Back in Rome after moviemaking in Montreal, Actress Sophia Loren, 42, has a new role as a grandma -or at least a step-grandmother to husband Carlo Ponti's first grandchild. Loren's work in Montreal involved family matters of a different kind. In Angela, a modern version of the Greek tragedy Oedipus at Colonus, she plays a restaurant waitress who loses her infant son to Mafia kidnapers. Years later, the long-lost lad, played by Steve Railsback, 30, accidentally meets up with Mom and, presto, some Oedipal complexities develop. Sophia can only hope she will avoid such problems in her next movie, The Great Day. She is cast as the mother of six.

Hoping to pick up some pointers for his new job, Semanticist S.I. Hayakawa enrolled in a special Harvard University program for freshman Congressmen. As a former no-nonsense professor himself, the California Senator-elect should have made an attentive student. Alas, during seminars he was caught napping. At least Hayakawa had a novel excuse: "I admit I may have dozed through some of the sessions, but I haven't had a good rest since the campaign."

The party offered much champagne, delectable finger food and an East Side address (rented for the occasion). A 3-ft-high hazelnut cake with pink icing had tilted to starboard in its box during shipping, but Hostess Shere Hite, author of the bestselling study of female sexuality, The Hite Report, propped it up with her 438-page tome. Hite threw the bash for friends who had helped her through her 3 1/2 years of research for the book. Nine of them had anted up a total of $23,000 when she ran short of cash, and Shere was repaying the loans both in cash and in style. Said Virginio Del Toro, 48, a doorman and a patron to the tune of $15,000: "She was doing something somebody had to study. I only worried I would drop dead or something before she finished."

When she was only 25, Margaret Mead studied sexual mores in Samoa and earned an assistant curatorship at Manhattan's American Museum of Natural History. Half a century and many field trips later, the anthropologist is still working for the museum. To commemorate her 50th anniversary on staff, which happened to coincide with her 75th birthday, the museum established a fund to endow a chair in her name and to reorganize its anthropology collection. Mead plans to help raise the target of $5 million, at least when she can spare the time. She is working on a new book.Letters from the Field, and is still traveling. Contemplating a trip to Bali in the spring, the spry septuagenarian says: "I fully intend to die, but I have no plans to retire."

Singer Harry Belafonte has been lighting up stages for 20 years; now his daughter Shari Belafonte is doing the same -only in a different way. Though Shari, 22, is pretty enough to appear in a spotlight, she prefers to operate one. A senior drama major at Pittsburgh's Carnegie-Mellon University, Shari says, "Fm not as interested in accumulating fans as I am in dealing with people." Thus she plans to be a producer. Her curriculum includes, besides lighting, scenery and technical details, such assignments as hammering together the set for a CMU production of the Bertolt Brecht-Kurt Weill opera, Mahagonny. Shari says her dad never pushed her toward a show business career. "Neither my father nor mother cared what I wanted to do as long as I was a good girl."

For the first time this year, Rosi Mittermaier came in last. But fans of the West German skiing Wunderkind need not despair. The 1976 Olympic gold medalist was not schussing down a snowy slope but competing in a decathlon parody staged by German sportswriters. Events included skateboarding, "walking on water" and American football, for which Rosi donned shoulder pads, helmet and cleats. One of three females among twelve contestants, Rosi took the hindmost in good humor. Well she might. Now a professional, she will earn $1 million promoting sports equipment over the next three years.

Convicted Killer Gary Mark Gilmore's struggle for death continued last week. The U.S. Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to lift a stay of execution that had been granted on behalf of Gilmore's mother. Uplifted, Gilmore, 36, broke his 25-day fast by consuming two hero sandwiches, an orange and a quart of milk. But then a Utah district court judge set the execution date for Jan. 17--a delay that allows time for further court action that could prevent his going before a Utah firing squad. Gilmore tried to take matters into his own hands again: he attempted suicide for the second time in a month, swallowing an overdose of barbiturates believed to have been smuggled to him by prison inmates. At week's end the murderer bent on his own death had sufficiently recovered to be returned to prison, where he is under heavy guard.

It is twelve years since he played Zorba the Greek, but Anthony Quinn, 60, can still step and stomp to bouzouki music. In his first cabaret appearance, Quinn brought down the house at the Club Sirocco, a Greek nightspot in Manhattan. "I danced for money," said the actor, who did indeed. In a one-shot benefit performance, Quinn raised $50,000 for the Institute of Applied Biology, a research center in Manhattan that specializes in cancer, drug addiction and arthritis. Though he may not get a chance to dance, Quinn is looking forward to playing another Hellenic super-role in a forthcoming film. The Greek Tycoon. He hopes his co-star will be Jackie -Jacqueline Bisset, that is.

It had the makings of a French farce, or at least a comedy of manners. Checking into London's swank Dorchester Hotel last week were Honeymooners Elizabeth Taylor and John Warner; also checking in were Richard Burton, the groom in two of Liz's six previous marriages, and his bride of four months, Susan Hunt. "We shall all be meeting to have a few drinks," said Burton convivially. But Liz apparently had other ideas. She and her new hubby promptly went motoring in the country.

Just a few shopping days before Christmas, Watergate Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein received their first, er, sizable check for their best-selling The Final Days since the book was published last April by Simon and Schuster. The sum. which covered royalties, paperback rights and other fees, was a mere $58 short of $1 million.

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