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

Remembering that

149 is the school for me,

Drives away all adversity.

Steady and true

We'll be to you,

Cinemactor Danny Kaye returned to his Brooklyn alma mater, P.S. 149, where he demonstrated the irresistible hold he used to have on coeds, and recalled that it was in a school minstrel show that he first appeared on the stage and made a hit--playing a small seed in a large slice of watermelon.

In her vacation villa in Switzerland, Princess Grace of Monaco observed that "marriage is improving me. I am growing up. We hope to have a son" so that Princess Caroline, seven months, "won't have the problem of being heiress to the throne," but can "grow up to be anything she likes--even an actress.'' Vowed Grace: "Sooner or later those rumors about my pregnancy are going to be true."

In London, the Daily Sketch reported that Princess Margaret would marry a faithful escort and bachelor-in-waiting, Billy Wallace, British-born stepson of U.S. Author Herbert Agar and heir to an iron-and-coal fortune. But Billy and Buckingham Palace denied the report. Meanwhile, down in Venezuela, a faithful escort of yesteryear, R.A.F. Group Captain Peter Townsend, was surprised by a photographer while at breakfast aboard a Japanese freighter in the port of La Guaira. After tossing a plateful of fried eggs and chips, rolls and jelly at the man, Townsend recovering his aplomb, said, tightlipped: "I won't say anything about the royal family."

Arranging "an intimate party for some chums," Showman Mike Todd hired Madison Square Garden for the night of Oct. 17 to commemorate the first anniversary of the opening of his movie, Around the World in 80 Days. Arriving from such distant points as England, France and Venezuela, some 18,000 intimate chums will gather to help Mike celebrate.

Reduced to agreement by a "most persuasive" letter from Amateur Painter Dwight D. Eisenhower, Amateur Painter Winston Churchill will permit 30 of his paintings (landscapes, seascapes, still lifes, interiors of famed houses) to be shown publicly early next year in a tour of U.S. cities for his first one-man show after 35 years at his favorite pastime.

The Ozark pixy in Harry S. Truman got the better of him when he surprised Stanley Woodward, his old chief of protocol at the State Department, by meeting him aboard the Ille de France on Woodward's return from Europe and playfully having an official misinform him that his passport had been canceled. After the laughter (mostly Harry's) had subsided, Truman continued his week's visit in Manhattan at a nostalgic, noon-to-twilight reunion luncheon (shrimps, lobster, steak) of members and staff of the Senate's World War II committee to investigate the national defense program, which Senator Truman headed--straight to the White House.

In "the most wonderful week I have ever spent," Partygoer Elsa Maxwell, 74, submitted a rose-colored report from Venice, where "all class snobbishness is removed--the doorman at the hotel, the gondoliers, the bellboys, maids, duchesses, princesses, they are all the same: kind, sweet, delightful." So charged did she feel in the early hours of one of her own parties that, with large numbers of titled internationals hovering in the background and Soprano Maria Callas (a shapely unoperatic bathing beauty by day) beside her humming Stormy Weather, Elsa banged away at the piano, blew the saxophone, valiantly beat the drums--admittedly out of beat with the rest of the band.

Back in Moscow after several strenuous days doing Tashkent, globe-trotting Eleanor Roosevelt, 72, spent an afternoon in bed with an upset stomach, dauntlessly rose in the evening for dinner at the Indian embassy.

Indignantly denying an insinuation that she is 83, Dancer Ruth St. Denis, who will give a series of dance recitals in Manhattan this week, threw a diaphanous lemon-yellow chiffon robe about her once-famed figure, went into a couple of emotive poses (contrition, supplication), announced: "I am 79."

Pretty, adventure-seeking Sandra Ferry Rockefeller, 21, daughter of John D. Rockefeller III, gave the other side of the story, plaintively disclosed that it is "boring and artificial" to be rich, "more fun being a rich little poor girl than a poor little rich girl." Sandra reached her conclusion after a summer vacation hiking around England, Scotland and Wales on a tight budget with a rucksack on her back, stopping at 70-c--a-night youth hostels that "had just cold water and a wooden tub, and some had just one faucet, so that we had to wait outside in the rain for our turn to get washed." Gushed Sandra: "It was great."

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