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

At a shipyard in Sturgeon Bay, Wis., Mrs. Jean McCarthy, wife of Wisconsin's junior Senator, swung heftily with both arms, smashed a bottle of champagne across the bow of a new Navy vessel, the 385-ft. LST 1170. Joe McCarthy, as silent as he has been at any event in years, glowed and said: "It's Jean's day."

The heavy-lidded vamp of the silent screen, Polish-born Cinemactress Polo (Mad Love) Negri, 56, suddenly popped out of retirement in Hollywood to disclose all sorts of irons in the fire. Pola, who used to outhawk her own pressagents with whoppers about her past (e.g., she once claimed that she had been divorced from a Pope of Rome), now made big talk about her future. Items: a movie comeback this fall as a fallen woman in a German production, an autobiography in the works which "will cover my life and loves from Chaplin to Valentino--and those who came before and after." At week's end Pola, looking pert and still glamorous, was photographed after she landed in New York for a two-week visit with anonymous old friends.

Sage Bertrand Russell celebrated his 82nd birthday by bringing out his second volume of short stories, Nightmares of Eminent Persons. Among the bad dreams that Russell dreamed up were nocturnal horrors suffered by Dwight Eisenhower, Joseph Stalin and former Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

Robert Maynard Hutchins, who left the University of Chicago to underpin the Ford Foundation, made an appearance at a credit-men's convention in San Francisco and unburdened himself of some random thoughts on the lurking perils of 100% Americanism: "To hear these people [i.e., superpatriots] talk, you would think that the American way consisted of unanimous tribal self-admiration . . . There is a present danger that critics of even the mildest sort will be frightened into silence ... I sometimes think we are approaching the point where it will be impossible for one person to be seen with another person until he first gets the other person cleared with the FBI."

U.S.-born Romaine Pierce Simpson, 30, better known as the Marchioness of Milford Haven, stalked grimly out to a plane at New York's International Airport for a "mystery flight" to Mexico. Both the mystery and Romaine's marriage were soon unraveled. Two days later she was back home with a jigtime Juarez divorce from the blueblooded marquess, David Michael Mountbatten, 35, who is closely related to both Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh. It was not, however, the marquess' royal family ties which troubled Romaine; she had charged earlier that he was even more closely related (through connecting hotel suites) to eye-filling Hungarian Cinemactress Eva (A Tale of Five Women) Bartok.

Frau Lucie Maria Rommel, whose late swashbuckling husband, Germany's Field Marshal Erwin ("Desert Fox") Rommel, tried mightily to invade Egypt in 1942, invaded Egypt without firing a shot. In Cairo to help ballyhoo the world premiere of a new German movie That Was Our Rommel, Frau Lucie sat beside Egypt's President Mohammed Naguib at the showing, was also greeted cordially by Premier Gamal Nasser. Later she placed wreaths on war memorials to both Allied and Axis soldiers at El Alamein, where Rommel lost the crucial battle of the North African campaign.

The Netherlands' speed-loving Prince Bernhard hurtled along a Dutch road in his royal Lincoln. Bernhard's chauffeur sat at his side, idly watching the kilometers flit past. While trying to pass a road-hogging truck, the prince zigged when he should have zagged, wound up with the car doing a neat half rollover, followed by a ground-chewing landing on its side. The unperturbed chauffeur ceremoniously opened the door for unhurt Bernhard, who climbed out, hitchhiked to a gas station, phoned the royal garage for a fresh car.

Perennially best-dressed Mrs. Mono Williams, 57, widow of Utilitycoon Harrison Williams and chief heir to his reported $100 million, opened a flower and fruit stand on the grounds of her 60-acre Long Island estate. Planning to peddle the products of her own gardens and orchards, she saw no good reason why the rich should not grow richer. Said she: "It's not just for fun. I hope the shop will pay for itself. You don't go into business unless you plan to make money."

From Kentucky, word trickled out that Private G. (for Gerard) David Schine, whose failure to become an Army officer has stirred some talk lately, has been a full-fledged colonel all along. His spot commission (in Kentucky only) came a year ago as a result of a request from his friend Colonel Anna Friedman, whose own lofty office is Keeper of the Great Seal of Kentucky Colonels.

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