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

On the advice of a doctor who told her to take a "long, long rest," Academy Award-winning Actress Audrey (Roman Holiday) Hepburn, 25, also the toast of Broadway for her star performance in Ondine, announced that she is going to loaf for "at least eight months" in Switzerland, Italy, France and England. Said overstrained Audrey: "I want to enjoy life, and not become a wreck after a few years of work, like so many others."

Interviewed in Manhattan, debonair Crooner Billy Eckstine announced plans to record an Eckstine-composed duet, Two for Tee, with an old fairway acquaintance, Golfer Jimmy Demaret, three-time winner of the Masters Tournament, and described by Billy as "a surprisingly sweet Killarney tenor type." But Golfer Demaret has no place in Eckstine's vision of the composite "dream crooner." His choices and their attributes: "The ideal lad would have Perry Como's voice, Frank Sinatra's ease, Tony Martin's showmanship, Nat 'King' Cole's soul--and Bing Crosby's money."

Reminiscing about a meeting with Sinclair Lewis in London in 1922, Biographer Charles Breasted, writing in the Saturday Review, recalled asking the late author whether Main Street, the literary rage of that day, was autobiographical. Lewis'candid admission: it was. Breasted wanted to know whether the novel's heroine, Carol Kennicott, was a self-portrait. Startled at one of the few correct guesses about Carol's identity, Lewis replied with what could well have served as his own gloomy epitaph: "Yes, Carol is 'Red'

Lewis: always groping for something she isn't capable of attaining, always dissatisfied, always restlessly straining to see what lies just over the horizon, intolerant of her surroundings, yet lacking any clearly defined vision of what she really wants to do or to be." A few years later, Lewis told Breasted just what value he placed upon his own works: "In the future a book of mine will probably always be good for a sale of 50,000--but neither the critics nor the author will be fooled. The best of what I'll ever have produced will bear the same relation to true literary achievement that a jacket blurb does to the text of a really great book."

Photographs of an oil portrait of Mamie Eisenhower, all prettied up in pink and wearing a wistfully puckish smile, were released at the White House. The work, which hangs in the President's living quarters, was painted last year by Manhattan Artist Thomas E. Stephens (no kin but an old Greenwich Village friend of White House Appointments Secretary Thomas E. Stephens). Artist Stephens has coached Amateur Painter Dwight Eisenhower, also painted him, his mother, father and several of Ike's friends.

In Hollywood, the grand old lady of the American theater, Ethel Barrymore, turned 75, still looked grand, and, in an interview with a New York Timeswoman, pronounced herself "wildly healthy." Ethel went on to diagnose the state of the lively arts. The theater, she decided, "looks pretty good--although none of the girls knows how to talk any more. Except Julie Harris, and that one can do any thing." Then Ethel disclosed that "I never go [to the movies], not even to my own. Why should I? I never saw myself on the stage either, you know." She had television down pat: "It's hell." Notwithstanding its hellishness, Actress Barrymore sat down last week and was photographed as she signed a long-term contract to emote in a series of half-hour TV shows, starting next April.

Onetime Chicago Daily Newsman Ben (The Front Page) Hecht, 60, who as a self-proclaimed Child of the Century has sampled most of the century's boozy philosophies, hit Chicago again and tried out his old beat in Women's Court. Reported Byliner Hecht: "In the 30 years since my byline was visible in this newspaper . . . things have changed, including possibly the shape of the earth. But . . . she was still there . . . trying to defend her wicked ways . . . The officer had spotted her talking earnestly to a strange man on the street corner . . . With her run-over heels and tongue-tied soul [she] will be the only thing the atom bomb will never change or remove."

At Minsky's burlesque house in Newark, N.J., where bumps and grinds have found refuge from Manhattan's clayfooted bluenoses, Mrs. Tommy Manville, 31, opened a one-week stand to supplement her income ($1,000 a week from Tommy). Asbestoscion Manville, 60, peevishly refusing to catch his estranged ninth wife's routine, snorted: "I haven't been to a burlesque for 46 years--and I won't start again with her stinky show."

In Chicago for the World Council of Churches assembly (see RELIGION), Germany's famed Pastor Martin Niemoeller lit a long cigar and discussed tobacco as the hallmark of the theologian. Puffed he: "If he smokes cigarettes, he's liberal. If he smokes cigars, he's orthodox. If he smokes a pipe, he's dialectic. If he doesn't ( smoke, then he cannot be a theologian." Niemoeller then admitted that the theory was not his, but that of Switzerland's pipe-smoking Theologian Karl Barth.

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