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

Dr. Alfred Kinsey, an effective advance man for his Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, talked about his favorite subject to an overflow audience of women reporters, Author-Actress Cornelia Otis Skinner (a Kinsey interviewee) and a scattering of interested males at a Women's National Press Club luncheon in Washington. Ordinarily a solemn man, Kinsey proved to be an old tease when the girls got going on questions. What age group prefers sleeping in the nude? asked a woman from Woman's Wear Daily. Kinsey restated the question to his own liking --"Should the manufacturers of clothes be seriously disturbed by nude sleeping?" --then replied that, mostly, it is women with higher educations who sleep in the raw. The mother of an eight-year-old girl asked whether she should send her child to a coeducational or a girls' school, got a snappy answer: "In other words, you want to know whether she should go to a heterosexual or a homosexual school. Frankly, we don't have enough information yet on that problem." The New York Daily News's Ruth Montgomery, looking demure under a big hat, asked whether his sensational statistics might not be influenced by the reluctance of "nice women" to talk, compared with "our sisters of the street." Kidded Kinsey: "Those are not terms a scientist uses." --

Actor Sir Laurence Olivier and his Actress-Wife Vivien Leigh, after cruising the Mediterranean with Cinemagnate Sir Alexander Korda on his 150-ton yacht Elsewhere, were back in London for another busy theater season. They began rehearsals for their new play, The Sleeping Princess (Actress Leigh's first stage role since recovering from last spring's nervous breakdown), and were photographed helping famed British Actress Helen Haye* (still going strong playing the Dowager Empress of Russia in Anastasia) blow out the candles at her 79th birthday party.

Christine Jorgensen, making the rounds as a nightclub entertainer, had a confidential word to say in Atlantic City: "When I get married it will be in Europe. An American man would think it a reflection on his masculinity to marry me. Europeans don't care about their masculinity."

Sloan Simpson, 36, New York City's onetime First Lady, came home after five social-whirling months in Europe and landed her pretty face all over Manhattan's front pages. Smiling brightly and flicking a black-gloved hand for photographers, Sloan (an ex-model) told shipboard reporters, "Let's not get into that," when asked why she had left William O'Dwyer. She is divorced from him, she explained, except in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church (she will go to Mexico to try for a church annulment). She spoke warmly about O'Dwyer and professed to be tickled about magazine stories that have pictured him as the hapless pawn of a playgirl: "Every story has a hero and a villain. I am delighted to be the villain in this case, if it'll give him the break he deserves."

Novelist James Jones, pleased by Hollywood's jo.b on his From Here to Eternity (especially the sad ending, because "people need tragedy"), was spending an industrious summer at a writers' colony near Marshall, Ill. Holed up in the second-floor bedroom of his own "bachelor house," he was already more than 400 pages along on his second novel. Publicity men wanted him at the Chicago opening of From Here to Eternity, but Jones stood fast: "I love you all, but please leave me alone. I'm living with my characters."

Oldtime Crooner Rudy ("The Vagabond Lover") Vallee, still crying "Heigh-ho, everybody" in the nightclubs, dropped into Port Arthur, Ont. for a one-night stand and hinted that he might not go on forever. At 52, he said, he was getting tired and thinking of retiring in a year or two to his Hollywood home. A reporter asked how old he felt. Sighed Rudy: "Like an old race horse regarding the ice wagon."

Resting up before going off to Bern, Switzerland, to head the U.S. Embassy. Madame Ambassador Frances E. Willis, 54, the first foreign service career woman to work her way to the top of the diplomatic pile, was pictured primly snipping rosebushes at her Redlands, Calif, home.

Wagnerian Soprano Helen Traubel, rising to the bait of $7,500, warmed up for a week's work at Chicago's Chez Paree, her debut in any such emporium of liquor and lowbrow music. "There will be no Wagner," she promised. "This will be nothing but fun . . ." Her big number: a take-off on Jimmy Durante and Eddie Jackson mangling that sweet old song Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey?

Four months after Novelist Edna Ferber called New York the filthiest city in the world and "a scab on the face of our country," Mrs. Wendell Willkie, widow of the 1940 presidential candidate, arrived from Europe with a new blast. "I think New York is the dirtiest city I've ever been in, and I love New York," said Edith Willkie. But she had the start of a solution: "I'm willing to go out with a broom and help clean up myself."

* Not to be confused with famed U.S. Actress Helen Hayes.

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