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

Stalking into a Los Angeles court in a Let-Them-Eat-Stanislavsky mood, torn-T-shirt-school Cinemactor Anthony Franciosa ground his teeth and glowered while a deputy city attorney recounted his misdeeds. Franciosa fractured the peace two months ago when, according to the lawman, he place-kicked a press photographer who was trying to snap him with his then great and good friend (now wife) shock-haired Cinemactress Shelley Winters. "It would not have been seemly to have had my picture taken with Miss Winters. I was still married," Franciosa explained after the fracas. When the prosecutor demanded that he be jailed "for the protection of society," Franciosa rose with his chest heaving. Chewing each word as if it were scenery, he pounded the table and began emoting eight to the bar: "He is saying society has to be protected. This is ridiculous. I am society." Society's sentence: two years' probation, $250 fine, ten days in the pokey.

At least seven leagues removed from the days when he followed his famed father in dueling along balustrades and skewering villains behind the arras, Cinemactor Douglas Fairbanks Jr., now a London boulevardier, last week bagged a pride of social lions. The catch at Fairbanks' coming-out party for his 17-year-old daughter Daphne: Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, and Princess Margaret with a new and eminently eligible beau, 23-year-old Lord Patrick Beresford, her escort at the Ascot races. Handsome Doug, whose swash shows no signs of buckling at 47, got the first dance with the Queen, also got a precedent-breaking (because Fairbanks and his wife are divorced) invitation to tea at Ascot on the sacrosanct sod of the Queen's Lawn.

As befits a man who has spent much of his professional life expiring at the top of his voice (he has logged 227 hours of dying time in Tristan alone), Siegfried-sized Tenor Lauritz Melchior knows his deathbed bathos down to the last Cheyne-Stokes wheeze. When bandits hopped the fence of his Beverly Hills estate last week, bound him with neckties and began looting the place, the 67-year-old Dane huffed and puffed like a heart-attack victim, sagged to his chair in feigned death throes (Tristan und Isolde, Act III) to frighten them off. Said he: "I am something of an actor. I let my tongue hang out of my mouth, and my eyes rolled in my head. I was never better. They were frightened."

But the act earned Melchior something less than an Equity minimum. As the tenor untied himself, grabbed a deer rifle and hustled out the door, his captor audience skedaddled back out the gate, taking with it $140,000 in boodle (jewelry and cash). Police bag by week's end: two of the four badmen, all but about $40,000 of their loot.

Even in Hollywood's Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, all falls are not prat. Last week doorknob-bald Cinemidol Yul Brynner looked more dashed than dashing after he tried some Cossack-style horsemanship for MGM's The Brothers Karamazov, swooped too low, fractured a vertebra. And Cinemactress Rita Hayworth kicked up her heels during the Pal Joey shooting, got sent to the showers with a gimpy tendon.

Celebrating the 20th anniversary of one of Hollywood's more durable marriages, Soprano Jeanette MacDonald and Actor Gene Raymond, a major in the Air Force Reserve, rubbed noses and nibbled wedding cake in Las Vegas, Nev., where Jeanette was singing at the Sahara.

Fifteen years after he was retired and charged with dereliction of duty, and almost 13 years after a court of inquiry cleared him of blame, Rear Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, 75, four-star commander of the Navy's Pacific Fleet when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, was honored by his Annapolis classmates. Last week, in an election hailed by the Naval Academy's alumni magazine as "an affirmation of faith by those who have known him well for more than 50 years," Admiral Kimmel was named alumni president of the class of '04.

It looked like a hard winter for the Pilgrims. The Indians (outlanders from Oklahoma who showed up at Plymouth, Mass., to the considerable wrath of an authentic New England Indian who felt that his offshore rights had been poached) had been friendly, but among the company of the Mayflower II there was no Thanksgiving. The difficulty: a falling-out, mostly over wampum, among the Pilgrim Fathers. The tourist turnout was below expectations, and Captain Alan Villiers was kept busy soothing his crewmen. There were complaints that some of them had not been paid. In London, Lloyds Underwriter Felix Fenston, who had ballasted the project with $98,000, jumped ship because the Mayflower promoters had not turned the vessel over to a charitable foundation, as planned. There was hope of fresh cash from rubbernecking admissions during a proposed stay in New York Harbor, but even here the long arm of Old World oppression threatened the hardy ship: back in England, Tugboat Owner Ernest Lister instructed his solicitor to have the Mayflower II seized for unpaid towing fees.

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