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

Vacationing in Pinehurst, N.C., Britain's roving Lady Astor was entertained at the local country club by the city's foremost winter residents, General of the Army George Catlett Marshall and his wife Katherine. Ordinarily one of America's most caustic critics, Virginia-born Nancy Astor was on her best behavior, kept her temper during her frequent rounds of golf (handicap: 20), purred just like any sweet old (65) lady. Sample: "I've never known so many nice people as you've got here."

From Hollywood, garrulous Cinemactress Zsa Zsa Gabor issued one of her regular reports on her pillar-to-post romance with closemouthed Dominican Playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, now listlessly awaiting a Dominican divorce from his fourth wife, Five & Dime Heiress Barbara Mutton. "He is screaming about my career," screamed Zsa Zsa. "Rubi has forced me to choose between him and my career. And now it looks like I'll have to choose my acting . . . I'm in too much of a hurry to become a top actress." Every once in a while, also complained Zsa Zsa, Rubirosa's easygoing torpor erupts into a jealous pet. "I can't even look at another man," cried she. "Not that I would do such a thing, [for] I am a very faithful girl even when I'm not married. When Rubi isn't around, I only date old friends and ex-husbands."

In Manhattan, a rare species of old bottle was put on permanent display in an American glassmaking exhibit of the New York Historical Society. Its embossed inscription: "E. C. Booz's Old Cabin Whiskey." With a new spot in the public's eye, the cabin-shaped vessel, its neck resembling a chimney, was likely to further the popular misconception that E.C.'s surname spawned the most common synonym for strong spirits.*

An old man who believes that birthdays are for children, Physicist Albert Einstein seemed slightly startled when friends reminded him that he would turn 76 this week. Even more than birthdays, however, Dr. Einstein deplores birthday interviews. But he was duly goaded into a typical bit of self-depreciation. "The world is no longer interested in me," said he at his office in Princeton's brain-crammed Institute for Advanced Study. "I do not consider myself important any more. First, I was nobody, and then I became famous and people developed illusions of greatness about me that were untrue. Now I plan to live quietly . . . unless I feel it is my duty to come forward . . . in the interest of individual liberty or personal rights."

After winding up his song-and-dance chores in his own screen biography, ebony Singer Nat "King" Cole, a trifle breathless from crooning a dozen of his hits, e.g., Nature Boy, Too Young, told how he felt as the hero of the vanguard film in Hollywood's projected series of movies about living musicians of renown. Asked if he had been thrown by any of his own lines, Cole shrugged and husked:

"Dialogue is just lyrics that don't rhyme." How is movie making different from one-night stands? "In a nightclub you talk when you run out of songs. In a picture you sing when you run out of words."

Returning to the scene of the grime, Tennessee's trap-mouthed Ray Jenkins, committee counsel during the Army-McCarthy hearings, popped up in the capital for a lecture at Georgetown University. During his prepared remarks (on the defense of democracy), he referred only in passing to "that now historic and celebrated fiasco." But when his listeners started questioning him, Jenkins let down his cropped hair, exulted that he had found the principals in the hearings to be splendid fellows, if not extraordinary. Of Army Counsel Joseph Welch: "A great dramatist, very effective." Of McCarthy's Counsel Roy Cohn: "The most brilliant young lawyer I ever met . . ." Of Army Secretary Robert T. Stevens: "A high-type gentleman of wealth." Of Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy himself: "One of America's outstanding men insofar as personal magnetism and charm are concerned."

Striding before a four-expert panel on ABC-TV's Masquerade Party (Wed. 9p.m. E.S.T.), Indiana's billowing Republican Senator Homer E. Capehart, artfully disguised as an ancient Roman senator in toga, patrician mask and phony baldpate, managed to stump the eagle eyes with the modest help of his wife Irma, decked out as an old Roman matron. The identity guessers, however, did not seriously guess, amidst their wild stabs in the dark, the person Capehart reckoned they would think he was. On first catching a mirrored glimpse of himself in full regalia, he shuddered melodramatically and gasped: "Good heavens! I look like Liberace!"

* Philadelphia Distiller Booz bottled his product in "Booz bottles" around the middle of the 19th century, doubtless helped repopularize a slang word which had been bandied around (as Middle English's "bous," Middle Dutch's "buse," meaning a cup or beaker) since the early 14th century.

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