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

When her ex-husband, Actor Burgess Meredith, sued in Manhattan for a $200,000 slice of what was once "community property," Cinemactress Paulette Goddard asked the Supreme Court in Manhattan for some advice. A Mexican divorce had been good enough when she divorced Charlie Chaplin, but didn't the court think that her Mexican divorce from Meredith was illegal? Couldn't she sue all over again in New York and claim that Meredith has been living in sin with his fourth wife, Dancer Kaja Sundsten?

Skilled fictioneer though he is, J. B. (The Good Companions) Priestley, 59, composed a series of letters that left Oxford Archaeology Professor Charles F. Hawkes unconvinced. Mrs. Hawkes, Priestley wrote the professor from Japan last fall, was only his good companion. But between the lines, Hawkes read more than a traveling literary collaboration. A British judge agreed, granted Hawkes a divorce, called Priestley's adulterous conduct "mean and contemptible."

In London for a coronation fling before a scheduled $25,000 appearance at the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, Nev., ex-G.I. Christine Jorgensen was sent a coolly worded engagement-breaking letter, beginning "Dear Sir," by the hotel's lawyers. Despite whatever the Danish doctors did, the letter said, the Sahara's owners suspect that Jorgensen is "not now and never can be a woman." If a contract cancellation was not agreeable, "it will be necessary for us to demand medical proof . . . that you are a woman . . ." Snorted Jorgensen: "I have behind me some of the most important and brainy doctors."

After 3 1/2 years of complaining that her estranged husband, Winthrop Rockefeller, 41, kept her "hobo poor" and "starving," Barbara ("Bobo") Rockefeller got a $1,000,000 trust fund that will pay her a tax-free $20,000 a year. Would the fund get father Rockefeller occasional custody of his four-year-old son Winthrop Paul, who already has a $1,000,000 fund of his own? Said Bobo: "The boy is not a can of oil to be shipped over the country."

Caviar and champagne at the $35.28-a-plate Coronation Ball in London's Savoy Hotel revived two of President Eisenhower's four official U.S. representatives after the long ceremony at Westminster Abbey. Turned out in gold-braided full-dress uniform, General of the Army Omar Bradley launched into an enthusiastic off-beat rumba with Editor Fleur (Look) Cowles, whose diamond tiara was as grand as anything worn by a peeress.

Flying a Canadian-built F-86 Sabre jet, Aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran whooshed to another pair of speed records over Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. After clocking 590.273 m.p.h. around a 12-pylon, 500-kilometer course and 670 m.p.h. in a straight 15-kilometer dash, Jacqueline pronounced the Sabre a safer plane, and easier to fly, than the prop-driven fighters of World War II.

In London, cautious officials of the British Air Ministry decided that " it , would be "inappropriate that a flight in fighter aircraft should be offered the Duke of Edinburgh" during his tour of the R.A.F. Fighter Command.

For those who raised eyebrows at the prominently lettered name on his office door in Kansas City's Federal Reserve Bank Building, Harry S. Truman had a frank and forthright explanation: he was tired of visitors wandering in under the impression that it was the men's room.

In Munich, the crimes of Use Koch, "Bitch of Buchenwald," were still catching up with her. Already serving a life sentence for concentration-camp atrocities, she was classified a major Nazi offender by a German de-Nazification court. Her sentence: two years in a work camp and confiscation of all her property.

At 4:30 a.m. in her London apartment, robbery-prone (three times in four years) Skating Star Sonja Henie woke with a scream, then dashed into the street in a barefoot, unsuccessful pursuit of thieves who had stripped her bedroom of an Aleutian mink coat ($18,000), an ermine coat ($7,000), a mink jacket ($3,500), two gold compacts, $840 in cash.

Even before it appeared on the stalls, a reminiscent book by a foreign author promised to be a Parisian bestseller. The book: Memoires. The author: Russia's Catherine the Great.

Opening night at the new Parisian-revue Voila glittered with bright stars of the international carriage trade. Trailing white satin, diamonds and lanky Hollywood Cowboy Gary Cooper, French Cinemactress Gisele Pascal showed up without her steady escort, Monaco's Prince Ranier III. Tubby ex-King Farouk shied at photographers ("Please, no pictures. I'm here incognito!"). Oldtime Singer Maurice Chevalier ogled the crowd, happily concluded, "Everybody, but everybody is here tonight!"

Talking for Collier's, the St. Louis Browns' ancient (somewhere between 45 and 55) Negro pitcher, "Satchel" Paige, gave his own rules for staying young:

"Avoid fried meats, which angry up the blood.

"If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.

"Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.

"Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain't restful.

"Avoid running at all times.

"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you."

Only three years after he died insane and almost a pauper, the body of the great Russian Dancer Vaslav Nijislcy was quietly exhumed from an unmarked grave in London's Marylebone Cemetery to be reburied beside other artists in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. The transfer was a tribute paid by Nijinsky's famous pupil, Dancer Serge Lifar.

Australian-born Explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins, 64, brown-bearded veteran of ten Arctic and Antarctic expeditions and a submarine trip that took him within 400 miles of the North Pole, was appointed a geographer in the Research and Development Division of the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps.

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