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

The gayest party girl of them all, Elsa Maxwell, 75, confided to Paris reporters something she has long brayed to everyone in earshot at her favored Manhattan watering holes: her credo for frivolous success. Chunks from the eight-lump manifesto, in its current version: "I have developed the fine art of choosing my enemies. Everyone loves truth but nobody says it except me. I firmly believe the world is my oyster. I stay away from geniuses; the men I see most often are Orson Welles, Cole Porter and Aly Khan."

Reining up for a border baggage check down Mexico way, bouncy Song-and-Dance Man Sammy Davis Jr. stood briefly in the law's firm grasp. Collared by U.S. Customs agents, Sammy was frisked to his skivvies, found toting a .22-cal. pistol. Explained he: "I'm an honorary deputy sheriff of Los Angeles County." Unimpressed by the quaint mores of the county, which allows its more than 1500 honorary deputy lawmen--many of them Hollywood types who couldn't outdraw their great-aunts--to bear arms at will, the agents turned Sheriff Sam over to local police, who double-checked, decided he could go his way and take his funny little pistol with him.

To keep America arockin' while fidgety Song Mumbler Elvis Presley croons his stuff to Army buddies instead of live mikes, sharp-eared execs at Louisville's tiny Legacy Records, Inc. were set to unveil the aging tree from which the young block was chipped: Elvis' spry grandpappy. Jesse Presley, 62. Jesse, now a Pepsi-Cola crate repairman, has already turned his crackly tenor loose on four soon-to-be-released sides of old cotton-pickin' tunes (sample: Swingin' in the Orchard). A critical admirer of the family's most agile sprout ("He is a good Christian boy, and he can do a lot better than rock 'n' roll"), Jesse stoutly declares that he isn't aiming to get ahead on another's fame: "I'm on my own and am trying to succeed on my own."

With the uncowed look of a retired town marshal sniffing rustlers in the sagebrush, horse racing's grand old man, Trainer James ("Sunny Jim") Fitzsimmons, this week celebrates his 84th birthday, shows no signs of slowing to a sedate canter. Up at 4:45 a.m. for his day at the track, Mr. Fitz still keeps two dozen thoroughbreds under his watchful eye, including Stakes Winner ($764,204 so far) Bold Ruler. At night, naturally. Fitz stays abreast of horseflesh problems the TV way: watching westerns.

After 2 1/2 years of court fights to force a passport from the State Department, Artist Rockwell Kent, 76, longtime dabbler in odd-hued causes, prepared to leave for a tour of the Soviet Union, where a studio has just finished a documentary film on his work. Still applying a rare shade of pink to his world picture, Kent seemed worried about his warlike homeland, but the U.S.S.R., he assured reporters, "desperately desires peace."

Beaming like all getout, Hoteluminary G. David Schine and his toothsome bride Hillevi, Miss Universe in 1956, embarked in Southampton on a five-day British junket. Schine, the U.S. Army's most publicized G.I. after his amateur gumshoeing for the late Joe McCarthy, could well beam. Unlike his 1953 visit with youthful Sleuth Roy Cohn, when the two sparked "Go Home" headlines for their plan of "inspecting the BBC," Schine arrived almost unnoticed, seemed oddly quiet about his Rover Boy past. Asked a reporter: Does he regret his McCarthy ties? Hedged David: "I'd rather not say."

Herself an acid-tongued footnote to British history, Virginia-born Lady Astor gaily recalled her debut as first woman seated in the Mother of Parliaments (in 1919). Escorted on her entrance by Lloyd George and A. J. Balfour--"both of whom were trembling, they were so ashamed"--Lady Astor even stirred up a critique on her big moment from a clarion-voiced observer: "Afterwards Sir Winston Churchill said I had made a very remarkable performance--but he would only speak to me in the lobby, not in the House. He said: 'When you entered, I felt you had come upon me in my bath and I'd nothing to protect myself with but the sponge.' "

At his cinematic best a shaggy lumpen proletarian helplessly meshed in the woof of modern life, Cinemillionaire Charlie Chaplin off the set could apparently out-guile even a Boston textile tycoon. According to a suit filed last week in Manhattan by a widow of a onetime business pal, Charlie was wont to have his royalties deposited at Manhattan's J. P. Morgan & Co., then transferred to a Swiss banker, who funneled the funds to a dummy corporation set up by Chaplin in currency-careless Tangier. Result: two years after Chaplin settled in Switzerland--and while the U.S. Government was vainly trying to collect more than $1,000.000 in back taxes--he was still getting money from home, as much as $70,000 in a single transaction.

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