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

In Rome, thrice-married Cinemactress Ava Gardner said four times was out, described her near, dear companion, Italian Comic Walter Chiari; as just an "attentive, affectionate, charming friend." Mourned Chiari: "I could be ready for the ceremony in ten minutes."

While Levittown, Long Island, suburbia's assembly-line Eden, celebrated its tenth birthday with fireworks, a 75-float parade, a midget football game and a performance of John Millington Synge's Riders to the Sea, William Levitt, the ringtailed realtor who started it all, celebrated in his own way. For $1,750,000 he bought Belair, the 2,226-acre Maryland estate of the late William Woodward Jr. Purpose: more diapers and down payments in a new, 5,000-castle Levittown.

On a South Dakota cornfield, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson rose on the speaker's platform, drew a barrage of half a dozen eggs from local farmers (their peeve: Benson had not answered their letters). After seeing the whites of the farmers' eggs, Benson said gravely: "This doesn't represent the feeling of the people of South Dakota."

It was a regular maypole frolic in Peking when Stephen Tyler and 14 other U.S. innocents abroad--part of the 45 students who thumbed their passports at the State Department and AWOLed off to Red China last summer--got together with that jolly old minstrel, Premier Chou Enlai, for a clap-hands songfest. But as the Trans-Siberian Express chugged back to Moscow last week, the party line began to fray. Complained self-described "Rightist" Tyler at the U.S. embassy: because he had tried to dampen their enthusiasm for Red China, two of his fellow travelers-for-the-truth had bopped him on the nose.

Just out of the Navy after a hitch as a frogman, Jon Lindbergh, 25-year-old son of Charles, signed on for more of the same--as a Navy officer in the cloak-and-flipper film Underwater Warrior.

Catching Hollywood's rumorists by surprise, Cinemactor Marlon Brando, 33, got spruced up (the unwashed jeans lately have stood empty while their owner sported a blue suit, necktie and Hom-burg), drove to Eagle Rock, near Pasadena, and got married. Then with his bride, demure, olive-skinned, sari-swathed Starlet Anna Kashfi, 23, almost as unknown as any of the carhops and hat-nappers he has dated while snubbing the screen's more famous ladies, "Hollywood's most eligible bachelor" vanished in a cloud of idle speculation. Was there a Welshman in the woodpile? Was Dar-jeeling-born Anna's real name Johanna O'Callaghan? Back in Cardiff, Wales, William Patrick O'Callaghan, a former railroad man in India, said he was her father, told delighted newsmen: "That's our daughter, and both me and the missus were born in London." He said Johanna had moved to Cardiff with them when she was 13, got a job in a butcher's shop, later was shipped to Hollywood by a talent scout. (MGM, which likes Johanna-Anna in her off-shoulder sari, first hedged, then admitted her identity.) Said Papa O'Callaghan huffily: "She never mentioned Mr. Brando in her letters."

A few months ago, Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn showed up at Independence, Mo. to help Harry Truman dedicate his museum (TIME, July 15). Last week at Bonham, Texas Harry returned the favor. Sam's museum, a $500,000 Greek-temple affair in white marble, houses gavels, gimcracks and the nation's most complete private collection of books about Congress--including records of all sessions since the first Continental Congress. On hand for the museum-warming was the most complete collection of Texas big shots seen in recent years: Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, Oveta Gulp Hobby, Secretary of the Treasury Robert Anderson, and a large glistening gathering of Big Rich. Reminisced Harry Truman: back in 1943, he told Sam he wanted to nominate him for the vice-presidency, got a dirty look. "I thought he was going to hit me. If Sam had done what I wanted him to do, I'd have gotten out of all the trouble I ever got into in my life, and I'd still be in the Senate having the time of my life."

Describing "life because of father" as having more advantages than disadvantages, California Congressman James Roosevelt, 49, F.D.R.'s eldest, wrote in Esquire that though he inherited his father's enemies and was condemned to living his private life largely in the public eye, "I'm willing to concede [Sam] Goldwyn never would have hired me at $25,000 a year [as a vice president in 1939] if

1 had been James Doe." Said Roosevelt: "I learned how to dine with royalty (you had to finish all of your soup before you earned your meat course) and how to find my way to a tower guest room in Windsor Castle without bumbling into the Queen's or someone else's quarters."

Spokane's Gonzaga University opened its new library, a glittering campus showplace for which sentimental old Non-Grad Bing Crosby (class of '26) donated $615,000. The library, which has 153,000 books, is also outfitted with a special Crosbyana Room. It has wall-to-wall carpeting and glass showcases for Bing's Oscar (for Going My Way in 1944), photographs, citations, old scrapbooks and the 20 gold platters for recordings that sold more than a million copies.

Mindful of the Big Ten's code of football purity and eager to show that service with Coach Duffy Daugherty's undefeated assassins does not curtail a young scholar's other activities, Michigan State's athletic department posed hefty (6 ft., 200 Ib.) sophomore Guard Russ Kelly, 25, with his four major courses: Nick, 7, Kurt, 6, Marilyn, 4, and Terry, 2.

Expressing regret at what has happened to his favorite game ("It's down now where bowling used to be"), William Frederick (Willie) Hoppe (rhymes with poppy), former world champion of three-cushion billiards, celebrated his 70th birthday in Miami retirement.

The first American to win West Germany's choicest literary plum, the peace prize of the nation's book industry, U.S. Playwright Thornton Wilder, 60, spoke in German on "Culture in a Democracy" for TV cameras and 2,000 people jammed into St. Paul's Church at Frankfurt, told them: "Democracy is not only an attempt at social equality for all men, but also the effort to give them the consciousness that they are all equal in God's respect; they are not . . . underlings and not low-born."

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