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

The son of the only Negro to become a general officer in the U.S. Army followed in his father's bootsteps. West Pointer (36) Benjamin Oliver Davis Jr., director of Operations and Training for the Far East Air Force, was made the first Negro general of the Air Force, 14 years after General Davis Sr. had made the grade. Said his proud father, now 77 and retired: "It took me 41 years to make it. My son took 18. That's as it should be. If my boy can't do better than I did, I'd feel that I had failed as a father."

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Reporters charged into the little village of Bandol, France, to corner elusive Cinemactor Marlon Brando, 30, who finally admitted that he is engaged to marry pretty Josane Mariani-Berenger, 20, stepdaughter of a local Mediterranean fisherman. But that was about all the information the reporters got that they might depend on--for Brando, in his own unpredictable way, frequently likes to play the merry wild goose. Like lovers in a gay French film, the couple first talked about the romance that neither Louella Parsons nor Hedda Hopper in their wildest moments had predicted. Josane, who used to pose for the late Moise Kisling, famed painter of sensuous nudes, said she met Marlon in New York last February, when she was a governess (piano and French lessons) in a psychiatrist's family. "Two hours after our meeting," she claimed, "he asked me, 'Will you be my wife?' " Then Brando helpfully added a few points. Said he: "I'm here for three things. I want to get to know my parents-in-law. I want to live for a while under this beautiful blue sky where my fiancee was born . . . and I want to relax in the sun." Chirped Josane: "I'm very happy. My dream has come true." With that, the couple hopped on Marlon's rented motor scooter and chugged off toward the beautiful sky. Next day, though, Marlon was tired of "persecution" from newsmen. He kissed his girl goodbye and sped off. Only he, and presumably Josane, knew his destination.

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The Russian propaganda machine, slogging away in all directions, finally hit a snag in India, where it has been trying to be winning. The Indian government took a delayed look at the latest edition of the Big Soviet Encyclopedia and turned to the name Mohandas K. Gandhi. "Author of the reactionary teachings of Gandhism," it read. "Hailing from the Banya caste, which engaged in trade and usury . . . actively helped British imperialism . . . betrayed the people and helped the imperialists against the people . . . aped the ascetics . . . pretended, in a demagogic way, to be a supporter of Indian independence and an enemy of the British . . . Gandhism widely exploits religious prejudices . . ." Fuming, the Indian government prepared to take the matter up with the local Russian ambassador.

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From the Army-Navy-Air Force Journal came a prediction that Army Chief of Staff Matthew B. Ridgway will not be retired when he turns 60 next March, but instead will be kept right on the job.

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Romance came at last to Broadway Critic George Jean Nathan, 72, iconoclastic sniper-in-arms (in the '20s) of H. L Mencken. Announced Nathan, from Manhattan's Royalton Hotel, where he has lived as a bachelor for 48 years: he would soon marry wraithlike Actress Julie Haydon, 44, with whom he has been keeping company for 17 years. Julie last appeared on Broadway nine years ago as a wispy cripple in Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. "The best woman," Nathan once wrote, "is the inferior of the second-best man . . . To enjoy women at all, one must manufacture an illusion and envelop them with it; otherwise they would not be endurable." Marriage, he concluded, "is based on the theory that when a man discovers a particular brand of beer exactly to his taste he should at once throw up his job and go to work in the brewery." Last week Prospective Bridegroom Nathan said: "I found the right girl at last." From the Royalton, where she also lives. Actress Haydon said: "I worship him. It's darling of him."

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With 95 musicians assembled on the stage of Carnegie Hall, there was the usual hush which precedes the appearance of the conductor. But no conductor appeared. The excited audience witnessed an all-but-unheard-of spectacle: the big orchestra began to play to a full house and an empty podium. The group was Arturo Toscanini's famed NBC Symphony, which NBC dropped last spring when the Maestro retired. Superbly trained, the men simply listened carefully to each other as they played, produced music that was perfect in balance, pure in articulation and movement. It sounded as if the Old Sorcerer were there on the podium. When the concert was done, the audience broke into an ovation that Toscanini himself had not often heard. Explained a bass player: "We learned from Toscanini to honor the will of the composer. We simply paid closer attention to the score. When it said pianissimo, we played pianissimo."

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The Committee of French Good Taste awarded a prize for masculine elegance to France's seven-star General of the Army Alphonse-Henry Juin, NATO's Central European commander. Marshal Juin, said the committee, "wears civilian clothes with as much elegance as he does the French Academician's green uniform or the full-dress blues of Field Marshal of France."

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Just three years after her marriage to Captain Horace Brown, oldtime Cinemactress Marion Davies, longtime great and good friend of the late William Randolph Hearst, decided to call a halt, filed a divorce suit against Brown alleging mental cruelty. Marion and Captain Horace had the same sort of trouble in 1952, but made up before court convened. This time, though, it seemed that Marion intended to go through with it. Hollywood was not surprised, because it had been a stormy marriage. Even for fun-loving Marion, Captain Horace was a cutup. On one occasion he found a gun and shot out all the Japanese lanterns around the family swimming pool during a party, then went into the huge parking area of the mansion and shot and slashed all the tires on the guests' cars.

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A bastard son of Painter Paul Gauguin, living in Tahiti where his father was a famous longtime (1890-1903) exile, sat down for a chat with Art Lover Wilmon Menard. Reported Menard, in the Saturday Review: Emile a Tai is proud of his origin. Two of his children, he said, like to draw. "Perhaps between [them] real talent might reveal itself to justify the Gauguin blood. Perhaps my father's spirit shall smile upon them some day, and then he will be sorry that he did not give me the name of Gauguin to pass on to them . . . My father was a strange man. I would not want to meet his ghost on the lonely beach of Hiva Oa, [but] I would have liked to have known [him]."

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