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

Peppery old (71) Socialist Norman Thomas sounded off in Houston. On free enterprise: "All the recent business mergers and consolidations make absurd the old-line talk of free enterprise. The only free enterprise in America today is small boys who shoot marbles for keeps." On the Kelly-Rainier merger "If Grace had married the mayor of Las Vegas, she wouldn't have had to produce a son to keep the place going."

At a sizzling swing concert in Britain 23 years ago, Trumpeter Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong recalls, he interrupted himself to roll his eyes toward a royal box and rasp: "This one's for you. Rex!" Rex, better known as King George V, was jolted but amused, despite the protocol that bars entertainers from referring to royalty in the audience--let alone addressing them directly. Last week, cavalier as ever about protocol, Satchmo did it again. Beaming at a $3.50 orchestra seat in London's cavernous Empress Hall, Armstrong growled: "Now we are going to jump one for one of our special fans. We're gonna lay one on for the Princess!" Grinning happily, Princess Margaret hugged her knees. Armstrong's cats then blared the Mahogany Hall Stomp, a jazz classic celebrating a famous turn-of-the-century New Orleans bordello that boasted an octoroon madame with a red wig and the only white piano in town. When the echoes died away, Margaret exclaimed: "Wonderful night!"

Back from their fortnight honeymoon in the Bahamas, New York Timesman Clifton Daniel and his bride, Margaret Truman Daniel, played it plain, set a refreshingly unobtrusive tone for their future public appearances. Said Cliff Daniel to fellow newsmen at New York International Airport: "We're an old married couple now, and we're not news any more." Asked if she plans to step back into radio and TV stardom, the girl from Missouri replied: "As long as it doesn't interfere with my husband's career."

Between chukkers of a polo game played at Windsor Great Park, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II had a word with her hard-riding husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, while Prince Charles and Princess Anne stood by. Later touring Devonshire, the Queen and her consort had a close scrape when a roadside throng, pressing forward to see the royal pair, toppled a badly anchored 20-ft. flagpole across the highway only a moment after the Queen's open car had passed the spot.

After nearly half a century of making a comedy of sex while some other business ladies were making it a commodity, billowy Sexagenarian Mae West, heavily flanked by a troupe of gorgeous muscle men, undulated about Manhattan's flesh-flaunting Latin Quarter nightclub, but between acts, in her dressing room, proved to be as unpretentious as anybody's grandma. Bedeviled by censorship in her earlier days, Playwright West (Sex, Pleasure Man) is now, strangely, all for watchdogs over public morality: "Why, if it wasn't for censors, there'd be more and more wickedness on the stage, and finally complete depravity. Shocking!"

Sportsman Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, 43, multimillionheir owner of one of the top U.S. racing stables, confirmed Manhattan cafe scuttlebutt that he and his high-styled wife were legally separated last January. Of pretty Jeanne Lourdes Murray Vanderbilt, 33, his elopement bride (second wife) in 1945, a friend once observed: "She can take race horses or let them alone--with a slight drift toward the latter." The rift, however, seemed no choose-me-or-your-horses affair: Vanderbilt announced that he will sell 37 of his 41 thoroughbreds next week. Herself an heiress, sad-faced Jeanne, mother of two of Vanderbilt's three children, Heidi, 7, Alfred Jr. ("Butchie"), 6, said: "I want ... a reconciliation."

Boston's ex-Mayor James Michael Curley, 81, was indignant when Edwin O'Connor's bestselling novel The Last Hurrah (TIME, Feb. 13) first hit the bookstalls, had his lawyer sniff through its pages for the scent of libel. By last week, however, Old Pol Curley had not only failed to sue but had come around to loving Hurrah's every word, reported Columnist Doris Fleeson. He revels in the late-life glory unexpectedly brought him by his fictional counterpart, Old Pol Frank Skeffington, the book's improper Bostonian hero. Said Newshen Fleeson: "He grandly refers to himself ... as Skeffington, protesting, however, that O'Connor gave him a Nova Scotian Irish, not a Boston Irish name." In Massachusetts' recent presidential primary, 161 Bostonians cast write-in ballots for Skeffington as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Vastly flattered, National Democratic Committeeman Curley lays claim to these votes, points out that a vote for Frank is obviously a vote for Jim. Curley, dazzled by Hurrah's popularity, is also trying to interest publishers in his very own autobiography. But so far he has found no takers--possibly because a Last Hurrah for Frank is so indubitably a Last Hurrah for Jim.

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