Nary another New Year's Eve blast in Rome could boast so satiny a sommelier. Beautifully intent and just a trifle bubbly, Sophia Loren, 28, uncorked 1963 by filling the crystal goblets of such whoopee-minded friends as Actors David Niven, Peter Sellers and Party Giver Vittorio De Sica. Then it was the twist until 2 a.m., when Sophia and Husband-in-Spirit Carlo Ponti, 49, decided to call it a night and headed for home. "I'm an early sleeper," said Sophia, "and it is already too late for me."

At a Kremlin reception, Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev, 68, was presented with a gift designed by the members of the British correspondents' poker club in Moscow: a London-tailored tie of midnight-blue, decorated with golden cupolas symbolically inset with crossed sickles and quills. Nikita did not miss the point, added a touche of his own. "I am delighted," he said, "and I promise to wear it at my next press conference." His last press conference for Western newsmen: July 15, 1960.

Looking Britishly baggy but craggily handsome, the gloomy prophet of impending automation, Novelist Aldous Huxley, 68, bravely entered the chic new world of fashion modeling. He consented to pose for Harper's Bazaar with a woolen-suited mannequin at his side. "It was no trouble at all to get him," said a Harper's editor. "A man that age enjoys having a pretty girl on his arm."

With his high dome, big nose and white hair, the Very Rev. Hewlett Johnson, 88, looks something like a latter-day George Washington. But his thoughts go the other way. For 32 years, the "Red Dean" of Canterbury has nursed a passion for Communism. He pleaded for the U.S. to give Russia the atomic bomb, accused the U.S. of germ warfare in Korea. "Communism," he preached, "is doing something. It is following Christ's standards." He even attributes his vigorous health to the Reds; he and his wife inject themselves with a mysterious, Rumanian-developed novocain serum called H3. Anglican churchmen have long squirmed over the Red Dean's antics, but Dr. Johnson has at last done something to gladden their hearts. Saying that he wants to travel and finish his autobiography, he turned in his resignation (as of next May) to the Queen.

After 42 years on the boards. England's first prima ballerina, Alicia Markova (nee Lilian Marks), 52, ever so casually announced that she was turning in her tutu to teach. Boarding a New York-bound jet at London Airport, the Dresden-fragile dancer, who has been plagued with illness since a tonsillectomy last February, told reporters simply: "My New Year's resolution is to give up active dancing."

For months there was talk of an impending divorce between Belgium's tall, handsome ex-King Leopold, 61, and his wife Liliane, 46. But when Leopold returned from a zoological expedition to the Amazon basin, Liliane, handsome as ever, was at the airport to meet him. Dropping his royal reserve for once, Leopold later issued a 414-word statement denouncing "those infuriating and scandalous rumors." His wife, he said, had stood by him "with devotion and tenderness for better and for worse. Thanks to her I found again my family hearth."

The leggy Lido chorus girls were competing for the Duke of Windsor's attention, and whatever Countess Mona von Bismarck, 65, was blaring in his ear seemed urgent too. But the Duke, as well as the photographers covering the Paris nightspot's new revue, found it hard not to focus on such a well-turned-out fashion plate as the Countess Marie Aline de Figueroa, 41, the American-born wife of the Spanish Count of Quintanilla.

The rigors of spring training are still more than a month off, but baseball's geriatric wonder, St. Louis Cardinal Outfielder Stan Musial, 42, was already embarking on his own workout program by running a brisk mile twice a week. Then "The Man," who hit a blistering .330 last season (his 22-year average: .333), dropped by the Cardinal offices to make all the exercise worthwhile. He signed a contract for an estimated $65,000. "I never felt better," said Stan, "and that's hard to say when you're getting older.''

Articulating admirably, Marlon Brando, 38, let a Tokyo reporter for Variety in on the difficulties of marketing a Great Actor. "An actor is a product like Florsheim shoes or Ford cars," said Brando. "He's a useful product that is resold many times for social purposes; and he's exploited the way any other piece of merchandise is." All terribly crass, but something else bugged Brando even more: "As soon as you become an actor, people start asking you questions about politics, astrology, archaeology and birth control. And what's even funnier, you start giving opinions."

Ill lay: Robert Frost, 88, patriarch poet of the U.S., in Boston's Peter Bent Brigham Hospital after surgery for a urinary tract obstruction complicated by a mild heart attack and a subsequent blood clot in his lung; Clifton Webb, 69, courtly film comedian, in a Houston hospital for vascular surgery; Mrs. William O. Douglas, 45, wife of the Supreme Court Justice, with lacerations of the forehead and left knee sustained in a car-truck collision in Georgetown not far from her home; Hugh Gaitslcell, 56, Britain's Labor Party leader, in a London hospital with pleurisy complicated by pericarditis.

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