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

Late last year a liveried chauffeur began poking around the French Riviera, seeking a country mansion to suit the tastes of his employer, an anonymous Paris industrialist. Through a Paris real estate office, he finally negotiated the purchase of a stately, green-shuttered pink villa. Price for the estate, which sprawls near the Aga Khan's Cannes hideaway: $90,000. The tipoff that the new owner was no ordinary industrialist came last November, when the locals learned that he had ordered a new lodge built on the grounds especially to house his platoon of bodyguards. Last week the mysterious Parisian's neighbors learned his identity: ailing Maurice Thorez, France's high-living No. 1 Communist, a dedicated proletarian whose exclusive industry aims at delivering France into the Kremlin's power.

Pioneering as the first American jazz bandleader ever to go jamming around Israel, drum-busting Vibraharpist Lionel Hampton tortured his tom-toms in Tel Aviv, had frenetic listeners in the aisles stomping out the Horn, Israel's most popular folk dance. After one concert, during which some 100 cops hooked arms to bar gate-crashers from the hall, rhythm-happy Hampton laid down his drumsticks and gasped: "Man, in a country that's younger than jazz itself, these Israeli cats have sure growed fast!"

Before setting off on a 40,000-mile tour of the Far East, Helen Keller, 74, whose senses have steadily quickened ever since she was struck blind, deaf and dumb in childhood, was guest of honor at a farewell banquet in Manhattan, where she received through her fingers the words of a greeting from Eleanor Roosevelt. In the Orient, Dr. Keller will plug for expanded facilities for the physically handicapped.

Novelist James T. Farrell disclosed in Florida, where he is loafing and avoiding typewriters, that he has at last decided to sell the movie rights to his American hero, boozy, wench-chasing Studs Lonigan. Said he: "I wrote Studs when I was 25, and I've held off selling him for another 25 years. But the movies have now grown up enough to handle a big mischievous boy like Studs."

At the annual March of Dimes fashion show in Manhattan, well-known ladies from all walks of U.S. life dressed them selves in newly designed getups, paraded about the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria to help raise money for a final victory over polio. Among the models were austerely beautiful Mrs. William Randolph Hearst Jr. (who displayed what Couturier Charles James called "the highest bust line in 125 years"), socially registered Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, TV Star Margaret Truman, and split-bustled sometime Stripteaser-Novelist Gypsy Rose Lee. Bubbled Gypsy: "I don't worry about shoes. When they start looking at my shoes, I'll retire."

Spain's great master El Greco--at the height of his powers in the 1590s--painted his famous Piet`a, a study of Mary receiving the dead Christ at the foot of the Cross. Last week, after the Piet`a had languished for 15 years in a Manhattan warehouse, a new owner was announced. The man whose $300,000 was enough: Greek-born U.S. Shipping Magnate Stavros Niarchos, 45, who lent the Piet`a indefinitely to Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum. Niarchos explained his generosity: "Having a painting like that in your own home creates some problems. It's so big that you would have to build a room around it."

The New York State Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a $1,000,000 libel suit against onetime Communist courier Whittaker Chambers, author of the best-selling expose of domestic Reds, Witness. The complainant: U.S. Artist Willy Pogany, whom Chambers erroneously described as the brother of Joseph Pogany, once (until Stalin liquidated him) Communist Hungary's puppet Commissar of War. A lower court had found that Chambers, in his mistaken identification, had not maliciously implied that Willy was closely associated with "a Communist leader and spy."

The British government reported that Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in June 1953 was quite economical. Expenses for the pomp and circumstance totaled $3,376,800--$235,735 less than its advance estimate. But the bargain performance was still Britain's most costly of modern times: King George VI's coronation in 1937 cost $1,980,000, George V's, 26 years earlier, a mere $897,250.

After her estranged husband, Dr. Lewis Morrill Jr., had invoked California's community property law in forthright manly fashion, voluptuous Cinemactress Rhonda Fleming, 31, moved out of their Hollywood home and into a hotel. Rhonda's reason: "He claimed he owned half the bed and broke down the boudoir door."

On a San Francisco street corner, Newsboy Chester Alan Arthur III, 53, balding grandson and namesake of the 21st President of the U.S., was busily peddling his papers as usual. Explaining that he is working on a biography of Grandpa, Chester III added thoughtfully: "In any other line of work, I would be forced to carry home . . . worries and responsibilities."

Britain's garrulous Lady Astor arrived in Washington and, as is her custom, began laying down a barrage of epigrams, some of which fell upon Washington Star Gossipist Betty Beale. Sample of Virginia-born Nancy Astor's uncoupled train of thought: "The only thing I like about rich people is their money* . . . Anybody can die for their country: people should live for their country . . . My vigor, vitality and cheek repel me. I am the kind of a woman I would run from."

*An epigram not to be confused with the one coined by Ernest Hemingway when the late F. Scott Fitzgerald enviously pointed out to him that "the rich are very different from you and me." Hemingway's reply: "Yes, they have more money."

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