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

Due for the full Washington treatment this week is Spain's handsome, unmarried Prince Juan Carlos, 20, in on an unofficial visit for five days of capital sights, parties and interviews. Even the hostess with the mostes', peripatetic Party Giver Perle Mesta, gets her chance (for one hour) at the young prince, rumored to be Dictator Francisco Franco's choice for the Spanish throne. Said Perle: "I'm going to have a combination tea and cocktail hour. What I've planned to do is have the prince meet . . . some of the Republicans and Democrats here in Washington. This is what I thought the prince might like to do." Also on the schedule: peeks at West Point, Annapolis and Manhattan.

To celebrate the opening of the rebuilt, 1,401-seat Lunt-Fontanne Theatre--first legitimate playhouse addition to Broadway in 31 years--Actress Helen Hayes, who has a theater named for her right across 46th Street, joined hands with Veteran Troupers Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne under the marquee, presented them with sisterly kisses and a gushing essay in metamorphosis: "This commemorates the moment when the two most beautiful people in the world become the most beautiful theater in the world." Appropriately, the Lunts open the theater dubbed in their honor this week with a play called The Visit--their 37th Broadway production together since 1924.

It was just like old times down South for onetime Playgirl Patricia ("Honeychile") Wilder, now the wife of Prince Alexander Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfuerst and proprietress of an Austrian resort hotel. On a recent safari to Italian Somaliland, it seems, Honeychile bought herself a slave girl. "I'm from Georgia, you know, in the Deep South, and we used to have slaves there," explained Honeychile. "The sweet little girl was only 16, and her father wanted to sell her to some old man. I just jumped into the affair and outbid the other buyer." But Honeychile still has one problem: how to get her new possession into Austria.

With advance bookings of $1,400,000 and ticket mongers taking orders for 1960, the most ballyhooed play of the year, My Fair Lady, opened in London for what looked like a long, long run. Headed by the same principals (Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews, Stanley Holloway) who starred in it on Broadway, Lady captivated most of the city's captious critics (said the Times: "A musical comedy of the first water"), who often delight in panning U.S. productions. Afterward, temperamental, triumphant Actor Harrison, escorted by Cinemactress Wife Kay Kendall, gamely offered a limp hand to a wellwisher.

Hollywood Restaurateur Mike Romanoff, the "Prince" of modern phonies, who has kept his origins and his early immigration run-ins with the U.S. suitably mixed up, turned drably legitimate. By voice vote, the U.S. Senate passed a bill declaring him a permanent U.S. resident as of December 1932. Said Mike: "I've lost my title. I feel sort of naked before mine enemies."

Lecturing in Arizona, Novelist Erskine Caldwell set up his own bullyboy definition of literature, then admitted that he did not measure up: "Literature implies a graceful treading along a prescribed course and a conformity to the sensibilities of prejudiced minds. I am not quiet-spoken, and I do not have a velvet touch. I like to hammer, hammer, hammer, and make all the noise I can."

Oldtime Cinemactress Corinne Griffith, 58, in her heyday the eye-filling "orchid lady of the screen," revealed that the bloom was off her 22-year marriage to garrulous George Preston Marshall, onetime Washington laundryman and owner of the Redskins pro football team. Corinne, a West Coast realtor, will file for divorce, told a reporter: "There is no marital bliss in being 3,000 miles apart. And as hard as I tried, I just couldn't learn to play football." Promoter Marshall, for once, had no comment.

Minus a pesky gall bladder, ex-President Herbert Hoover, 83, strode out of Manhattan's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center two weeks after his operation, pronounced himself well and ready for work in another two weeks. Hoover, who was awarded an honorary degree (his 84th) from the State University of New York while in the hospital, had some cheery advice on operations for the elderly: "Go to a good hospital and have it over with. It's not as bad as it used to be. When you get out of a hospital in two weeks, it's a testimonial to the doctors."

Despite censorship by an overzealous P.I.O., word leaked out of some of hip-flipping Crooner Elvis Presley's activities at Fort Hood, Texas. He has advanced to acting assistant squad leader, donated new furniture to the company recreation hall, and according to a fellow trainee, "when he's free at night he goes to the telephone center and makes calls. On weekends the place is flooded with girls, and they drive him around the post."

Poet Ezra Pound, released from a Washington, D.C. mental hospital, paid a friendly visit to North Dakota's aged (79), ailing Representative Usher Burdick, who last year asked in Congress for a review of the poet's case. Spry Ezra did his best to cheer up the Congressman with a 75-minute discourse on everything from American Presidents (Herbert Hoover: "Any man can make errors in his youth"; Franklin D. Roosevelt: "He was a fool"); to the well-documented charges that Pound made treasonable broadcasts from Italy during World War II ("Damned lies--I never told the troops not to fight"). Unperturbed by the word flow, Burdick had admitted earlier that he had never read any of Pound's works: "I like things that are clear."

Flying into London for a two-week concert tour, robust Singer Ella Fitzgerald ran afoul of tight-lipped British customs officials, who held up Ella and her eleven-man troupe for almost two hours on a luggage search (object of the hunt: unspecified contraband), cut open toothpaste tubes, analyzed a bottle of vitamin pills belonging to Bassist Ray Brown, tried to probe the large (225 Ibs.) person of Songstress Fitzgerald. Furious, Ella shouted: "I've been a million places but never saw anything like this!", later calmed down over the reaction of her first audience, which yowled for encores, went home only when Pianist Oscar Peterson, in desperation, played God Save the Queen.

Durable Boulevardier Maurice Chevalier, 69, confessed that he did not understand the younger generation, frowned especially at sad-eyed, bedroomy Novelist Franchise Sagan: "I do not follow that kind of mentality. I cannot understand how it is to be young, in good health, to have talent and money, to be attractive--if with these five blessings you are unhappy, then what do you want? The only thing left is to commit suicide!"

To the nation's best-known bench warmer, Bernard Baruch, 87, came the ultimate reward: another bench of his own, in front of a new library at Manhattan's City College, presented by his class of 1889.

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