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

In a jovial farewell to the cast of The Entertainer, in which he played a boozy, aging song-and-dance man, Actor Laurence Olivier piped some 150 show-world guests (among them: Lena Home, Peter Ustinov, Ralph Bellamy) aboard a chartered excursion liner for a midnight cruise up the Hudson River. Garbed somewhat loosely in naval attire (explained mink-clad Actress Jessica Tandy: "I'm dressed as a Russian lady sailor"), Olivier's un-nautical crew dipped into champagne and stout, danced Scottish reels to the skirl of a bagpipe, taxied home from the cruise at 3:30 in the morning.

"Knowing that you know of a situation for a boy; and being desirous of obtaining one," the letter read, "I will with your permission apply for it. I would like to get a position where I would have a good chance of advancement." Last week, 75 years after he was hired as an office boy (salary: $4 a week), spry Frederick Hudson Ecker, 90, honorary board chairman of the giant ($80 billion in insurance) Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., sat through a dinner in his honor, reminisced to his audience about the company's great past. President for seven years (1929-36) and board chairman for 15 more, Ecker has worked without pay since 1938, is still consulted on big investments--and still shows no signs of retiring.

Helping some 3,000,000 Minnesotans celebrate their statehood centennial last week were Norway's comely Princess Astrid, daughter of King Olav V, and Sweden's Prince Bertil, third son of King Gustaf VI Adolf. Earlier, the royal junketeers, who looked none the worse for the four-day hullabaloo, had found time for New York shopping and lunch in Washington with President Eisenhower and Mamie. But Bertil, who arrived in the U.S. two days earlier than Astrid, had one regret: no time for golf.

Onetime Staff Sergeant Matthew Mc-Keon, 33, on the slow Marine Corps road back, after he was busted to private following the death by drowning of six recruits from his training platoon on a tragic night march two years ago, earned a promotion to corporal.

As usual, the splashy annual Cannes film festival produced its share of ecdysis among the visiting females. A Yugoslav beauty challenged Cannes Visitor Jayne Mansfield to a boom-or-bust tape-measure duel. Two Norwegian models, coyly heeding the open-fronted tradition begun by the late Starlet Simone Silva four years ago, consented to some slightly untrammeled poses for photographers. Bulging into the limelight in a different way, a well-turned bevy of cinema quail (Italy's sunbrowned Sophia Loren, Russia's Tatiana Samoilova, Hollywood's Mitzi Gaynor and Russia's Lino Yudina) stood shoulder to shoulder in a wary display of international solidarity.

Looking as if wedded bliss was everything he asked of it, hopeful Crooner Dennis Crosby, 23, son of Old Groaner Bing, avoided the obvious to gaze into the eyes of his Showgirl Bride Pat Sheehan, 26. No sooner had the junior Crosbys taken their vows in Las Vegas, Nev., where Pat, a divorcee, hoofs in a nightclub, than word leaked out in Los Angeles that sometime Telephone Operator Marilyn Scott, 25, as the result of a little unwedded bliss with Dennis, was the mother of a 5 1/2-month-old daughter, whose support has been provided by the Crosby lawyers. Worse yet, Dennis, a Catholic, was aware that the first marriage of Pat, a Protestant, was probably valid, and so he could not marry her in his own church. Hiding from the press through it all was Dennis' dad, himself just past the newlywed stage with Cinemorsel Kathy Grant.

Keen on the sporting life since his days as an amateur pug in Prague, barrel-chested Metropolitan Tenor Kurt Bourn asked a former neighbor, Wrestler Antonino Rocca, to demonstrate his headlock technique. As any friend would, Rocca grabbed Baum's head and squeezed. Result: one blocked nasal passage, aggravating an old injury, one canceled singing tour, one operation for Tenor Baum. Said he ruefully in the hospital: "One moment I had perfect pitch, the next a nose that felt like a ripe persimmon."

Without mommy's help, blonde, seven-year-old Princess Anne bravely walked into London's Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children--the first member of Britain's royal family to be treated in a public institution. Later, minus tonsils and adenoids, Anne greeted her parents Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, remained aloof from the carping of the London press, which weepily urged that the "lonely patient in Ward Dy" be allowed to play with the other kiddies.

Playwright Paddy (Marty) Chayefsky, a specialist in soul-probing among the urban proletariat, gave a group of Washington, D.C. actors a spasm of comment on his own class: "I've never known a good writer who observed anyone but himself. Megalomania is one of the prime requisites of being a good writer. Writers write out of different convictions. For example, Saroyan believes life is beautiful. That's a hard message to get over in a recession."

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