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

Acidulous Society Author Cleveland (The Proper Bostonians, The Last Resorts) Amory, 38, scudded into Manhattan after a voyage from England, licking psychic wounds that he picked up in a five-month running battle of wills with the redoubtable Duchess of Windsor. Hostilities loomed the very moment the duchess hired Amory to carry on the ghosting of her autobiography, a meandering treatise on which three years had already been spent. Amory summed it up:

'You can't make the Duchess of Windsor into Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm." The duchess, lamented Ghost Amory, tried to impose worrisome conditions of servitude upon him. He was supposed to prove that 1) B. (for Bessie) Wallis Warfield was born "on the right side of the tracks" in Baltimore, 2) she and the duke are "happy and busy people," 3) Britain's royal family and common folks treated her "very meanly" in disallowing her the title of Her Royal Highness. Said Amory: "I told the duchess I didn't mind omitting facts, but . . . I wouldn't distort them. She wanted . . . a soap opera . . ."

While Amory was speaking his piece in Manhattan, the duke's secretary in London issued a stiff-upper-lipped statement: "Mr. Cleveland Amory . . . has now given all the assistance the duchess felt was of value, and his employment has therefore been terminated." Next day, when Amory's lament was gleefully spread by London's anti-Wally press, the duke's secretary announced less politely: "The Duchess of Windsor wishes it to be known that it was on the unanimous recommendation of the three publishers of her memoirs--namely [New York's] David McKay Co., McCall's Magazine and [London's] Sunday Express--that Mr. Amory's employment was terminated." With Amory's unfinished 300-page manuscript thus brushed aside as "unsatisfactory" hack work, a brand-new ghost was hastily materialized. Starry-eyed with zest for his task, McKay Co.'s Editor Kenneth Rawson exulted: "I have found the duchess filled with desire to tell the truth!"

Upon docking in Manhattan on another leg of the honeymoon following a quasi-medieval wedding in Venice (TIME, Oct. 3), a Mexico City Volkswagen salesman, known better to the international set as empireless Prince Alfonso Maximilian Hohenlohe-Langenburg, 31, took a camera and delicately lifted the skirt hem of his voluptuous bride, Princess Virginia Ira Furstenberg, 15, to make a different kind of cheesecake shot for avid tabloid photographers.

In a white turban and blossom-festooned, Tennessee's wide-ranging, head-geared Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver, probing his way rapidly around the world, settled down for a brief moment in the northern Indian town of Ratangarh. chuckled admiringly at the local fruits of the U.S.-India technical cooperation program.

Off on a drive around Paris, the Aga Khan unabashedly doted upon his touring companion, granddaughter Yasmin, 5. Now in France to visit her father, dashing Prince Aly Khan, Yasmin is watchfully chaperoned by her mother, Cinemactress Rita Hayworth, currently estranged from husband No. 4, Crooner Dick Haymes.

While taking his ease at the bar of a Paris hotel, soft-spoken Playwright Tennessee (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) Williams was accosted by a reporter, pessimistically discussed his philosophy of dramatics. How much in today's stage plays or movies is really new? Replied Williams: "Everything has been said and resaid. I never write anything with the idea of putting any ideas into it, perhaps because I don't have any ideas. Mostly, I have a heart. I don't have any message any more." Do such beliefs lead to ambiguity in his work? Williams' workaday answer: "Life is an ambiguous thing, a floating cloud, something neither black nor white, but eternally grey . . . How then can a man help being ambiguous?"

Utah's far-right Republican Governor J. (for Joseph) Bracken Lee, 57, opened a new skirmish with the Federal Government. For the fourth year in a row, the governor proclaimed that he will proclaim no United Nations Day in Utah. Instead of lauding the confraternity of the U.S. with a lot of foreigners on Oct. 24, he will instead get a jump on One-Worlders by proclaiming Oct. 23 as United States Day. What's more, cried terrible-tempered Governor Lee, he will salt away every penny he owes in federal income tax on what ever sum he makes over his governor's salary--until if and when the U.S. Supreme Court orders him to unhand it. Raged J. Bracken Lee: "It is unconstitutional for this nation to tax its citizens for the support of foreign nations!"

Touring Britain to pick up tips on how the U.S.S.R. can begin making corsets and girdles, rarities in the Soviet Union, Russia's Fashion Czarina Mrs. V. G. Kaminskaya confided to newsmen: "We're bringing up the rear, and we know it."

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