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

Dyspeptic Pianist Oscar Levant and his local TV show (Words About Music) were scuttled by Los Angeles' station KCOP after Levant began neglecting music to make off-color comments on such interesting compositions as Marilyn Monroe and Richard Nixon. Moaned his ex-sponsor: "The show got too dirty. We want to sell carpets, not controversies." Confessed Wit Levant: "I was outraged at my taste . . . I'm like a middle-class James Joyce--extremely-self-conscious. The station left it up to my own judgment, which I don't have."

New Jersey's No.1 bachelor, Democratic Governor Robert Meyner, 48, long an escort of Margaret Truman Daniel, now an uncommitted favorite-son suitor of the White House, had nonetheless switched to a willowy, blue-eyed Stevenson named Helen, 28, a distant relative of Adlai Stevenson. Though Meyner was mum as ever about romance, Helen said they have been "friends" ever since May, when the governor was keynoter of a mock Democratic Convention at Ohio's Oberlin College (prexy: Helen's . daddy, William Edwards Stevenson). Paralleling Helen's legitimate claim of kinship with Adlai, Kentucky's back-pounding Governor Albert B. ("Happy") Chandler, darkest Democratic horse now visible at all, also clomped into the consanguinity act with a hoarse declaration of Stevensonian blood in his wife's veins.* Happy's claim was as undocumented as it was tenuous--but it gave Adlai Stevenson, if elected, a perfect out to bar Happy from his Cabinet on the pretext of no nepotic appointments. As matters stood, all that Candidate Stevenson had to say to Candidate Chandler about their family ties was: "I'm impressed."

Foolhardily trying a daytime reconnaissance in force, oil-rich Divorcee Barbara ("Bobo") Rockefeller, flanked by two legal wingmen and the mother of one of them, invaded the well-guarded mountain-top estate of her honeymooning ex-husband, Arkansas Squire Winthrop Rockefeller. Bobo set forth on her raid soon after getting word that a nurse, sent to Winrock Farm with little Winthrop, 7, to care for the lad during his regular half-summer visit with his father, had been booted off the estate. Arriving to rescue Winnie, Bobo soon had the child in her rented U-Drive-It car, but her operation stalled there because a burly Rockefeller guard grabbed the car keys. Versions of the skirmish diverged after that. Bobo claimed that a bullyboy had dragged her from the car, tossed her some ten feet onto hard gravel. Winthrop Rockefeller's forces later asserted that Bobo was "loud and abusive," "a wildcat." The Battle of Winrock then bogged, ended toward evening when a sheriff moseyed onto the scene. Reluctantly, Bobo gave young Winnie back, got her keys back, was escorted off with her troops to be charged with disturbing the peace. Back in Manhattan at week's end, bedded with "nervous exhaustion." Bobo was mulling possible assault raps against Squire Winthrop and three of his "henchmen. Elated citizens of Monaco held a rousing, cork-popping celebration in appreciation of the fertility of their newly wed royalty. Massing in the square before the palace, the alerted Monacans, prayerful for an heir to the throne to prolong their immunity to French taxes and France's military draft, heard Prince Rainier III triumphantly proclaim: "Her Highness, the Princess Grace, expects the birth of a child in February! . . . This news . . .guarantees the continuance of our dynasty and ... of the privileges and advantages of Monegasques!" Tax-free vivats resounded for hours.

On a lavender mount (a Lincoln), World Champion Ail-Around Cowboy Casey Tibbs roared across two South Dakota counties, hit speeds up to 100 m.p.h. Headed off by a sheriff, Tibbs climbed down, later drawled to a judge: "I thought I'd slacked off going through the towns." Drawled the judge: "$100."

In Buenos Aires, a juvenile court indicted Argentina's lecherous ex-Dictator Juan Peron on a charge of seducing his bobby-sox doxy, Nelida ("Nelly") Rivas, now 17, when she was 14, and carrying on with her for two years. In his Panamanian exile, creaky (60) Lover Peron was still carrying on with his subsequent flame (TIME, April 9), Dancer Isobel Martinez, at 23 a veritable crone by Peron's cradle-snatching standards.

Imagining himself a Negro at the suggestion of the Negro monthly Ebony, Mississippi's Nobel Prizewinning Author William Faulkner told how he would seek equal rights, turned out a piece not likely to please most Southern whites (few of whom buy Ebony). A colored Faulkner would advise the leaders of his race "to send every day to the white school to which he was entitled by his ability and capacity to go, a student of my race, fresh and cleanly dressed, courteous, without threat or violence, to seek admission."Among antagonistic whites, Faulkner asks himself, "Would you find it hard not to hate them?" His reply: "I would repeat to myself Booker T. Washington's words ... 'I will let no man, no matter what his color, ever make me hate him.' . . . Hypothetical Negro Faulkner's big decision: "I would be a member of the N.A.A.C.P., since nothing else in our U.S. culture has yet held out to my race that much hope. But I would remain only [if] the watchword of our flexibility [were] decency, quietness, courtesy, dignity; if violence and unreason come, it must not be from us."

India's deadly tiger eliminator (some 1,200 kills), the sure-shot Maharajah of Surguja, approached Canadian officials in New Delhi to arrange for him "to shoot a moose in Canada." Though having no reason to doubt the Maharajah's aim. the diplomats carefully replied that they would try to arrange for him to shoot "at" a moose. Last week five Canadian provinces and the Yukon territory were trying to lure the big-spending Maharajah to their respective hunting grounds. Of these, the Yukon issued a most sporting challenge to him to get there next month. Boasted a Yukon game official: "As the rutting season generally starts about the loth of September, the bull moose will at that time be just as dangerous to meet as the Indian tiger!"

Tying flies for a Colorado fishing expedition, Topeka Oilman Alf M. London, 68, disclosed that he will be "far from the madding crowd" when the Republicans convene late this month. Furthermore, the 1936 G.O.P. standard-bearer will not even follow the convention antics of his fellow Republicans on TV: "It's going to be too cut and dried."

Sounding off in Honolulu, one of World War II's most regimented G.I.s, Author Marion (See Here, Private Hargrove) Hargrove, 36, sputtered like an unfading old soldier about today's U.S. Army being a sissy sanctuary. Said Hargrove: "Mothers, chaplains and loudmouthed Congressmen have taken over the Army. The Army can bluff for three weeks, but then the kids catch on that there's nothing it can do to them."

For the past six years, federal customs sleuths have been impounding, as fast as it poured into the U.S. from Europe and the Orient, a vast collection of erotica consigned to the Institute for Sex Research of Indiana University's Sexpatiator Alfred C. Kinsey. The Government last week gave Zoologist Kinsey and his sexociates until this month's end to show why the treasure-trove of pornography should not be destroyed. Protested Kinsey: "The issue involved is the right of a scholar to have access to material which is denied the general public." Among the material that the federals would deny to Scholar Kinsey: 1) six naughty Chinese paintings dating from about 1750, 2) some spicy Parisian lithographs, 3) a handful of wooden and stone phallic symbols from China, 4) a little 18th century tome titled The Lascivious Hypocrite, or The Triumphs of Vice, 5) a rather obscene Japanese scroll, 6) filthy drawings and lewd notations, tagged simply, "lavatory wall inscriptions."

* Happy's boast: Mildred Chandler is Adlai's sixth cousin, once removed.

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