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

At San Francisco airport, the crowd waiting to greet General Mark Clark on his return from the Far East caught sight first of Mrs. Clark, who flashed a wide-open look of joy when she spied her daughter, Mrs. Gordon Costing. After welcoming ceremonies and a four-mile parade, the Clarks went on to New Orleans, where the general served as best man at the wedding of their only son, Major William Clark, 28, a thrice-wounded Korean veteran, and 25-year-old Fashion Model Audrey Loflin.

Peevish old Sculptor Jacob Epstein, who gets more respectable as the years go by, was not surprised when a committee of distinguished fellow Britons unanimously selected him as the man best qualified to create a memorial to South Africa's late Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts. Said he: "I deserve it."

In Hollywood to discuss the filming of her Texas-baiting novel, Giant, Edna Ferber appeared unconcerned about how Texans would take to the movie. Said she: "I think they're kind of getting worn down now, like you do after a good big fight. They're wiping the sweat from their collective brows and admitting, 'Well, maybe some of us are like that, at that.'"

Taking care not to nick her big, flat hat, Esperanza Wayne, estranged wife of Cinemactor John Wayne, poked her head out the window of her pickup truck in a fetching demonstration of woe. The truck, used for hauling garbage and dirt about her Encino, Calif, home, "is my only transportation," she wailed. Her Cadillac had been attached for bills run up since she and Wayne parted last year. Esperanza was asking the superior court for $9,000 a month to live on, instead of the $1,100 temporary alimony granted her pending their divorce trial next October.

"While I lived in the United States I was a science-fiction addict myself," confessed Hungarian Author Arthur (Darkness at Noon) Koestler in Harper's Bazaar, "and I am still liable to occasional relapses." But the American mania for "reading about space travel, time travel, martian maidens and extragalactic supermen is habit-forming, like opium, murder thrillers and yoghurt diets ... [A kind of] apocalyptic intuition [that] the human race may be a biological misfit doomed to extinction . . . may be one of the reasons for the sudden interest in life on other stars."

Sounding more chipper than usual, New York's ex-Mayor William O'Dwyer threw an office-warming cocktail party in the Mexico City penthouse suite of O'Dwyer, Bernstien & Correa, the law firm he is starting up with his brother Paul, New York Lawyer Oscar Bernstien, and a Mexican partner. O'Dwyer, who stayed on in Mexico (despite investigations back home of corruption in city politics) after resigning as U.S. ambassador last December, expects to visit the U.S. for about 90 days this year. "I plan to spend as much time in the United States as I can," he said. "That includes Manhattan and Brooklyn."

Her Majesty's Army had a volunteer: the Duke of Kent, 17-year-old first cousin of Queen Elizabeth and seventh in succession to the throne. In October he will become the first member of the royal family ever to enter the ranks as a private. After pre-cadet training, he will take the examinations for Sandhurst, Britain's West Point, hoping to make the army his career (preferably as a tank officer).

Back in a Red Sox uniform after his discharge as a Marine captain, and signed up (for an estimated $50,000) for the rest of the season, Ted Williams stepped up for his first batting practice in over a year, sprayed Boston's Fenway Park with line drives, quit 15 minutes later with a quarter-sized blister on his right palm.

After twice examining Aloysius Cardinal Stepinac in Yugoslavia, where he is confined by government order to his home village, two American physicians reported that he was "not in any immediate danger" from his blood disease (an excess of red blood cells), thought he "still can live many, many years."

Charged in his wife's divorce suit with gross neglect, extreme cruelty and beating her "black and blue," former Light-Heavyweight Champion Joey Maxim protested that it wasn't that way at all. "Sure, we had some fights, but I always came out worse than she did. I take more than I dish out."

At Cooperstown, N.Y., Dizzy Dean, flamboyant fogball pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals in the '305, joined Al Simmons, longtime (1924-44) batting great (lifetime average: .334) for ceremonies enshrining them in baseball's Hall of Fame. Dean, "an old Arkansas cotton picker" who turned into a grammar-mangling sports announcer after racking up 150 major league victories, 83 defeats, called it the "greatest honor" of his life. "I want to thank the good Lord," he drawled, "for giving me a good right arm, a strong back and a weak mind."

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