorker a 1,500-word piece on New York's new International Center of Photography? It was published in the Jan. 13 issue of the magazine--unsigned, like all "Talk of the Town" contributions. Editor William Shawn did not divulge her fee, saying only that she would be paid at "regular rates, which run into the hundreds rather than the thousands." The same week Jackie reaped $3,000 from the sale at a Manhattan auction house of some old furniture, including President Kennedy's chair from Choate School and John Jr.'s discarded desk. When the gallery owner went to select the furniture for the sale, he rejected several pieces. Disappointed, Jackie said: "I wish you'd take more. What's left I'm going to give to the thrift shop."

Was it a dream or a nightmare? Ballet Patron Rebekah Harkness, 59, was sure she had married Dr. Niels H. Lauersen, 48. She remembered a quiet ceremony at her Sneden's Landing, N.Y., home last October. But when she publicly confirmed the happy event recently, the 6-ft. Danish-born gynecologist ungallantly nipped the nuptial tale. Pressed, he said gruffly, "It's all done for tax purposes." Meanwhile, Rebekah was rhapsodizing about her bridegroom. "He loves ballet," she sighed. "I frankly think he would have liked to dance. He could have been good. He is built well enough."

Why did officials of Washington's Smithsonian Institution keep Erica Jong, 32, standing on tiptoe so long if they were not going to kiss her? Perhaps, when they invited her to speak in one of their monthly lecture series, they had not read her bestselling novel, Fear of Flying. A raunchy, anarchic account of a woman's sexual escapades conducted with a Tom Jones lusty disregard for convention, taste or conscience, Flying is so uninhibited that it sweeps aside those more tortured analysts of women's state, Joan Didion and Sandra Hochman. It is also an ICBM in the war between the sexes. Someone at the Smithsonian must have finally caught Jong's drift, because she was twice begged to keep her talk clean. Enraged by such censorship, Jong dumped the Smithsonian and last week talked instead at D.C.'s Mount Vernon College, delivering a speech that would have made the Smithsonian's dinosaurs rattle with fright. Before reading her poem "Becoming a Nun," Jong explained: "This is about all those times when you decide you're going to give up sex. This always precedes a debauch by about three days."

Like many other ardent Irish patriots, Actor Richard Harris prefers to live abroad. That does not mean he is not fighting for the cause. There he was in Nassau, when he learned that former British Prime Minister Edward Heath was spending New Year's in the Bahamas. Harris (with Producer Kevin McClory) rushed into print with "A Message of Goodwill to the Right Honorable Edward Heath," a full-page ad in the local paper accusing Heath of lolling on the beach while people were still jailed in Northern Ireland. Heath was annoyed enough to denounce Harris at a press conference as a friend of the I.R.A. He then climbed aboard a plane and flew to Jamaica. Harris called a counter-press conference, denied membership in the I.R.A. and then went back to the beach to beat up a starfish.

The future of Anglo-American relations may be shaky. Charles, Prince of Wales, 26, revealed last week in an interview with the London Evening Standard that the king he admires "enormously" is George III. "A much maligned monarch--particularly by American historians," was Charles' verdict. Actually, George may not have been mad at all, says the prince, but had a "great sense of humor." Praising his ancestor's devotion to duty, Charles added, "A lot of people would regard this as boring, because he didn't do what Charles II reportedly did, and have affairs with all sorts of delectable ladies, which is always much more glamorous than a chap who works hard and is a conscientious monarch--and is also more discreet." Does this mean George III was a secret swinger?

Once again, the U.S. tax court has struck a blow for the poor, pawed-at, imposed-upon American. Recently, it threw out an IRS decision to tax the John D. Rockefeller Cemetery Corp., which was endowed with $200,000 by John D. Rockefeller Jr. to ensure his descendants as much comfort below ground as above. The nonprofit corporation met with all the law's requirements concerning tax exemption. Still, claimed the IRS, with visions of laying hands on just a little more of the living Rockefellers' estimated $1,033,988,000 wealth, Congress had intended only public necropolises to be taxexempt. "Grasping at straws" was the way the tax court described the IRS argument. Now no Rockefeller need fear potter's field.

Homeless refugees, the Maharanee of Baroda and her son Princey arrived in Monte Carlo from India 16 years ago. Prince Rainier kindly made them citizens of tax-free Monaco, and in next to no time they were busy teaching the natives how to play marbles with emeralds the size of tiger's eyes and drink Dom Perignon from Waterford crystal mugs. But this was poverty to a family that at one time had a fortune of more than $300 million, and stifling to a woman who once flew the Atlantic to telephone India from London because she had difficulty making the call from the U.S. As the money ran out, the maharanee, now 54, had to pawn her jewels. But burdened with annual interest payments of $200,000, she was recently forced to sell them at a secret auction. The gems went for $4 million, which should keep the maharanee in Beluga gray for a couple of years. Her reputation for extravagance, however, was ruined. Said one casino habitue empathetically: "You can hide good luck but not misfortune."

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