Names make news. Last week these names made this news:
When her ex-husband, Actor Burgess Meredith, sued in Manhattan for a $200,000 slice of what was once "community property," Cinemactress Paulette Goddard asked the Supreme Court in Manhattan for some advice. A Mexican divorce had been good enough when she divorced Charlie Chaplin, but didn't the court think that her Mexican divorce from Meredith was illegal? Couldn't she sue all over again in New York and claim that Meredith has been living in sin with his fourth wife, Dancer Kaja Sundsten?
Skilled fictioneer though he is, J. B. (The Good Companions) Priestley, 59, composed a series of letters that left Oxford Archaeology Professor Charles F. Hawkes unconvinced. Mrs. Hawkes, Priestley wrote the professor from Japan last fall, was only his good companion. But between the lines, Hawkes read more than a traveling literary collaboration. A British judge agreed, granted Hawkes a divorce, called Priestley's adulterous conduct "mean and contemptible."
In London for a coronation fling before a scheduled $25,000 appearance at the Hotel Sahara in Las Vegas, Nev., ex-G.I. Christine Jorgensen was sent a coolly worded engagement-breaking letter, beginning "Dear Sir," by the hotel's lawyers. Despite whatever the Danish doctors did, the letter said, the Sahara's owners suspect that Jorgensen is "not now and never can be a woman." If a contract cancellation was not agreeable, "it will be necessary for us to demand medical proof . . . that you are a woman . . ." Snorted Jorgensen: "I have behind me some of the most important and brainy doctors."
After 3½ years of complaining that her estranged husband, Winthrop Rockefeller, 41, kept her "hobo poor" and "starving," Barbara ("Bobo") Rockefeller got a $1,000,000 trust fund that will pay her a tax-free $20,000 a year. Would the fund get father Rockefeller occasional custody of his four-year-old son Winthrop Paul, who already has a $1,000,000 fund of his own? Said Bobo: "The boy is not a can of oil to be shipped over the country."
Caviar and champagne at the $35.28-a-plate Coronation Ball in London's Savoy Hotel revived two of President Eisenhower's four official U.S. representatives after the long ceremony at Westminster Abbey. Turned out in gold-braided full-dress uniform, General of the Army Omar Bradley launched into an enthusiastic off-beat rumba with Editor Fleur (Look) Cowles, whose diamond tiara was as grand as anything worn by a peeress.
Flying a Canadian-built F-86 Sabre jet, Aviatrix Jacqueline Cochran whooshed to another pair of speed records over Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. After clocking 590.273 m.p.h. around a 12-pylon, 500-kilometer course and 670 m.p.h. in a straight 15-kilometer dash, Jacqueline pronounced the Sabre a safer plane, and easier to fly, than the prop-driven fighters of World War II.
In London, cautious officials of the British Air Ministry decided that " it , would be "inappropriate that a flight in fighter aircraft should be offered the Duke of Edinburgh" during his tour of the R.A.F. Fighter Command.