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

Dominican Playboy Porfirio ("I just try to make women happy") Rubirosa, 47, seemed afflicted by true love. In his legal partnerships so far, Rubirosa has always poorly concealed the practical methods that leavened his romantic madness.

In his previous altar junkets he got: the boss's daughter (No. i was Flor de Oro Trujillo, golden flower of the Dominican dictator), glamour and oodles of connections (No. 2 was French Cinemactress Danielle Darrieux), and the good life (No. 3 and No. 4: Heiresses Doris Duke and Barbara Hutton). No. s-to-be can give him none of these things, but moonstruck Rubirosa, aching to marry her "probably within one month," husked that his fiancee, fast-rising Paris Actress Odile (Fabien) Rodin, 19,* is "pretty, intelligent, gracious and good."

Heckled by creditors, Greece's hard-pressed (at $250,000 a year) King Paul was voted a sympathetic raise to a $383,333 annual stipend. Then, however, he learned that some parliamentary Deputies had opposed the increase. He promptly turned it down, proudly vowed to cut expenses by making "radical changes in palace life."

The music world's most talented and tempestuous diva, Manhattan-born Soprano Maria Meneghini Callas, winged from Italy to touch native soil for the first time since she held eight outnumbered process servers to a draw in a Chicago Civic Opera House fracas (TIME, Nov. 21). Sued for $300,000 by a Manhattan attorney who keeps on claiming that she owes him 10% of her earnings since he launched her in 1947 (when she scaled almost 200 Ibs.), slim (5 ft. 7 in., 132 Ibs.) Maria will make her Metropolitan Opera debut late this month. No process servers greeted her at New York's Idlewild Airport, and Prima Donna Callas fell happily into the arms of her papa, a Bronx pharmacist.

As the fog began closing in, Britain embarked on an autumn grousing season, picked as its first target a member of the royal family. The victim: bonnie Prince Charles, 7, fresh back in Buckingham Palace after a long Scottish holiday. The question, quickly debated by irritable newspaper readers: Assuming that Charles has a brow, is it high, middle or low? Noting that on his return "the prince's hair was even closer to his eyebrows than usual," London's more or less crewcut Daily Express pressed the attack with a monumental grouse: "Not one photograph of him has ever revealed his forehead!" The trail led to an elegant tonsorial emporium called Trumper's, which fortnightly dispatches a barber named Crisp to the palace to shear Charles (price of the haircut: 62-c-). What manner of brow lurks beneath the Prince's plunging forelock? "We never," announced Trumper's aloofly, "discuss the heir's hair."

Into the White House, amidst a week roiling with campaign screamings and baseball meemies, strolled serene highness in the persons of young-jowled Prince Rainier and Princess Grace of Monaco. All tokens pointed to continued good relations between the U.S. and the vestpocket principality, as President Eisenhower and the royal couple chatted easily of places they've all visited and people they've known--and fishing. Rummaging in his desk drawer for a gift for Rainier, Ike pulled out a velvet-swathed box, then suddenly changed his mind and instead handed the Prince a handsome leathercovered box with a "fishing lighter" for cigarettes. After their 25-minute social call, Monaco's rulers moved on to a press conference in the office of Press Secretary James Hagerty. Although eligible to vote in the presidential elections, Grace declined to say whether she is a Democrat (her millionaire papa, John B. Kelly Sr., is a big-wheel Democrat in Philadelphia) or for whom she would vote; in fact, she doubted that she would vote for anyone because of "my marriage to the head of a foreign state." Smiled the Prince: "She's a Monagasque." After they limousined away, the White Housers, sighing over the afternoon's dash of glamour, went back to work.

Back at his Pentagon desk for the first time since his prostate operation, jovial Defense Secretary Charles E. Wilson sorted through a pile of well-wishers' messages, waved one that especially tickled him: "Dear Sir: I wouldn't vote Republican for less than $100,000 . . . but I like you and hope you get well soon. [Signed] A Democrat." "Engine Charlie" later allowed that he was feeling fine and drew guffaws from reporters by boomeranging a bit of Democratic drollery about the health issue. "I might flippantly say," quipped Wilson, "that I'm qualified now to run for some kind of a high office." In a pronouncement recorded for Voice of America broadcasts, British Prophet Arnold (A Study of History) Toynbee admonished his listeners: "Is mankind going to rid itself of two of its three traditional scourges--war and pestilence--only to be done to death by the third scourge, famine? Surely we are not going to be so stupid as that!" With no more war and everybody living longer, however, Toynbee foresaw no way for the human race to avoid wholesale starvation unless it faces "the problem of limiting the birth rate." This could be done, said he, by persuading or compelling parents to limit the size of their broods. It would be necessary, of course, added Toynbee, to persuade some people to change "some of the tenets of their ancestral religion . . . Man's new religion may hardly be recognizable."

After having graced most lists of the world's best-dressed women ever since she became a best-dressed duchess (in 1937), the redoubtable Duchess of Windsor abruptly slapped the hands of the arbiters who have long applauded her. Snapped she: "How could such a list be anything but phony, when most of the judges seldom see me or the other people they are voting for?"

Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker printed a translation of a poem composed to extol his war in Indo-China by Viet Nam's spaghetti-bearded Red Boss Ho Chi Minh. In one stanza Ho seemed to allow that sometimes he lounged back in headquarters, boozing it up while his boys were out sniping at the French: "Leisure after work/on army affairs; autumn wind/ autumn rain and autumn cold/ Chills; then one hears/the sound of flutes/coming through the hills;/guerrillas have returned/and I rejoice that wine enough/ is left for them."

Manhattan gossipists worked hard to fill the gaps made in their columns by the departure for Hollywood of robustious (40-18-35 1/2) Actress Jayne (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?) Mansfield. With a truffle hound's nose for publicity, Jayne quickly set filmland agog by flapping her charms at anyone who could rush her into print or picture. Lunching with the New York Herald Tribune's Hollywood Legman Joe Hyams, Jayne, bubbling over her first film stardom ("Everybody calls me Miss Mansfield") in a movie to be released under the titillating title of The Girl Can't Help It, modestly explained what the "It" stands for: "Sex appeal, what else? This girl I play has the most fabulous body in the world, but she's unaware of her sex appeal. All she wants to be is a wife and mother, but sex keeps getting in the way. She's like me, you might say." Collaring a local United Pressman, she crowed for quotation: "They're not hiding too much of me. Just enough so people can hear the dialogue." However, Jayne reserved her most intimate confidence--about her current flame, protein-packed Mickey ("Mr. Universe") Har-gitay--for Columnist Sidney Skolsky: "Mickey has a 52-inch chest expansion and I measure over 40 inches--and we both have short arms. All this makes dancing difficult."

*No kin to famed French Sculptor Auguste Rodin, Odile changed her surname from Berard.

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