She recognizes her weakness, but apparently cannot do anything about it. Last week Martha Mitchell--using a phone in an upstairs bathroom so Attorney General John Mitchell wouldn't hear her--called a U.P.I, reporter to complain that "the academic society is responsible for all our troubles in this country. They don't know what's going on." John's reaction is a matter of conjecture, but a few days later, when a White House elevator door nearly closed on Martha, she was offered a Band-Aid. "What should I do with it," she asked, "put it over my mouth?"

Across the Atlantic last week, several parents who also happen to be famous entertainers proudly posed their offspring for photographers. In a Paris church, an Armenian prelate baptized a reluctant Katia, the daughter of Singer Charles Aznavour and his wife, Ulla. At a maternity ward in North Wales, Actress Gayle Hunnicutt introduced her newly born and yet unnamed son to her husband, British Actor David Hemmings. And near London, where she opened at $84 a week in a nonsinging part in the Henry James play, The High Bid, Eartha Kitt took time off from her new role to play with her eight-year-old daughter Kitt.

Husband Harold, the ex-Prime Minister, who is now working on his memoirs, couldn't be more pleased. "It's her turn to talk today," he said, standing in the background as Mary Wilson autographed copies of Selected Poems, her fast-selling new book. Of the 32 selections four love poems have aroused the most curiosity. Sample verse: "O that we might, for one brief hour/ forget that we are bound apart,/ And lie within each other's arms/ Mouth pressed on mouth, and heart on heart." How does Mary feel about her literary success? "It's a personal ambition I have long cherished," she said, "but of course it cannot compare with the excitement of being at No. 10."

Performing before an audience of 700 at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris last week, Violin Virtuoso Jascha Heifetz completed the last segment of a taped, hour-long all-Heifetz TV show that will be aired in the U.S. in April. During a passage that the accompanying French National Orchestra played too loudly, Heifetz, 69, cautioned, "Softer, please, they want to hear me." An impressive standing ovation proved that he was absolutely right.

The format in the current McCall's looked familiar. It was a Playboy-style interview of Hugh Hefner, conducted by Writer Gloria Steinem. Gloria, a recent convert to the Women's Liberation movement, was obviously restive in her passive role as interviewer. Exasperated by one of Hefner's answers, she took the offensive: "Don't you understand you've made women objects, more easily exchanged than sports cars? It's like being on the meat hook. There are times when a woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual."

"Absolute nonsense!" That was Rudolf Nureyev's response to the rumor that Russian Ballerina Natalia Makarova, 29, who recently defected from the Leningrad Kirov Ballet, is replacing Dame Margot Fonteyn, 51, as his partner. As for Fonteyn, the prima ballerina sounded unconcerned about the possibility of his teaming up with Makarova. "Sometimes I dance with Nureyev and sometimes I don't," she said. "I dance with other partners, and so does he. I would very much like to see them dancing together some time."

"If I had it to do over again, I wouldn't," said Joan Kennedy last year after she had earned a disapproving look from Pat Nixon by wearing a silver minidress to an evening White House reception. To demonstrate that she had learned her lesson well, Joan showed up last week at a White House luncheon for Mrs. Ferdinand Marcos, wife of Philippines President, in an unobtrusive little number: a silver leather Cardin midi with black lace-up boots and a stretch lace see-through blouse.

Northern Ireland's politics will never be the same again. The word out of Armagh jail was that Bernadette Devlin, serving a six-month term for inciting riots, had taken up the peaceful craft of crocheting under the tutelage of a convicted murderess. Furthermore, when a fellow Member of Parliament, Ulster's Ivan Cooper, visited Bernadette, he found her surprisingly subdued. "In her political comments, she's a good deal more tolerant than when she went to prison," Cooper observed, "and her temper is much better than it is normally."

"When the system fails to respond to all normal means and channels," Pediatrician Benjamin Spock told a gathering of 2,500 University of Hartford students last week, "then you must become more dramatic in your tactics. You know that the majority of American people do not give a damn about granting equal rights to blacks, poor people and other minority groups." Spock nonetheless urged his audience to avoid violence and said he did not believe that violent revolution was possible in the U.S. To Spock, 67, there is a better way. Said he: "I will work within the system for changes."

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