It was an unhappy marriage, and divorce seemed the only way out for Clifford and Edith Irving, mastermind and accomplice respectively of the phony Howard Hughes biography caper. But when they emerged from prison after being separated for nearly two years, they were understandably reluctant to get involved in yet another legal process. Last month Clifford, 44, returned to Ibiza, the Mediterranean island where he used to live, to spend Christmas with his wife and their two sons, Nedsky, 6, and Barney, 4. Irving was due back in Manhattan last week, where he is still trying to sell his phony Hughes book as well as a new novel. Edith, 39, will stay and paint in Ibiza. But even if the Irvings have not settled all their differences, Clifford has managed to bury at least one hatchet in Ibiza--with Elmyr de Hory, 63, the master art forger. The subject of Irving's 1969 book called Fake!, De Hory was offended when Irving failed to show him the prepublication manuscript as promised.

"She is the woman I have been looking for. I have found her. She writes poetry, she drives a car, she smokes cigars!" The enraptured young man speaking is the son of a rich Italian landowner, played by Robert (Godfather H) De Niro, in Bernardo Bertolucci's film 1900. The object of his love is a free-spirited flapper named Ada, played by a free-spirited actress named Dominique Sanda. Sanda, 23, is irresistible to most of Europe's leading film makers: in 1970 Bertolucci gave her a starring role in The Conformist and later conceived Last Tango in Paris with her hi mind (she was unavailable). The late Vittorio De Sica, equally enchanted, cast her as the doomed heiress in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, and she has also appeared in a film by Luchino Visconti. Sanda lives on the edge of the forest at Rambouillet outside Paris with her son by Actor Christian Marquand, her current lover, Painter Frederique Pardo, and Pardo's mother. When as a rebellious teen-ager Dominique settled on a stage name, it was Sand --as in George Sand, the elegant cigar-smoking 19th century novelist. But apparently a century seemed not enough to avoid possible confusion, so Dominique added an a. And left it at that.

Sir Alec Guinness is rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and doing it cautiously, for his February 1976 television performance with Genevieve Bujold in George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. The show's sponsor, Hallmark Cards, is still aching from the karate chop rendered unto Winston Churchill by Richard Burton on the eve of his starring role in The Gathering Storm. Shaw wrote that Caesar "bought men with words," but Sir Alec, talking about the play, sounded like a translation from Latin: "Anything that is reasonably civilized is likely to have an underlying wit." Somewhat more intense in her approach, Bujold studied Sir Alec's every gesture, the better to play her own part. She watched him admiringly as he delivered his soliloquies; at other times she dared to curl up to the distant Guinness in the manner, as Caesar says to Cleopatra, of "both a girl and a cat."

The party got off to a rousing, Texas-style start in the same hotel bar where Teddy Roosevelt was supposed to have recruited the Rough Riders. Before the day was over, Lady Bird Johnson and the friends and relatives who helped her celebrate her 62nd birthday, including America-Beautifiers Laurence Rockefeller and Mary Lasker and former Press Secretary Liz Carpenter, attended a mariachi Mass in San Antonio's 254-year-old San Jose mission. They then proceeded to the mission's high-ceilinged granary for a dinner by candlelight. The high point of the day, though, occurred when the revelers assembled in the middle of a busy downtown intersection to give the former First Lady her $45,000 birthday present: an elaborate fountain carved from Mexican lava stone and placed near the Alamo on the spot where some of its defenders are said to have been burned in 1836. Mrs. Johnson pushed a button, the Ladybird Fountain gushed, and in a way, so did its namesake. Making the best of San Antonio's brick-oven climate, she wished: "Long may it cool the breezes in summertime in San Antonio."

There's no place like home for the holidays, unfortunately. Sandringham House, the 365-room Victorian manor in Norfolk where Queen Elizabeth usually throws a lavish New Year's house party, is closed this year for a $550,000 modernization. The Queen, 48, her husband Prince Philip, 53, their sons Princes Charles, 26, Andrew, 14, and Edward, 10, and a handful of servants squeezed themselves into a nearby six-bedroom farmhouse known as Wood Farm; all other royals, including the Queen Mother, 74, and guests, were left to fend for themselves in nearby fiefs or hotels. Only the wildfowl who live on the 20,000-acre Sandringham estate were assured of spending the holidays in a manner to which they are accustomed: the traditional pheasant shoot, an unhappy affair for as many as 8,000 birds, was in no danger of being canceled.

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