It helped defeat Napoleon, and now a latter-day Mediterranean visitor, Christina Onassis, is apparently having second thoughts about the Russian winter. Even the charms of a seven-room apartment near Moscow's Botanical Gardens and her new-found domestic bliss couldn't keep Christina, 28, in the Soviet Union. She went to her villa in St. Moritz for Christmas and then on to Paris, where she was joined by her husband of six months, Sergei Kauzov, 38. Alas, it's only a temporary stay, but while there the couple took advantage of la bonne vie by dropping some tanker profits in shops along the chic Avenue Montaigne. As for those rumors that Mrs. Kauzov is pregnant, the word from the lady's office is nyet.

It was a one-woman show, and the major prop onstage was a telephone. Still, theatergoers willingly paid up to $100 a ticket to see Liv Ullmann, who appeared off-Broadway last week in five performances of Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice. Both Ullmann and the director, Jose Quintero, gave their services free of charge as a benefit for six struggling theater groups. "We actors are all one group and share the responsibility of keeping theater alive," says Ullmann. Besides, she was taken by Cocteau's heroine, a distraught woman whose lover of many years has just called to say he is marrying someone else." I have known pain so I identify with her," says Ullmann. "But I don't agree with her. You must put more in your life than a man." Ullmann's own life is well filled. On Jan. 29 she starts rehearsals for her first Broadway musical, I Remember Mama.

"Imogene Coca has show business in her bones. Indeed, she has it in her genes," deadpanned Actress Kitty Carlisle Hart. Coca, daughter of an actress and a vaudeville conductor, giggled along with the rest of the glittering audience at Regine's in Manhattan. Egged on, Hart continued: "The thing about Imogene is that one nostril never knows what the other is doing." The evening was a joint tribute to Coca on her 50th year in show biz and a celebration of a new "I Love New York" advertising campaign. For the guest of honor, appearing center stage at her golden jubilee seemed to be more nerve-racking than starring in the Broadway hit On the Twentieth Century. When asked what she would be working on in the future, the star fluttered, "Right now, I'm working on not being scared."

The last of the Watergate convicts, former Attorney General John Mitchell, was freed from an Alabama federal prison last week after serving 14 months of his one-to four-year sentence. Meanwhile, the Watergate judge, John Sirica, was dotting the i's on his forthcoming book To Set the Record Straight (W.W. Norton; $15). The judge, now 74 and semiretired, drew upon impressions he jotted down during the trial: how the witnesses and defendants looked and acted, whether he felt they were telling the truth or "exaggerating." The actual work took place at his Washington home, in a study with an exercise bicycle and a solid "Watergate wall" of cartoons, photographs and awards he has received. Besides his views of his most famous case, Sirica's book will offer insights into the life and times of the tough judge once known as Maximum John. Says he: "I was a dropout from law school twice, so I tell youngsters, if Sirica made it, you can."

On the Record

Irving Paul ("Swifty") Lazar, literary agent, when asked if he had any compunction about handling Richard Nixon's book: "No. Let us say a doctor is called in to save Hitler. Do you think he should save his life or let him die?"

Garry Trudeau, cartoonist, describing Elizabeth Taylor in his comic strip Doonesbury: "A tad overweight, but with violet eyes to die for."

Albert Kumin on his new job as White House pastry chef: "It is the icing on the cake."

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