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

Spotting a dandy opportunity to reacquaint Roman readers with an old friend and get in a gratuitous whack at the U.S. at the same time, Italy's conservative Il Tempo paid a call on top-ranking poet and philosophical Wild Man Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington. Groused Pound, who is confined to St. Elizabeths' grounds on a much-argued diagnosis of legal insanity, faces trial on 19 counts of treason (he broadcast eccentric, violently pro-Axis speeches from Italy during World War II) if he gets out. "At first," said Pound to Il Tempo, "I laughed when the government called Grandpa Ez crazy. But now St. Elizabeths to me is worse than prison. I'm like the Man in the Iron Mask. My mask imprisons my thoughts and smothers my voice." Pooh-poohing the treason charges: "I only met old Muss once, and our conversation pleased neither him nor me. I talked [over the radio] about Roosevelt's follies, but I never said anything against my conscience as an American." On the world mess: "What the politicians have given us is an atrocious lump of sugar, the U.N. building." On writers: T. S. Eliot "betrayed poetry. In America, well, Papa Hemingway knows how to write, but he's dishonest." Said Papa to Il Tempo: "Pound is a great poet, and I proclaim it proudly. He's been punished enough, no matter what he did."

Old Broadway Hand Helen Hayes, her hair dyed white for her role in the Jean Anouilh play, Time Remembered, headed north from Mexico City, was met in Los Angeles by something only a mother could love: her 19-year-old son, Cinemactor James MacArthur, and his hair-razed redskin haircut, done for his role in the tomtom drama, The Light in the Forest.

Topping their stage romance with a real-life courtship, Comedienne Judy Holliday and Leading Man Sydney Chaplin, stars of Broadway's Bells Are Ringing, last week took off for Europe to tell the good news to Sydney's famed father, Cinemime Charles Chaplin.

Sunburned after a month spent collecting and classifying plants in the 3,000 acres surrounding his Nasu Imperial Villa in Tochigi, Japan's Emperor Hirohlto took time out from scholarly puttering to be photographed informally (no tie) with his occasional companion on the botanical walks, Empress Nagako.

At noon one day last week, Rachele Mussolini stood in the family cemetery at Predappio while the body of her husband Benito Mussolini, hidden for years in a Capuchin monastery by a government conscious of its value as a symbol to neoFascists, was formally identified, then placed under a tricolor to await burial. Next day during three Masses, some 500 shouting, banner-waving Fascists broke a pledge against demonstrations, milled about the chapel, and while Rachele stood motionless, gave the blackshirt salute and knelt before the coffin. Later, Italy's old-time Duce was buried beside his blacksmith father and schoolteacher mother.

Lacking a royal family to twitter about, Washington society made do last week by hoking up a heart flutter between Mrs. Alben Berkley, 45, widow of the onetime Vice President, and cue-bald Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn, 75. Bachelor (since a brief 1927 marriage) Rayburn, who squired the lady to Senator Lyndon Johnson's 49th birthday party last week, was not talking, but Jane Barkley was: "For heaven's sake! I enjoy his company immensely, and that's that."

Opera's most flamboyant diva and one of the cinema's hottest box-office blondes were on the outs with their employers. At the Edinburgh Festival, tempestuous Soprano Maria Callas waved a note from her doctor, walked out on Milan's La Piccola Scala (her second such disappearance this summer), said she was going back to Italy, explained: "I'm tired." In Hollywood, irked by a long-term contract with Columbia Pictures that calls for a humiliating $1,250 a week, straw-haired Kim Novak refused to show up for a film, was suspended by her exasperated bosses just in time to catch a hopperful of publicity as her latest film, Jeanne Eagels, opened in Manhattan.

Passed over for promotion to brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve because stern-minded Senator Margaret Chase Smith said he had not spent enough time actively being a colonel (TIME, Sept. 2), shambling Cinema Good Guy Jimmy Stewart last week got a star anyway, and with it a title requiring no active duty at all: honorary sheriff of Elko County, Nev. (14,000 people, twelve crap joints).

In Jackson County, Mo., Harry S. Truman won his audience when he told schoolteachers that "Lazy parents, baby sitters and a shortage of switches have made the teacher's role a hard one and have made our educational system a coddling process." Taking the view that gentlemen of the old schools had more chance to become gentlemen, and schooled, he recalled that his first-grade teacher "opened school with a prayer. She also kept a good limber switch in the corner."

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