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

Amidst a busy week, Citizen Harry Truman, in his favorite, folksiest role of elder politician, turned up in Chicago as the guest (and paid speaker) of Illinois' Jewish bar association. He was agreeably surprised by a premature birthday celebration, complete with cake, eleven days before he was due to turn 71. Among the congratulations, one message was especially notable, a wire from onetime Republican presidential nominee Alf London, who praised Truman's frankness and courage, predicted that "future historians . . . will rank Mr. Truman as one of our great Presidents in [the foreign affairs] field." Confessed Truman later: "Almost knocked [me] off my chair. I now wish that my good friend, Alf Landon, had got a few more votes in 1936!"

Washington newsmen and a smoky cloud of legislators, rubbing elbows at the National Press Club's annual Congressional Night, stared at a curtain and wondered who their mystery guest might be. The master of ceremonies provided some clues: he had once been a U.S. Senator, was later elected to a higher office--and he could play a piano. From behind the curtain then wafted the recognizable strains of the Missouri Waltz. Many got set to welcome, with a big huzzah, their old friend Harry Truman back into town. But the curtain rose to disclose Vice President Richard Nixon, seated at a grand piano and disguised only by a Trumanesque pair of steel-rimmed glasses.

In Manhattan, Corliss Lament, 53, left-turncoat son of the late Capitalist Thomas W. Lament, and at the least a Utopian socialist, voluntarily quit as a lecturer on philosophy at Columbia University. His return to the post hinges on the outcome of Senate contempt proceedings brought against him after he refused to tell Wisconsin's Joseph McCarthy what truck he has had with Reds.

After three weeks at Gettysburg, Mamie Eisenhower, still convalescing from her bout with flu last March (but a becoming 10 Ibs. lighter), returned to Washington, waded into a grueling social calendar, tuckered herself out and was persuaded by the White House physician to cancel all social engagements for a week.

At the International Film Festival in Cannes, where one obscure French songstress continued a Cannes tradition by stripping to the waist for photographers, the beauty most often snapped was, nonetheless, Italy's bosomy Cinemactress Sophia Loren, who popped up in one of the most undecollete creations of her low-necklined career.

Nominated by President Eisenhower as U.S. Ambassador to West Germany: Dr. James Bryant Conant, longtime (1933-53) president of Harvard and U.S. High Commissioner (ranking as an ambassador) in West Germany since 1953.

Temperamental Cinemactress Susan (Untamed) Hayward, 34, at her San Fernando Valley mansion near Hollywood, and supertemperamental Actress Diana (Pajama Tops) Barrymore, 34, on tour in Boston, had the same idea at roughly the same time. Each overdosed herself with sleeping pills, was hauled off to a hospital for a thorough stomach pumping, rest and rehabilitation. Both ladies bounced back fairly quickly. After thanking "my many friends and well-wishers for their kind wires, flowers," Susan went home; after attributing her fast recovery to "the strong Barrymore recuperative powers," Diana went back into her show. Susan would not explain why she gobbled the pills, but Diana was candid: "I only tried to calm my nerves."

On the desk of New York's Democratic Governor W. Averell Harriman landed a bill, passed by the Republican-controlled legislature, proposing to rename the state's 562-mile toll road the Governor Thomas E. Dewey Thruway. Vetoing the honor for his predecessor, Harriman explained: "The records . . . reveal no precedent for naming a [New York] state highway for an individual, no matter how renowned."*

In the heart-throbbing story of her "brief encounters" with Oscar-winning Cinemactor Marlon Brando, serialized in London's Daily Express, his fiancee, former French Model Josane Mariani-Berenger, 20, disclosed that Brando, though growing more normal daily, still has some charming eccentricities. One popped up last year when they hied themselves to her Riviera home town to show Brando to her parents. Recalled Josane: "Marlon--who hates noises--usually carries small ear plugs for train traveling. This time he'd forgotten them. So he bought a sandwich and plugged his ears with bread! He slept all the way. But the next morning, we discovered the bread had dried--and he not only couldn't get it out, but it was hurting him. I took him to a doctor."

* A precedent contrary, however, to one set in the naming of state buildings. Albany's towering administrative center is called the Governor Alfred E. Smith State Office Building.

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