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

In Oak Ridge, Tenn., to research a new yarn with an atomic science background, prolific Novelist Pearl (The Good Earth) Buck, 65, passed on a bit of literary advice to a young reporter: "Don't worry about spelling, punctuation, paragraphs. Get your story on paper. You can always find someone to correct your grammar."

In Los Angeles, white-thatched Gossipeer Walter Winchell, onetime song-and-dancer in burlesque, grandly confided his ideas for a proposed girlie show (starring W.W.) at a Las Vegas saloon next month. "They'll have three TV cameras in front of me, simulating a newscast, and monitors all over the club so I can be seen on the screen too. I'll close that part of the show with some advance info on the stock market. Then I'll go into a soft shoe with the girls, followed by a hot mambo with one of the girls . . ." The finale: "Onstage, you'll see an exact replica of my New York Mirror prowl car with me in it. I'll go across the stage--very fast. Then 24 beautiful girls --probably in G strings--come out swinging billies like a bunch of fairies with nothing but a silver badge on their left breast, blowing police whistles."

In temporary retirement was well-traveled Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Mount Everest and the South Pole, who withdrew from a proposed lecture tour in Britain, as he put it, "to stay home with Mum and the kids"--for a year--in New Zealand. In the Hillary future: physiological endurance tests in his old freezing grounds, the Himalayas, possibly another Antarctic expedition.

Rapidly becoming Hollywood's busiest mother (she expects a fourth child in October), Singer Rosemary Clooney, wife of Actor-Director Jose Ferrer, posed happily at home with her three little obbligatos: Miguel, 3, Maria, 1 year 9 months, and Gabriel, 9 months.

On a Vermont visit from snowy Colorado, where she ranches with husband Dave, Skier Andrea Mead Lawrence, winner of two gold medals in the 1952 Winter Olympics, showed off the four reasons why she may not race any more: Cortlandt, 5, Deirdre, 2, Matthew, 3, and Leslie, 10 months.

Announcing the permanent loan of a 19th century dress, Washington's Smithsonian museum casually dropped a small footnote to American history. In its statement, the Smithsonian said that the gown once belonged to Dolley (not Dolly) Madison, wife of the nation's fourth President, justified the spelling by recent research at the University of Chicago on the James Madison papers, proving that the famed White House hostess had indeed used the "e" herself. Among references due for a change: the Encyclopaedia Britannica, which calls her Dorothy, the Encyclopedia Americana, which lists her as Dolly.

The boom-or-bust romance between scrawny Crooner Frank Sinatra and gravel-voiced Cinemactress Lauren Bacall, widow of Movie Tough Guy Humphrey Bogart, sank deep in recession. One cause of the breach (Rasped Bacall: "Do me a favor; never mention me again in the same breath with Frank Sinatra") seemed to be French Cineminx Brigitte Bardot, soon to co-star with Sinatra in a movie. With the air of a gal who can sniff publicity continents away, Brigitte suggested that Lauren didn't want her Frank to make the picture, adding brightly: "Miss Bacall is no fool. I would do the same. Sinatra and I will make interesting chemistry together."

In the Virginia Quarterly Review's short-story competition this year, the top prize went to a familiar literary name: Sandburg. Honored this time, however, was not venerable (80) Poet Carl but his youngest daughter Helga, wife of American University Assistant Professor Arthur B. Golby. for her first published story, Witch Chicken. Due for Helga: publication this week of her first novel, a folksy farm drama called The Wheel of Earth.

To Alger Hiss, center of one of the foremost trials of the century, now a $12,000-a-year corporation executive (for Manhattan's Feathercombs Inc.), came news of financial bounty: in the will of his mother, Mrs. Charles A. Hiss, who died April 3, the onetime State Department officer received one-fourth of her estimated $60,000 estate, including $750 for "winning a scholarship at Johns Hopkins University three consecutive times, thus saving the amount in tuition fees."

It started out as just another quiet evening with TV for highstrung Cinemactor Anthony (Wild Is the Wind) Franciosa, who recently served a ten-day jail sentence for bopping a press photographer, and his highstrung wife, hefty Cinemactress Shelley (Behave Yourself) Winters. But by the time the Steve Allen Show went on, police reported, the Franciosas were off on a top-of-the-lung melodrama of their own. Result: Shelley grabbed a perfume bottle, aimed well, notched a two-inch cut behind Tony's ear. Cackled one cop, after the reconciled Franciosas had tooled off to Palm Springs for a rest: "That must have been a pretty good TV show, eh?"

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