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

In Baltimore, Iconoclast H. L. Mencken, 73, startled an interviewer with some relatively kindly comments on things in general. As he puffed on a long cigar and sipped some Canadian ale, Mencken conceded that Dwight Eisenhower is not a bad President. A "better-than-average President," said Mencken, and doing well "for a general." All this was a sign to his friends that Mencken, who has denounced every U.S. President since Teddy Roosevelt, is mellowing. Only once did Mencken unleash a hearty blast. General Douglas MacArthur, he said, is "a dreadful fraud, who seems to be fading satisfactorily."

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After some four years of armed truce, the enemy camps of Winthrop Rockefeller, who is holed up on his big, new farm near Little Rock, Ark., and his estranged wife, Barbara Sears ("Bobo") Rockefeller, who is holed up in their Park Avenue penthouse apartment in Manhattan, fired major salvos at each other. Winthrop's lawyer led off by announcing that Bobo had upped her "insatiable" settlement demands from $5, $500,000 to $10,000,000. Countered Bobo, through a friend: Nonsense. The settlement offer which Winthrop made last October and she returned for "consideration of new terms not involving money" was revised and has now been accepted. Moreover, said Bobo, she had not got a dime from her husband since October. Rockefeller's lawyer promptly waved a $2,500 check, endorsed by Bobo, which he said she accepted as a "Christmas gift" to Winthrop Jr., 5, in December. Replied Bobo: even now, a cruel Man hattan merchant was trying to repossess her $100 vacuum cleaner. At week's end hostilities cooled as abruptly as they had flared up. The settlement, to which Bobo agreed "in principle," was handsome--and had plenty of principal: for Bobo, $2,000,000 cash, a $1,000,000 trust fund, plus either $70,000-a-year alimony or income from another $500,000 trust fund; for little Winthrop Jr., two trust funds totaling $2,500,000.

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In Edinburgh, love was triumphant over the law, religion and an imperious father. No sooner were the banns published announcing the marriage of Maria Isabella Patino y Bourbon, 18, and James

Michael Goldsmith, 20, than Isabella's Bolivian father, Tin Tycoon Antenor Patino, dispatched private eyes and legal beagles to stop the wedding. Papa Patino had been hunting his daughter, a French citizen, ever since she ran off with Goldsmith early in December. But the young couple, who had fled to Scotland (where 18-year-olds are permitted to marry without their parents' consent), continued to hide successfully from detectives. Antenor was joined in his objections (he did not want his Roman Catholic daughter to marry outside the Church) by his estranged wife Princess Maria Cristina, member of France's out-of-season royalty, whom he has fought over money matters in French and U.S. courts for 13 years. When Patino got an Edinburgh temporary injunction against the marriage, young Goldsmith, scion of a rich British hotel family (London's Savoy and Claridge's, Paris' Scribe, etc.), began corralling lawyers to fight back. Finally, last week, the old man gave in, left Scotland without waiting to see his daughter. At their hideout in a 12th century castle outside Edinburgh, Isabella and Jimmy beamed at the news, rode off to Kelso to

get married.

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Looking toward Yale's forthcoming junior prom, the undergraduate radio station announced the selection of this year's ideal "Junior Prom Date": cat-eyed Negro Songstress Eartha ( Want to Be Evil) Kitt.

Pretty Helen Knowland, wife of Republican Senate Leader William Knowland, confided that when she first met Bill he was only eight years old but was already lisping precociously: "Wepwe-sentative government ith the way we do thingth in thith country." Writing in the Pathfinder Town Journal, Mrs. Knowland gave her view of the rivalry that is supposed to flourish between her husband and Vice-President Richard Nixon: "Actually they are the warmest friends, and I'm sure Pat Nixon feels the way about me that I certainly do about her." After 27 years of marriage, Mrs. Knowland is still "awed by the way Billy brushes off irrelevant matters," nevertheless has decided that the Senator is a fellow who, on being exposed to humor, must always tell himself: "See here, you must see the funny side of this." But, she implied, Billy seldom gets the witty point.

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Invited to London by the British Film Institute, veteran Actor-Director Erich von Stroheim, 68, showed his cropped poll in Britain for the first time in twelve years, growled through a showing of his old masterpiece Greed--the standard ten-reel version, which in 1924 was trimmed down from a colossal 42 reels by a film cutter whom Von Stroheim has never forgiven. Snarled Erich: "[The cutter] had never read the script and had nothing on his mind but a hat." Later, at a press conference, he screwed into his eye a half-crown--a substitute for his famed but absent monocle--and leered villainously at the cameras. When Von Stroheim asked for an ashtray, a puckish reporter offered him a cupped palm and said: "If you are the man you used to be on the screen, you'd stub it out on that." Rasped the master of menace: "If you were a woman, I would."

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In New York, Poet W. H. (for Wystan Hugh) Auden, 46, 1948 Pulitzer Prizewinner (The Age of Anxiety), was informed that he has won another award: the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, offered by the Yale University Library in recognition of Auden's lifetime work.

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In the Manhattan hotel suite where she began a honeymoon with her fifth husband, Dominican Diplomat-Playboy Porfirio ("Rubi") Rubirosa, five & dime Heiress Barbara Mutton tumbled and broke her left ankle. At her side, bearing up nobly, Rubi was consoled a bit on hearing that the Dominican Republic had reinstalled him at his Paris diplomatic post, which had been yanked out from under him last month. To cheer Porfirio further, the Custom Tailors Guild of America announced that he had beaten out President Eisenhower in a poll of its members to choose America's best-dressed man. Said a Guild official: "Whatever else may be said about him, Mr. Rubirosa is, indeed, perfection itself in sartorial matters . . . The nation's men could profit by following his example."

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Though not mentioning any villains by name, Eire's fierce old (75) poet-playwright Lord Dunsany reared up before a group of London authors and ground modern poets under his hobnailed heel: "They are bells of lead. They should tinkle melodiously, but usually they just 'klunk.' " Then he took aim at modern verse containing sexy lines: "If this is poetry, then there is plenty of it on the walls of the public lavatories of England which is quite as good."

Showman Billy (Aquacade) Rose, whose estranged wife Eleanor Holm Rose locked him out of their Manhattan town house more than a year ago, showed up at the place recently, was admitted by Eleanor and sat down with her in the kitchen for a cozy chat over some coffee. In the shared cups they found grounds for a divorce settlement, which the courts and their lawyers had been unable to work out in a two-year tug of war. Provided one of them divorces the other by April 10, Eleanor will go on swimming in the kind of money to which she is accustomed: alimony of $30,000 a year, plus a tidy bonus of $20,000 a year for a decade. Billy chirped: "Too bad neither of us had sense enough to have that cup of coffee 24 months ago."

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