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

Breaking attendance records at a Times Square nightclub in an act that features nine musclemen in loincloths, Mae West, 61, pronounced herself in "puffect" health: "I keep myself in puffect shape. I get lots of exercise--in my own way--and I walk every day . . . Knolls, you know, small knolls, they're very good for walking. Build up your muscles, going up and down the knolls . . . [My] teeth are so puffect that everybody thinks they're false. Do you know why they're puffect? 'Cause I take care of them. I brush 'em all the time. Sometimes I can hardly wait to get to the bathroom and start brushing my teeth."

Crooner Eddie Fisher, 25, discovered that he had a distinguished fan. In Manhattan last week, President Eisenhower heard Eddie sing at the Hotel Sheraton Astor, then delayed his own television speech and asked Fisher to do another verse of Irving Berlin's Count Your Blessings for the TV audience.

Massachusetts' Democratic Junior Senator John F. Kennedy was "very comfortable" in Manhattan's Hospital for Special Surgery after a successful operation on his spine, injured when his PT boat was cut in half by a Japanese destroyer during World War II.

In his fan mail last spring, TV Star Liberace received an unusual letter. "Even back in our old days in Boston ten years ago," it read, "I was sure that you would some day become famous enough for me to kick around in Li'l Abner . . . Since you are now a household word, it is up to all the Yokums and all the Capps to kid the daylights out of you, your piano, your candles, your curly hair and your adoring fans. I plan to do a Sunday page sequence about a pianist named Liverachy. Any resemblance to you will be deliberate . . . Cordially, Al Capp." Cartoonist Capp, whose king-sized ego permits few turndowns, was stunned when Liberace's lawyers said no. Recovering quickly, Capp invented a new character, Loverboynik by name, who bears an astonishing similarity to Liverachy. Loverboynik is a mad, foppish, candle-less TV pianist with a squealing female public and a mass of platinum blond hair. Capp insists that "Loverboynik is not Liberace because he can play the piano quite well and he doesn't giggle hysterically." Modestly, the cartoonist adds: "I don't think he's as funny as Liberace."

The late French Artist Andre Derain used so much violent color in his paintings that a critic once remarked of them that "someone has thrown a pot of paint into the public's face." It has now been revealed that after he was fatally injured in an auto accident last summer, Derain woke up in a white-walled hospital room, attended by doctors in white, and murmured: "Some red, show me some red, before dying I want to see some red and some green."

Even the most prosperous poets, said prosperous Poet Ogden (Hard Lines) Nash, sometimes like to "make a little dough" on a sideline. Nash's sideline: guest expert on television panels. Said he: "TV is the biggest racket ever invented. I love it. Half an hour's fun a week--and they pay you for it ... Most of the mail I get is from eleven-year-old children who say 'I loved your book, David Copperfield, please send me your picture.' "

A whole generation of Americans grew up believing that John D. Rockefeller was walking proof that it is better to be healthy than wealthy--and that all the money in the world won't ward off sickness. But when the BBC revived the old legend that the millionaire's stomach was so weak he had to live on milk and crackers, John D. Rockefeller Jr., no Milquetoast, rose up to deny the story. In a letter to the British publication, the Listener, John D. Jr. wrote: "The story .. . about my father's living simply on milk was entirely fictitious . . . Drinking milk was not any more of a habit with him than eating bread or meat . . . Milk was to him just another food ... As to [a] statement with reference to my father's being willing to exchange his wealth for a sound stomach, I can state unequivocally that with only such occasional indispositions as everyone has, my father enjoyed good health throughout life."

In Milwaukee, War Correspondent Don Dixon of the International News Service, testifying before Representative Charles Kersten's Special Committee on Communist Aggression, described how he kept his sanity during 18 months as a Communist prisoner in Canton, China: "I found my strength thinking about my family and my country. I didn't want to do anything that would make them ashamed of me or that would give the Communists any satisfaction. I wanted, in my own small way, to defy them, to show them that even though they had the guns, that was all they did have. I kept telling myself I could take as much as they could give out without breaking. Of course I knew that everybody has a breaking point, but fortunately we got out before I reached mine." When he realized that the Communists might be trying to frame him as a spy, Dixon's imagination went to work: "I fed them the line that I spent nearly as much time in Korea covering G.I. baking and beauty contests as on the war, and that if I was a spy at all, it must have been for the Miss Universe contest."

Ever since financial difficulties abruptly halted the shooting of the Italo-American film William Tell last year, unpaid actors and technicians in Rome have been slinging verbal arrows at Co-Producer Errol Flynn. Last week, as if he were still portraying a swashbuckling hero, Flynn flew bravely back to Rome to face his critics. Suing an Italian company for the money he invested in the unfinished movie, Flynn declared: "I lived up to my contractual obligations. It's a case of guilt by association. I put up 300,000 bucks and I lost it. For me, this is a lot of money."

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