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

Before she starred on the Philco Playhouse (CBS-TV), in a tailor-made drama called Run, Girl, Run, Lee Ann Meriwether, 19, better known as Miss America of 1955, got some encouragement from two previous titleholders, Yolande Betbeze ('51) and Jean Bartel ('43). Asked why so few of her predecessors had made the grade as successful actresses, Lee Ann had a blandly optimistic answer. "A lot of the girls haven't wanted it," purred she.

"They're just content to settle down as housewives." Japan's Crown Prince Alcihrro turned 21, enjoyed a rare reunion with his family (court protocol requires that crown princes grow up virtual strangers to their parents), then was off for a round of tea parties in his honor. Sobersided Akihito unbent enough to show the whimsy lurking beneath his royal aloofness. Mindful of perennial rumors that his engagement will be announced momentarily, the prince slyly eyed a school friend and asked: "Don't you think it's a bit too early for me to be tied down with a wife?" Onetime U.S. Vice Viceroy Charles ("Lucky") Luciano went to Rome to plead with bureaucrats for a cancellation of the curfew order that keeps him holed up in his Naples apartment from dusk to dawn (TIME, Nov. 29). After cooling his heels in a hall for five hours, Lucky had a ten-minute audience with Interior Ministry officials. He came out hopping mad; the bureaucrats had not let him speak, instead stared at him as if he were a malevolent curiosity. "I don't want to stay in this country any more," growled Luciano, who was sprung from Sing Sing and deported in 1946. "I don't feel like an Italian. I want to go somewhere where I'd be left in peace--even in Soviet Russia, if they want me." At week's end Lucky Luciano had neither a decision on his appeal nor any bid from the Russians to join the party.

Two lions of British letters, grand-mannered poetess Dame Edith (Fac,ade) Sitwell, 67, and her ailing author brother Sir Osbert (Wreck at Tidesend) Sitwell, 62, ensconced in a Manhattan hotel for the Christmas holidays, reminisced about their past troubles with readers. Sir Osbert, who once listed his recreations as "listening to the sound of his own voice, not receiving letters and not answering them," recalled a frustrating incident on a train: "I saw a lady reading one of my books. Reaching across from my seat, I tapped the volume and told her, 'I am the author. Would you care for my autograph?' She fixed a frozen eye on me, then raised the book so as to obscure me. I have often wondered about her behavior." Dame Edith chimed in coolly: "I have often mused that the lady suspected you, Osbert, of having nefarious motives." Bullish Tenor Mario Lanza, who recently played a real-life role (on the Chrysler Corp.-sponsored Shower of Stars, CBS-TV) as a singer so weakened by dieting that his recorded voice had to be dubbed in for his own (TIME, Oct. 11), landed a rather controversial movie role.

Lanza, who sang for newsmen soon after his TV fiasco to prove that his thunderous throat had lost none of its volume, was signed by Warner Bros, to star in the screen version of James M. Cain's novel Serenade. In the film, to be shot early next year, Mario will portray an opera star whose voice suddenly deserts him, then briefly returns to him in Mexico as he leads a more manly life.

David C. (for Curtis) Stephenson, 62, onetime Grand Dragon of Indiana's Ku Klux Klan, who used to regard the state as his own feudal barony, won his freedom from the state parole board. He had spent nearly three decades in prison, where he languished amidst delusions of persecution and grandeur, for committing one of the most sensational sadistic murders of the '20s. In 1925, he forced a state government clerk named Madge Oberholtzer to board a train with him and, while his bodyguards stood by, brutally ravished her in a lower berth. After they got off the train, Madge took poison. She died 29 days later--mostly because Grand Dragon Stephenson, instead of getting the medical aid she begged for, held her prisoner for hours more. (Boasted he to a henchman: "This takes guts to do this, Gentry. She is dying.") Last week. Convict Stephenson, summoned to hear the decision, got his second chance (he was paroled in 1950, hauled back to prison shortly for lamming to Minnesota). Mumbled the Grand Dragon, long shorn of power, women, and his purple and gold vestments: "Thank you very much."

In Las Vegas, Nev., Actor John Barrymore Jr., 22, in an escapade reminiscent of some his madcap father used to pull, was nabbed for reckless driving while whooping it up on his second wedding anniversary. He gave the cops some grandiloquent lip, was promptly tossed into jail, let out shortly on $300 bail, next day pleaded innocent to the rap.

With his glamorous wife Jacqueline at his side, Massachusetts' Democratic Senator John F. Kennedy, 36, borne on a stretcher, was wheeled from a Manhattan hospital, then flown to Palm Beach, Fla.

Operated on last October for spinal injuries he got in World War II when a Japanese destroyer sliced his Navy PT boat in two, Kennedy will be laid up for several more months.

Warming his old bones in the Florida sunshine, Connie Mack, grandest of baseball's patriarchs, decided, after celebrating several past birthdays on Dec. 22, that he had occasionally been hazy about the exact hour of his birth. "I was really born on the 23rd," said he. His family then cooperated in helping him turn 92 on that day. Asked to pass on a gem of wisdom to his juniors, Mack cogitated briefly, then in his best oracular manner rumbled : "People are living too fast."

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