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

Nominated for promotion to brigadier general, Air Force Reserve: lanky Cinemairman James (The Spirit of St. Louis) Stewart, 48, now a colonel and veteran of 20 combat bomber missions over Germany in World War II.

Five and Dime Scion Lance Reventlow, one of the future's richest men, turned 21, was cheered by the gift of a $425,000 Beverly Hills estate, complete with waterfall, from his sixfold-married mamma, Heiress Barbara Hutton. Two days later, Speed Demon Reventlow, who flies low about town in a Mercedes-Benz and races in a scarlet Maserati, was uncheered on getting the boot from the Sports Car Club of America. Paying no mind to young Reventlow's third-place victory in an amateur sports-car race in Florida a year ago, the club, which permits no minors to race under its aegis, suspended Lance upon learning that he had fibbed about his age. Said Racer Reventlow: "Now that my secret is out. I can only apologize."

Pope Pius XII, in good health for his years, turned 81, planned to take part next week in ceremonies celebrating the 18th anniversary of his coronation.

The June wedding season was helped along by Senate Minority Leader William F. Knowland, who proclaimed the banns for his petite daughter Estelle, 19, a Stanford University junior, and husky Robert McKeen, 23, former University of California basketball star.

In Manhattan's staid Hotel Plaza, veteran Cinemactress-TV Comedienne Ann (Private Secretary) Sothern, 47, perplexed by billows of smoke that rolled from the fireless fireplace of her 14th-floor suite, opened her windows and sounded the alarm. Firemen appeared, then rushed down twelve stories to learn that a guest in a second-floor apartment, after igniting some logs in its fireplace, doused them on observing that the flue was all but clogged. The absent tenant of the lower suite: Architectitan Frank Lloyd Wright, 87, a great fireplace fancier, who has also been known to prohibit smoking by people in his presence.

In its touting of Marxist-Leninist heroes, the U.S.S.R.'s Soviet Culture pounced upon none other than Poet Henry Wadsworth (Paul Revere's Ride) Longfellow, ballyhooed him as "a humanitarian who condemned war and demanded its abolition . . . one of the most beloved . . . poets in the world, despite attempts by modern bourgeois critics to knock him from his pedestal."

Half a world apart, two new U.S. envoys observed similar diplomatic traditions in their first official meetings with heads of state. In London U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's John Hay Whitney, just short of 60 years after his grandfather John Hay took over the post, hied himself to Buckingham Palace, there presented his credentials to Queen Elizabeth II. Noting that officials of the U.S. embassy have been criticized for concentrating on London to the rest of the country's loss, London's Daily Telegraph hoped that "Jock" Whitney, a millionaire with a real zest for getting around, would bring a "new start in this respect." The Telegraph also retrospectively hailed "the new Ambassador's firm break with the more absurd social conventions of New York society." In Tokyo, meanwhile, Career Diplomat Douglas MacArthur II, bearer of a name that still inspires respect in Japan, rode in an imperial household coach to the royal palace, there presented his papers to his uncle's good friend, Emperor Hirohito.

In a maternal dispatch from Monaco, Princess (High Society) Grace issued a bulletin on the development of five-week-old Princess Caroline, christened at week's end. Straight from the royal cradle: "Little Caroline does not suck her thumb . . . She certainly does not suck all her fingers, as some monster suggested . . . She hates hats . . . She also has a prejudice against her father's camera . . . They say she is a very pretty child, but how should I know?"

Jaded Asbestoscion Tommy Manville, 62, creaked into Manhattan from his suburban sanctuary to attend the wedding of his most recent (ninth) exwife, sometime Burlesqueen Anita Roddy-Eden, 34, and India-born Cinemactor John (Tonight We Raid Calais) Sutton. Making a grand entrance at the scene of the civil ceremony, a hotel library, Anita gazed fondly at her discarded mate and his successor, cooed: "Darlings, I want you both!" Quipped the groom: "Have you got an extra wedding ring, Tommy? I forgot mine." Later, Playboy Manville recalled the nuptials with elation: "It was the happiest day of my life--a wedding where I did not get married!"

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