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

Interviewed on CBS's Person to Person, grand old (75) Actress Ethel Barrymore, whose autobiography, Memories, is a bestseller, dredged up an offbeat memory of Calvin Coolidge, shed possible light on why Silent Cal customarily displayed all the spontaneous gaiety of a Vermont blizzard. Leaving the White House after a unilateral chat with Coolidge, Actress Barrymore, in stitches from laughter, was confronted by perplexed newsmen wondering what was so funny. Recalled Ethel: "And I said. 'Something the President just said.' And they all fell flat on their faces ... He really had made me laugh very, very much. I think he had an enormous humor that he sort of hid from people. In fact, he said to me, 'I think the American public wants a solemn ass as a President. And I think I'll go along with them.' "

Humming through Georgia one night in his brand-new Oldsmobile, Georgia's ex-Governor Herman Talmadge, on his way home from a rousing speech to some farmers, ran into one of his state's worst rural problems. Two stray mules suddenly loomed up before his car on the road. "I hit one and turned over," recalled Talmadge. "It killed the mule. I'm just a little bruised." His car was a total wreck. Though his victim was out of the harness for good, Talmadge was soon fitted for one by doctors: X-ray photos showed that he had a cracked rib.

On the breezy deck of the liner Queen Elizabeth, just before they sailed for Europe, Trumpeter James Caesar Petrillo, loud-tooting czar of the A.F.L. musicians, shot the breeze with one of his most distinguished rank-and-filers, Violin Virtuoso Yehudi Menuhin. Subject oft their chat: the merits of forming a United Nations orchestra. Petrillo was heading for an international labor powwow in Vienna; Menuhin, between concerts in Europe, could get in some hot licks on a forthcoming book about his recent odyssey. Tentative title: Around the World on a G-String.

At Britain's Ascot Heath track, two pretty equestriennes, Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret, staged an impromptu three-furlong horse race. Neck and neck most of the way, they galloped abreast into the stretch, where Margaret pushed her mount ahead to win by three lengths. Later, the two royal ladies still had horses on their minds. They turned up in West Norfolk to watch a horsy event, strolled to the stands with the care free air of schoolgirls on a holiday.

A onetime literary, sometimes sanguinary critic for London's News Chronicle, British Wit Stephen (Gamesmanship} Potter disclosed, in the New York Times, the Borgian tactics of his former trade in a piece called "The Art of Reviewmanship." Essence of the art: "How to be one up on the author without actually tampering with the text." In ex-Critic Potter's sardonic view, the problem boils down to showing that "you yourself . . . should have written the book, if you had the time, and since you hadn't, you are glad that someone has. although it is obvious that it might have been done better." In reviewing nonfiction written by a specialist. Potter advises: "If all else fails [find] at least two arguably misplaced punctuation marks, then say . . . 'If, as we hope, there is to be a second edition, certain small errors and inconsistencies can be put right.'" Novels pose a knottier problem: "[It] may even entail actual reading of the first and last chapters."

In an all-Republican love feast, Delaware's Governor J. (for James) Caleb Boggs named amateur Poetess Virginia Knight, bride of California's Governor Goodwin J. ("Goody") Knight, as an honorary poet laureate of Delaware. The work especially appealing to Boggs's eye was a two-stanza poem, dashed off by Virginia last week in Washington, where her husband was attending the governors' conference (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS) with President Eisenhower. Title: The President Smiled at Me. Excerpts: "The President smiled at me/ And every fiber of emotion swelled within my soul . . ./ So deep was my humility . . ./ When the President smiled at me."

Aging Hungarian Temptress (turned Manhattan jeweler) Jolie Gabor sadly announced the disengagement of her daughter, heartbreaking Cinemactress Zsa Zsa Gabor, from heartbreaking Dominican Playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, freshly disengaged from his fourth wife, Five and Dime Heiress Barbara Hutton. In tragic tones, Mama Gabor explained: "In Paris now they are having their last farewell. She can't marry Rubi, the darling boy, because he's so jealous." Then Mama grew more plausible: "Zsa Zsa will be a very big shot in Hollywood and in television. She would have to give that up to marry Rubi." Earlier in the week, Zsa Zsa (exwife of Turkish Bureaucrat Burhan Beige. Hotelman Conrad Hilton and Cinemactor George Sanders) confided to a New York Post gossipist: "None of my ex-husbands ever married again. After they've married me, they've had it!"

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