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

Would Aly Khan and Rita Hayworth make up? From coast to coast, it was a burning question for the press.

After a few days at the Saratoga yearling sales, where he wined & dined and sidestepped family questions but sold 20 of his father's yearlings for a total of $173,500, Aly chartered a plane for Manhattan. From there he flew to Los Angeles.

Reporters waiting for his arrival were disappointed. Rita was not there. Director Charles Vidor, his host for the five-day visit, was waiting with car and chauffeur. Would Aly and Rita . . .? "I hope so," said Aly. "That's what I am here for." Then he drove off to the momentous meeting--dinner at the Hayworth house in Beverly Hills. At word that the dinner was stretching out until 3 a.m., the encircling corps of correspondents and photographers doubled.

The next day the press watch in Beverly Hills began early and lasted long. Aly arrived for lunch and stayed & stayed. The press grew restive. and clamored for an audience. In desperation, newsmen formed a crescent on Rita's lawn, fell to their knees, salaaming and pleading. At last Aly appeared. Would he and Rita . . .? "Everything is going fine," answered Aly. Then he proposed a mutually agreeable truce to the press: go now and come back tomorrow for pictures and interviews. That evening it was three-year-old Yasmin who did more than anyone else to promote a reconciliation. Somehow she managed to swallow some sleeping pills. Aly and Rita became father & mother as they rushed to the hospital, held hands and waited until word came that there was no danger.

Next day, with truce-time over, reporters converged on Rita's lawn again. Good as his word, Aly appeared with Rita for a smiling picture. Said Rita, "We are very happy to see each other." But, reporters asked, would they . . .? The answer was "No comment." Any plans, then? Yes, Aly was off to the Del Mar race track, and at the end of his visit he planned to "go to Kentucky to see some friends in the horse business."

In Hollywood, veteran Director-Producer Cecil B. DeMille, 71, celebrated his golden wedding anniversary. His for mula for a successful marriage: "A man must be lucky enough to find a patient, gracious lady."

Perle Mesta, once famed for her Washington parties, wrote in This Week magazine: "After the three years I have served as Minister to Luxembourg, with world conditions as they are, I could never return to the party world of Washington . . . If I ever give Washington parties again, they will be different in purpose and spirit . . ."

The late Sir Stafford Cripps's one-page will was filed for probate in Gloucester, England. The onetime Chancellor of the Exchequer left an estate of $42,380 to his widow and a three-bedroom cottage to his daughter, Diana.

John L. Lewis announced that his United Mine Workers' pension fund this year had paid out $126,300,000 and had received $126,500,000 in interest and royalties. Present balance in the fund: $99,500,000.

In a "preview birthday party" at Hill-rest Farm, Peterborough, N.H., Mrs. Edward MacDowell, 94-year-old widow of famed U.S. Composer Edward (To a Wild Rose) MacDowell, heard praise and thanks from some 500 artists and friends for founding the 600-acre MacDowell Colony, an inexpensive, secluded working spot which has produced more than 20 Pulitzer Prizewinners in the past 45 years.

After a visit to MacDowell's grave and the log cabin in the woods where he did his composing, there were speeches by Senators Styles Bridges and Charles Tobey. Thornton Wilder read passages from Our Town, which he wrote in the colony. Mrs. MacDowell listened to selections of her husband's music and accepted a birthday book of greetings from several hundred statesmen and former colonists. She was, said Mrs. MacDowell in her thank-you speech, "a very ordinary woman who was given a very great opportunity which I se zed.'' And from Colony President Carl Carmer there was further good news. The proceeds of a fund-raising campaign now under way will be turned over to Mrs. MacDowell on her 95th birthday next November. The hope, he said, is to raise "a thousand dollars for each year of Mrs. MacDowell's life and a few extra thousand for her to grow on."

The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce gave the Duke of Edinburgh a trinket for his son Prince Charles: a set of bagpipes, one-third normal size, whose "effect is, to a Scotsman, most musical and quite inspiring."

Princess Yolanda of Savoy, 51, daughter of the late King Victor Emmanuel, while driving with her husband, Count Carlo Calvi di Bergolo, along a highway near Milan, saw a tank truck swerve from the road and plunge into a ravine. While her husband drove to the nearest village for help, the princess, an expert golfer, swimmer and tennis player, broke into the truck's cab (the wreck had buckled the doors) and rescued the two drivers, who were drowning in wine. The wine-filled tank had burst, flooding the cab.

The Most Rev. Dr. Geoffrey Francis Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, and his wife arrived in Manhattan for a five-week holiday in Boxford, Mass, as guests of the Rt. Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill, Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the U.S. Mrs. Fisher said that she intended to see something of the countryside "to find out how Americans really live." Dr. Fisher, who will make two addresses during his visit, said part of his time would be spent boning up on the coronation rite for the crowning of Queen Elizabeth II next June. Also, though not as active a gardener as Bishop Sherrill, "I shall be ready to push the wheelbarrow as far as I may be able to do."

Middleweight Sugar Ray Robinson hired a prominent plastic surgeon to remove scar tissue from his brow and pretty up his nose. Manhattan sportwriters concluded that he was getting ready to retire from the ring.

After twelve weeks of training, Peter Forrestal, 21, son of the late Secretary of Defense, was sworn in as an ensign at the United States Naval Station, Long Beach, Calif.

Democratic Presidential Candidate Adlai Stevenson sat and listened to a stout defense of himself from the pulpit of the Springfield, Ill. Presbyterian Church. Departing from the Scripture to comment on current events, the Rev. Richard Graebel thundered that Republican Senator Everett Dirksen's statement that Stevenson was the worst Illinois governor of the 20th century was "a blatant lie." Said Pastor Graebel later: he was not aware that the governor was in his church.

From Apia. British Samoa, came a picture of Cinemactor Gary Cooper, proud spearer of a young octopus, which Cooper got during an off-duty period from his job of starring in Return to Paradise, based on a James Michener South Sea story.

Secretary of Defense Robert A. Lovett and other top brass gathered in the Pentagon to watch Acting Air Force Chief of Staff General Nathan F. Twining pin the Distinguished Flying Cross on veteran Barnstormer Speed Pilot Roscoe Turner for his "contributions toward the advancement of the science of aerial flight." It was awarded by an act of Congress, and the first time in 20 years that the D.F.C. has been given to a civilian.

In London, Former Prime Minister Clement Attlee and his wife boarded BOAC's new Comet jet airliner and whooshed off to Rhodesia for a two weeks' visit.

The widow of General H. H. ("Hap") Arnold, World War II Air Force boss, turned over some 15,000 of his personal papers and items to the Library of Congress, which accepted the gift as "an invaluable addition" to its collection of aeronautical manuscripts.

Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser made a chilling discovery 30 minutes before he was scheduled to pilot one of his speedboats in the Lake Tahoe Gold Cup race. Someone had sawed half through the two-inch propeller shaft of one of his Gold Cup racers, and had stuffed nuts, bolts and rags into the carburetor and blower. Another had been thoroughly doused with gasoline. It was, said Kaiser, "an attempt at plain, cold murder." But he climbed into a third boat in his fleet, buzzed off to a second place behind Shipping Heir Stanley Dollar, Jr.

In Hollywood, French-born Cinemactress Corinne Calvert filed a $1,000,000 slander suit against Hungarian-born Cinemactress Zsa Zsa Gabor for telling a columnist that Corinne was cockney English, not French at all. From London Zsa Zsa replied: "It's much easier to get a million dollars out of a rich husband than it is out of another actress." At week's end, to the entire satisfaction of her pressagent, Corinne recalled another galling insult: "Zsa Zsa said once that I had no breasts. Well, any time she feds like making a contest out of it, I'm ready."

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