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

Portly John Jacob Astor, 44, a fur trader by ancestry and a fur giver by inclination, appealed to a Manhattan court for rescue from his mixup. Torn between a dubious Mexican divorce from Gertrude, Wife No. 2, and a messy Florida separation from Dolly, Wife No. 3, J.J. begged to learn some legal answers to some turgid questions: 1) If he decides to kiss and make up, which woman is his lawful wife? 2) When he labors through his upcoming income-tax return, should he file jointly with Gert or Dolly? 3) If he were to die before the two, which would have the legal claim to a widow's share of his (estimated) $70 million estate? The judge asked for time to think it out.

Virginia's famed Mrs. Chipsian Lucy Madeira Wing, 83, resigned after 51 years as headmistress of suburban Washington's genteel Madeira School. Schoolmarm Madeira, a doughty New Dealer, kept her girls, including daughters of such notable capital names as Morgenthau, Hopkins and Saltonstall, in green jumper uniforms, out of lipstick, with chaperoned escorts, and under a stiff liberal-arts regimen. Her favorite mottoes, watchwords to two generations of time-tried Madeira maidens: "Function in disaster!" and "Finish in style!"

Looking uncharacteristically jowly, Nobel Prizewinning Poet T. S. (The Waste Land) Eliot, 68, arrived at London Airport after a flight from his three-week honeymoon hideout on the French Riviera. At T.S.'s side was his second wife (his first died in 1947), Valerie Fletcher Eliot, 30, a shining inspiration to millions of secretaries dearly hoping to marry their bosses.

Two of the world's most out-of-this-world spiritual leaders, the Dalai Lama, 21, and his sidekick, the Panchen Lama, 19, Red-ruled gods-on-earth to some 3,000,000 Tibetans, neared the close of their six-week tour of India honoring the 2,500th anniversary of the death of Buddha--and celebrated in a great big way. Picking up $105,000 petty cash one morning at Calcutta's Communist-capitalist Bank of China, the Dalai Lama continued his madcap spending spree. No haggler, the Lama snapped up a $1,300 diamond-studded watch; when told it was a bit costly, he emitted a hearty, innocent laugh. He also amassed some German cameras, Swiss watches, radios and fountain pens, dropped about $3,000 at the races on tardy nags. He drew the line one evening, however, when a naughty Calcutta nightclub, featuring a couple of near-naked girl dancers, rang him up to confirm his table reservation. Protesting that the Lama was a wag's logical victim, his secretary cried: "This is horrible! This could never happen in Tibet!"

In Washington, that spry apostle of the rugged life, Boston's Heart Specialist Paul Dudley White, 70, scorned an elevator, pranced up 13 flights of stairs to have lunch with the National Press Club. Then he advised the jaded newshawks to get more exercise if they wished to relieve tensions and be as healthy as President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Said Dr. White: "If the President hadn't played golf, he might have had the heart attack 20 years earlier."

In London's Savoy Hotel, retiring U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's Winthrop Aldrich, lapel glittering with decorations, was wished hail and farewell at a banquet of the British branch of the Pilgrims Society, an Anglo-American group. On hand to honor him were new Tory Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and the local Pilgrims' current helmsman, lanky Lord Halifax, Britain's onetime (1941-46) ambassador to Washington.

Finding himself among friends at the Library of Congress, Pulitzer Prizewinning Novelist MacKinlay (Andersonville) Kantor, a Civil War buff who demands that all historical novels be historical, flailed away at lurid chroniclers. Rumbled he: "People who had been flooding the market with sex novels about flappers . . . found that they could write the same sex novels about the American historical scene; they had only to dress their flappers in crinoline."

Nobel Prizewinning Author Ernest Hemingway could now brood about Hollywood's choices to star in forthcoming film versions of two of his old novels. Papa's good friend Ava Gardner will play the role of bed-hopping Lady Brett in The Sun Also Rises; Jennifer Jones and Rock Hudson will be the star-crossed World War I lovers in A Farewell to Arms.

On behalf of an outraged lady constituent, New Jersey's Republican Senator Clifford Case demanded of Secretary of the Army Wilbur Brucker whether Dreamboat Groaner Elvis (Love Me Tender) Presley will be permitted to retain his pomaded mane and sideburns if he becomes a drafted G.I. Then Cliff Case, a Mozart lover, awaited an answer. After a huddle, the Army gravely reported back: the Memphis Meteor will rate no special treatment, and, furthermore, "no [official] statement was made concerning retention of his hair style."

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