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

Covering the Mediterranean waterfront for the Hearst press, Elsa Maxwell tersely laid the scene of a Stavros Niarchos wingding--"The Creole, at anchor in the port of Villefranche, lay low in the water like a black panther of the sea"--pounded out the hard news with dispatch--"It was too funny for words. Mrs. Guinness took off her shoes. The Duchess did her conception of the calypso. Harold Vanderbilt begged me to dance with him. I refused only because, though I love Harold, I cannot dance"--but lost, control in her bread-and-butter blurb: "When I said good night to Stavros, I felt much of my old affection rush into my heart and I said, 'You remarkable man, you are a fantastic Greek and a great sailor, a real man of the sea.' "

A long way from Sunnybrook Farm, black-haired, 29-year-old Shirley Temple, who squeezed coos and clucks from the moviegoing world as the gold-topped cinemoppet of the '30s, announced that she would end an eight-year retirement from show business, seek ohs and ahs as the narrator and sometime star of a series of TV fairy tales. Tryout audience for her stories of dragons and derring-do: her children Susan 9, Charles 5, and Lori 3.

Ho Chi Minh, the goateed scholar and activist who is President of Communist North Viet Nam, last week smooched in comradely fashion with Polish Communist Chief Wladyslaw Gomulka, this week continued his buss ride through the satellites, reared back and thrust his deep-pile chops at Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito. Then, to prove there was Marxism beneath the mush, he fired off a blast at "imperialist America and its puppets, who are continuing to arm themselves in an attempt to dominate the world." Next target for Ho's communal cuddling: Albania's Enver Hoxha.

Going along amiably with the rituals required of an elder statesman when he becomes a year older, former President Herbert Hoover, a healthy 83, boarded the liner President Hoover at San Francisco, sliced a chunk from a 5-ft.-long birthday cake modeled after the ship. Earlier, he told reporters that the state of the nation, despite threats of war and inflation, is "the best in history." He reported that his health is "fundamentally good," then qualified his diagnosis wryly: "After you pass the scriptural limit of three score and ten years, your longevity depends mainly on pills."

At Stockton, Calif.'s College of the Pacific, where he coached for some years after the University of Chicago retired him because of old age in 1933, college football's famed Amos Alonzo Stagg attended a combined celebration of his own 95th birthday (Aug. 16), his wife's 81st birthday (Aug. 7), and their 63rd wedding anniversary next month.

Monaco's Prince Rainier left his small pond on the Mediterranean, journeyed to a bigger pool at Gstaad, Switzerland for a vacation with Princess Grace. There he alienated music lovers and continued his vendetta against cameramen by showing up at a concert with Grace ten minutes late, strong-arming a photographer who tried to snap him and his half-sprouted goatee. Then, at intermission, petulant Rainier walked out on Violinist Yehudi Menuhin and Composer Benjamin Britten before a performance of five of Britten's short pieces.

His Uncle John jolted the family by joining the G.O.P., and last week Franklin Delano Roosevelt III prepared to go him one worse. Admitting that he had turned down Harvard, where his famous grandfather and less famous father, F.D.R. Jr., had nibbled the lotuses of liberal education, he said he intended to enter Yale next month as a freshman, treated reporters to a blast of 18-year-older's ferment: "I'm tired of getting my name in print just because I'm a Roosevelt. When I accomplish something, you can come back. Meantime, sorry."

Showing no signs of his spell in the well (TIME, May 27), towheaded, eight-year-old Benny Hooper of Manorville, N.Y. flew to Minneapolis with his parents and six-year-old sister Wendy for a week's fishing. His hosts: Minnesota's Governor Orville Freeman and nine-year-old son Mike, who angled unsuccessfully with Benny in Gull Lake (later, fishing with his father, Benny reeled in a creditable string of bass). Behaving as if he were running for governor himself, Benny paraded with a dairy princess, mugged happily at a press conference, offered the fruit of his experience to Young America: "Stay away from holes in the ground."

Simon-pure sportsmen objected that it was hardly cricket--something like funneling a golf green to insure accurate putting. The Rhode Island League of Salt Water Anglers protested to President Eisenhower. Democratic Senator Richard L. Neuberger protested to the Senate. But the vice chairman of the city council at Newport, R.I., where Ike will go for a vacation as soon as a laggard Congress lets him, snorted "perfectly ridiculous" and went right on throwing tasty bits of chopped fish into the ocean every day, so that when the President drops a line at the chummed spots, striped bass will be waiting.

While an aroused codger made news by bopping a detractor of the Queen (see FOREIGN NEWS) because, he said, Prince Philip was in no position to thrash the bounder himself, the prince collected a few headlines on his own. At Arundel Castle in Sussex, he captained a cricket team during a charity match, let a hot liner bounce off his chest for what the Americans would call an error, saw his players fight to a draw with the Duke of Norfolk's team. At Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, he raised eyebrows by having a drink with his old friend, Lieut. Commander Michael Parker, who was ousted as Philip's private secretary after his separation from his wife six months ago. Then he shocked the nation's nannies and provoked a reproving tut from one British newspaper by shipping eight-year-old Prince Charles as crew for a three-hour race through choppy seas in his 2g-ft. yawl, Bluebottle. Result: happy and salt-soaked as a clam, Charles had a fine time, pleased his papa by taking the tiller himself after they plowed past the finish line in fourth place.

In Tokyo, where he awaits a Japanese trial for manslaughter, Army Specialist Third Class William Girard, center of a celebrated legal case, sprang himself from Camp Whittington for three hours of AWOL bottling in a Japanese saloon, was placed back under 24-hr, guard when he showed up at camp again.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.