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

While Cinemactress Rita Hay worth and her fourth husband, Crooner Dick Haymes, tooled back north from a Florida vacation to New York City in a borrowed Jaguar, a children's court judge in suburban White Plains acted to give Rita a jolting homecoming. Sicked on the case by the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the judge placed Rita's girls by earlier marriages--Rebecca, 9, and Yasmin, 4--in court custody pending a hearing on the society's charges that Rita had neglected them. Rita had left the children in the modest White Plains home of widowed Antique Dealer Dorothy Chambers, an old friend of Dick's family. Early this week Yasmin's father, Aly Khan, flew from Cinemactress Gene Tierney's side to Rita's side. From Rebecca's father, Orson Welles, whose headquarters have long been in Europe, came word that he would gladly play nanny to both children until the crisis was over. In a White Plains hotel suite, Haymes, Rita and Khan had a cozy chat. Reported a busboy who had just served them chicken sandwiches: "Everybody seemed happy." A few hours later, everybody was. Finding no evidence that Rita was a bad mother, the judge gave Rebecca and Yasmin back to her.

In West Germany, onetime (1930-32) World Heavyweight Boxing Champion Max Schmeling heard that Franz Diener, the man he beat for the German boxing crown in 1928, had landed in a Soviet-zone jail. Diener's crime: while chief butcher in an East German sausage factory, he got caught passing out state-owned Bratwurst to hungry friends. Schmeling wrote to East Germany's Puppet President Wilhelm Pieck, got Diener pardoned by the Russians. Last week, after refusing a job as East Germany's commissar of boxing, Franz Diener fled to West Berlin and gratefully awaited a reunion with Old Opponent Schmeling.

Just to prove that superior acting ability can be passed off as mere frosting on the cheesecake, Actress Audrey Hepburn, who won this year's Hollywood Oscar for her starring role in Roman Holiday and the top "Tony" award for her performance in the Broadway hit Ondine, expertly struck a pose for photographers to help ballyhoo her forthcoming movie, Sabrina.

A visitor to Greenville, Miss., Novelist Alan Paton, whose Cry, the Beloved Country was an eloquent condemnation of South Africa's white-supremacy notions, eyed Southern U.S. race relations. Said Briton Paton: "In Mississippi I find a determination to provide equal but separate facilities [for whites and Negroes]. The time has come when the people of the South are willing to pay more for their prejudices than before."

On Formosa, the Chinese Nationalist government was reported ready to grant a passport to Wu Hsiu-huang, 16, son of the island's former governor, Dr. K. C. Wu, who now lives in vociferous exile in Evanston, Ill. It was "very good news, indeed" to Dr. Wu, one of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's most bitter non-Communist critics, who recently accused Chiang of trying to silence him by holding young Wu as hostage.

Glamorous added attractions of Manhattan's annual "April in Paris" ball at the Waldorf (for Franco-American chari ties) were suntanned Mrs. John F. Kennedy, wife of Massachusetts' junior Senator, Radio-TV Chitchatter Sloan Simpson, estranged wife of ex-Ambassador to Mexico William O'Dwyer, and comely Actress Celeste (The King and 7) Holm. Amateur Mannequins Kennedy and Simpson modeled dazzling new Paris gowns, while Actress Holm warbled a song.

Actress Elsa Lanchester, playing a nightclub date at Manhattan's Blue Angel, shuddered to recall some of her movie roles. "I was a loathsome bearded lady in The Big Top, a resurrected corpse in The Bride of Frankenstein, and I'll play the wicked stepmother in Cinderella," said Elsa in a frightened voice. "I've played so many repulsive characters that I sometimes have to stop and check to make sure that I have arms and legs and am quite normally human."

Admiral Robert B. Carney, Chief of Naval Operations, took a flyer into the realm of psychological warfare and gave a Chicago audience his prescription for U.S. relations with oppressed millions behind the Iron Curtain. As authors of the greatest of all revolutions, Carney suggested, Americans are singularly well equipped to preach revolt. Asked the admiral: "Why can't we be the salesmen of human revolt, 'which demonstratively has produced freedom for the individual and . . . standards of life heretofore unknown. . . ?"

Among the honorable portraits of 13 former mayors of the Japanese city of Moji (pop. 110,000) which hang in the office of Municipal Assembly President Kiichi Suematsu, the likeness of an Occidental dignitary was placed. It was the celebrated nude calendar photograph (3 ft. by 2 ft.) of a recent visitor to Japan, Cinemactress Marilyn Monroe. Explained Assembly President Suematsu, whose idea it was to round out his gallery: "The picture should serve to rejuvenate our municipal assemblymen."

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