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

Her memory whetted by the news that Mamie Eisenhower had retreated into the beauty-rejuvenating cloisters of Arizona's "Maine Chance" (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), Musicomedienne Beatrice Lillie, 59, mused on her own stint in the rise-at-7:30, lights-out-at-10:30 Elizabeth Arden camp: "Miss Separate Table, that was me. Everyone else was dieting. I was trying to put on some weight." Then with gusto Bea recalled: "One night some of us--and I won't say which--sneaked out the window, past the guards and rushed into Phoenix. There was a loud bar there and a very real cowboy. It was wonderful. He didn't know who I was. and all I know about him was that he was very big and kissed me good night. We got back to the ranch about 4 in the morning, and it was just like sneaking back into stir.''

In Manhattan to ballyhoo the film version of his often-belittled, sometime-banned (still taboo in Massachusetts) bestselling (more than 8,000,000 copies) novel, God's Little Acre, earthy Novelist Erskine Caldwell hopscotched between TV appearances, radio talks and press interviews. Once an oversexed tale about Georgia crackers, the tidied-up movie version will glow with the Motion Picture Association of America's seal of purity. Says onetime Georgia Cracker Caldwell: "Why not? It's a family picture.''

In a rare get-together for the public record, The Netherlands' royal family posed in Amsterdam for an informal portrait showing Prince Bernhard soundly outnumbered in the female palace. Then Princess Beatrix, 20, oldest daughter of

Queen Juliana, scampered off to visit the Western Hemisphere's Dutch territories. Moved by the overwhelming "cordiality of the people'' in The Netherlands' Antilles and Surinam, the princess, slated to become The Netherlands' third queen in a row, was gripped with a tinge of guilt. Wrote she: "How poignant is the contrast between people here and our own lack of interest."

Barely thawed out from a five-month antarctic expedition. Australian-born Explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins felt it was time to leave New York and to head for his Montrose, Pa. home. Lady Wilkins put off the new expedition, objected that Montrose was too cold and too bogged down in snow, revealed that her bearded husband, who has been shuttling between the North and South Poles since 1913. "doesn't like cold weather and never has."

Planted in front of Chicago's television cameras, Tennessee's Governor Frank Clement, 37, took some blunt battering from usually kid-gloved Interviewer Norman Ross. Asked if he enlisted in the Army in World War II to help his political career, the corn-shucking 1956 Democratic keynoter shucked no corn. "Yes. sir," he said, "I thought it would help."

As the snow turned into slush, a hint of spring tinged the air. and romance was off again, on again. Collared in mink and hatted in velvet, Cinemactress Paulette Goddard, 42, beaming on an old beau she had met in the late '30s in Branford, Conn., took as her fourth husband German-born Novelist Erich Maria (All Quiet on the Western Front) Remarque, 59. In Las Vegas, onetime Queen-for-a-day Leona Gage, 18. who got bounced from the Miss U.S.A. throne last year for being a married woman, did her own bouncing: she divorced Air Force Sergeant Gene Ennis. Now a Tropicana Hotel show girl making $200 a week, the leggy brunette got only $25 a month for support of her two children. Another airman, moon-faced Space Man Donald Farrell, 23, of The Bronx, turned out to have an ex-bride and a 4 1/2-year-old daughter. To Farrell, his feet barely steady after an imaginative seven-day excursion through space (in a grounded chamber in Texas), the revelation meant that his penpal romance with a Niagara Falls secretary was "up in the air." An expert on more earthly pleasures, bestselling Novelist Grace Metalious, 33, popped into an Alabama court, picked up a quickie divorce from husband George, three days later married her longtime friend, ex-Disk Jockey Thomas Martin, 33. Said the unblushing authoress of the unblushing Peyton Place: Martin "was the only man in my world who made me feel intensely female. A stallion type."

To British film leaders, alarmed over the advance of TV. Prince Philip brought soothing words. Said he at a dinner of the British Film Academy: "I don't think books have suffered much from magazine competition. I don't see why films, which are, after all, animated books, should suffer from television, which is simply an animated magazine." Later in an arduous week, the Prince scratched himself from a tiddlywinks joust to which he had been challenged by the Cambridge University team. He said with regret that he would have liked to lead his team, the Goons, but "unfortunately, while practicing secretly, I pulled an important muscle in the second or tiddly joint of my winking finger. Wink up. fiddle the game, and may the Goon side win."

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