Names make news. Last week these names made this news:

Hollywood's home-grown characters got notice that they could expect some first-rate competition from abroad. Dame Edith Sitwell, 65, poet-historian-lecturer sister of Sir Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell, held an audience for reporters in London and announced that she was off to California to write the screen play of her book Fanfare For Elizabeth (about Anne Boleyn and young Elizabeth). Said she: "My first scene will be most appallingly morbid. It almost frightens me. The story opens in London. Murder hovers around, and there will be an absolutely superb scene in the hospital for leprous virgins." What about censorship? "Not necessary," beamed Dame Edith. "The patients will be dressed as nuns. The lust of the era I manage beautifully." Her working plans include doing most of her writing in bed ("I hardly ever get up, unless there is some party which I think I will enjoy wildly"), and perhaps suggesting an idea or two on color schemes ("I know of a wonderful Elizabethan color called 'dead Spaniard,' but I can't remember whether it's brown or red").

The will of the late Adolph J. Sabath, Democratic Representative from Illinois, who died at the age of 86 two days after being elected to his 24th consecutive term in the House, was filed for probate in Chicago. Sabath, who arrived in Baltimore in 1881 as an immigrant from Czechoslovakia with $2 in his pocket, left an estate valued at $150,000.

A Paris court saw a small French farce played and produced by Playwright-Actor Sacha Guitry, 67, his fourth wife, Genevieve de Sereville, and his fifth, the former Lana Marconi. In the role of plaintiff, Guitry charged that wife No. 4 had continued to use the name Madame Guitry, which led to "much confusion," particularly when wife No. 5 kept getting No. 4's bills. Guitry asked the court to award him 20,000 francs ($60) every time Genevieve used his name. Said Genevieve in defense: Sacha had said when they were married, "Now you have my name forever." The court agreed with Guitry and awarded him symbolic damages in the amount of one franc.

In Vienna, a government-sponsored film, showing Austria still under four-power occupation in the year 2000, offered one ironic solution for world peace: the marriage of Margaret Truman to Lieut. General Vasily Stalin.

German-born Novelist Thomas (Magic Mountain) Mann, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1944, called a press conference in Vienna and announced that he had rented a small house in Erlenbach, near Zurich. Freedom was "slightly restricted" in the United States, he said, and "unless events make me change my mind again, I would rather spend the rest of my life in a European atmosphere." However, Mann added, "I will naturally remain an American citizen."

In Mexico City, Artist Diego Rivera, who was expelled from the Communist Party in 1929. later compounded his sins by providing a home in exile for Leon Trotsky, made his third formal appeal to be taken back into the fold. He had been, said Rivera, "a coward, traitor, counterrevolutionary, abject degenerate" who would, if given another chance, pledge his art and reputation to the sole service of "Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism," the "only just and true political line."

Sir Charles Mendl, 80, one of the last of the sabled international set, received a belated bequest from the late Albert Lasker, philanthropist and Manhattan adman: $5,000 and a box of 100 monarch-sized Havana cigars. Said Sir Charles, grateful but slightly puzzled: "All I ever did for Lasker was to get him rooms at another hotel when the [Paris] Ritz was full-up during the tourist season."

Two spritely elders were still on the go. Former Vice President John Nance Garner left his home in Uvalde and took to the hills of southwest Texas to celebrate his 84th birthday with a deer hunt. In Washington, Clark Griffith, owner-president of the Washington Senators, celebrated his 83rd birthday with some 180 friends and fans, including Chief Justice Fred Vinson and Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick. Griffith's birthday wish: to see his team win another American League pennant (it has won three since he started as manager in 1912) before he retires.

On the palace grounds in Marrakech, a photographer got a rare picture of the Sultan of Morocco at play. The result: a rubber-soled Mohammedan sovereign in Western dress and sub-Wimbledon form.

Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt S. Vandenberg, on a round-the-world inspection tour, touched down at a Korean airstrip, called for Marine Pfc. Nicholas Baldwin and handed him a big box of cookies. The general had met the marine's parents in Florence, Italy, and volunteered to play messenger. The marine's reaction: "I was plenty shook."

In Paris, the French Academy elected Marshal Alphonse Juin, 63-year-old commander of NATO's Central European land forces, to take the seat left vacant by the death of Author Jean Tharaud.

Arriving in London, the Duke of Windsor had tea with Queen Mother Elizabeth, next day lunched with Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh on their fifth wedding anniversary.

Oscar R. Ewing, head of the Federal Security Agency, left New York's Idlewild Airport on an eight-week, government-financed, round-the-world trip for a series of social welfare conferences in India, despite the protest of Republican Representative H. R. Gross of Iowa. Gross, who thought the junket was flying pretty high for a lame-duck agency boss likely to be replaced a few days after his return, wrote President Truman insisting that the trip be canceled. The answer came at the White House press conference last week: the Ewing trip was none of Gross's business.

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