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

On a shopping expedition in Windsor, Britain's bonnie Prince Charles, 7, along with five-year-old Princess Anne, in the tow of a royal nanny, rummaged about a gift shop "to buy a secret Christmas present for Mummy." His gift for Queen Elizabeth II: a miniature watercolor of Mummy herself, caparisoned in the full-dress uniform of a colonel of the Grenadier Guards, sitting sidesaddle on a chestnut horse named Winston. Among the little Princess' selections: a watercolor showing her namesake, Queen Anne, attending the Ascot Races some 250 years ago.

Already facing a five-year stretch for evading payment of $28,532 in federal income taxes, Manhattan's Italian-born Gambler Frank Costello, floating loose on $50,000 bail, gingerly peeked at a suspicious Christmas greeting from New York State revenooers. If he expected the worst, he got it: a claim on Costello for a jarring $190,982.24 in unpaid state income taxes. Further robbing Costello of holiday cheer, the federals recently vetoed his plea to let him get out of town, thus cancelled his annual pilgrimage to Hot Springs, Ark., where he might have shaken off his perennial laryngitis. --

Turning out for a National Basketball Association doubleheader in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden, baseball's great ex-Slugger Joe DiMaggio, 41, onetime New York Yankee now turned gentleman of leisure, and his husky son Joe Jr., 14, watched stoically as the Boston Celtics beat the Minneapolis Lakers (in to 104). They also kept poker faces while last season's champions, the Syracuse Nationals, hooped in a 98-to-91 victory over the butterfingered New York Knickerbockers.

"She shocks the fashion world!" cried London's easily shocked Sunday The People. "She" was none other than Princess Margaret, a fixture on most rosters of the world's best-dressed women. Seeming to care less for conventional ensembles than she did before her cliff-hanging rejection of Group Captain Peter Townsend, Margaret had turned up for the races at London's suburban Hurst Park in an outfit that, for once, really stunned fashionabobs. Her arresting getup: a heavy, goblin-style hat, a fur-collared, knee-length cloth coat with mannish lapels, a dress of another material but with black buttons matching the coat's, shoes and handbag in suede, the whole incongruously teamed with pigskin gloves, a pearl necklace. Polled for their views, the fashion experts, all insisting on anonymity, gasped politely at Margaret's rebellion. Said one: "A strange blend." Another: "It's daring ..." A third: "Extraordinary, to say the least ..." Oblivious to the stir she was making, Margaret was aces at the races, picked two winners.

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One of moviedom's topflight fashion plates, spry Boulevardier Adolphe Menjou, 65, happy veteran of more than 21 years of marriage to Verree Teasdale Menjou, paid tribute to the sartorial keystone of the marital arch. Suavely twirling his waxy mustache, Cinemactor Menjou advised: "If men would pay more attention to appearances, there would be fewer divorces. When a man goes around in a baggy, ill-fitting suit, looking something like a fugitive from the Bowery, it's no wonder that his wife loses interest in him [and] the tinsel starts to wear off the romance." Some of his helpful hints for husbands: 1) take an hour to dress, 2) always wear suspenders, 3) in public be gartered, 4) flash at least half an inch of cuff below jacket sleeves, 5) always wear a vest with a single-breasted suit, 6) avoid an excess of jacket padding, 7) get chummy with a good tailor.

To the Gettysburg White House went a petition urging the release of the 16 second-string U.S. Communists now behind bars for Smith Act violations. The signers: Eleanor Roosevelt, Socialist Party Patriarch Norman Thomas, News Commentator Elmer Davis, plus 43 other citizens, about half of them Protestant divines. A "Christmas amnesty" for the Reds, the petition argued, would help prove U.S. confidence in democratic institutions, boost the reputation of the U.S. abroad, and "contribute toward peace in the world." Meanwhile, in her monthly Q. & A. column ("if you ask me") in McCall's magazine, Petitioner Roosevelt was Q'd as to which eligible Republican, not counting Dwight Eisenhower, she would find "most tolerable" as President of the U.S. A'd she: "Chief Justice [Earl] Warren would be the best candidate. Richard M. Nixon would be the least attractive . . . My son John [an enrolled Republican] tells me that Mr. Nixon is an admirable man. I realize that my feeling about him is based chiefly on the type of campaign he waged when running for the Senate. I know that given great responsibility men sometimes change, but Mr. Nixon's presidency would worry me."

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