The naming of cats is a difficult matter, but the naming of Medal of Freedom winners puts it to shame. Lyndon Johnson finally awarded one to Poet Thomas Stearns Eliot, 76, even though the nation's highest civilian decoration is primarily intended for Americans and Eliot has been one of Her Majesty's most Britannic subjects for some 40 years. However, he was originally a product of St. Louis and Harvard, which are pretty American. A practical cat, and one who has to watch his health nowadays, Eliot elected to receive his honor in London. But as U.S. Ambassador David Bruce handed it over, the poet couldn't help grinning like Old Possum himself.

Magnolias and edelweiss make a proud device even in Moscow. And so last week Laurel, Miss., Soprano Leontyne Price, 37, and Salzburg-born Maestro Herbert von Karajan, 59, gathered at the Bolshoi Theater with the La Scala Opera Company to show what they could do with Verdi's Requiem. Quite a lot, as it turned out. The crowd, including Nina Khrushchev, enveloped the visitors in a bear hug, howling "Bravo! Bravo! Bravo!" and mashing its way down the aisles to pelt the stars with carnations in a 26-minute storm of applause that included 16 curtain calls.

What with all the work involved in calling for the general election, and in officially renouncing his own peerage, Britain's Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, 61, neglected to register as a commoner, and won't be able to vote on Oct. 15.

Weddings are, so to speak, expensive propositions. In Athens, Finance Minister Constantine Mitsotakis announced that the marriage of Greece's King Constantine, 24, to Denmark's Princess Anne-Marie, 18, cost the treasury $303,000, including $183,300 spent on wedding gifts. However, an issue of 2,000,000 commemorative 30-drachma pieces will net a profit of $1,063,000, leaving the wily Greeks with $760,000 to play around with, or possibly use as a dowry for Crown Princess Irene.

At $60,000 a year, the Cleveland Browns' fullback Jimmy Brown, 28, is football's most highly paid player. However, he says in his autobiography, Off My Chest, "the more successful a Negro is, the more difficult it becomes to accept second-class citizenship." He illustrates his proposition soberingly by endorsing the racist Black Muslims. "Does the white man realize that the Black Muslim's attitude toward whites is shared by almost 99% of the Negro population? I protest prejudice, but I am a prejudiced man. The white man has forced me to be prejudiced against him. I am not one of the Muslims, yet I'm all for them. The more commotion, the better."

I'd expect to be robbed in Chicago But not in the home of the cod. So I hope that the Cabots and Lowells Will mention the matter to God. wrote Poet Ogden Nash, 62, moved to versify in the Boston Globe as part of a plea to crooks to return at least the family photos from the $7,000 worth of loot stolen from his car in Boston.

The hoods were unmoved, but oh, what a gnashing of teeth in Chicago! "We protest this routine contumely," blazed the Sun-Times, while windy citizens clogged Nash's Manhattan mailbox with missive retaliation. "I've got ashes in my hair, I'm groveling in the dust," he reassured them. "Chicago fitted the meter, but I wish I'd used something neutral--like Gomorrah."

Her economist brother, Jean, has always been the celebrated member of the family. Yet Marie Louise Monnet, 62, has her own modest fame. In 1931, after a trip to Lourdes, she founded the Independent Catholic Youth in her native Cognac, forerunner of a now-international organization to promote the faith among the bourgeoisie. Last week, while she was attending a Mass celebrated in St. Peter's by Pope Paul VI, he announced that she was the first woman selected to audit the Vatican Council. Said she: "For a moment I thought I would faint, but I pulled myself together and thanked God."

"Rugged like a Viking," said one lensman. "An extremely handsome man," raved another. "The finest profile I've ever photographed," mused a third. They were talking about Illinois' Democratic Governor Otto Kerner, 56, whom the Professional Photographers of America, as a sort of entr'acte between the Miss America contest and Nov. 3, have named "The Most Handsome Governor in America." Second, third-and fourth-place winners: Michigan's George Romney, 59, New York's Nelson Rockefeller, 56, Pennsylvania's William Scranton, 47.

Most hotels that are 60 years old would rather forget it. But Manhattan's queenly St. Regis was built in 1904 by John Jacob Astor IV, son of the Mrs. Astor who started the social numbers game with her 400, and ever since it has been a hostelry for People Who Count. Last week, 450 of them honored the old lady's diamond jubilee in the season's first charity gala, the Hearts and Diamonds Ball. Wearing some of the diamonds, Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney paid her respects in a Count Sarmi chiffon with a white mink bodice, while Serena Russell, 20, post-deb granddaughter of the Duke of Marlborough, took care of the hearts in a swirl of feathers by Scaasi.

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