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

A perennial runner-up, Halldor Kiljan (Independent People) Laxness (rhymes with knocks mess), Iceland's epic chronicler of poets and peasants, at last won the Nobel Prize for literature. A winner of the Communist World Council for Peace Prize in 1953. Laxness, 53. bills himself as an "idealistic socialist," advises readers to judge the color of his philosophy from his books. His heroes are usually found struggling in the toils of nature and landed ogres, dying in blizzards, falling with boot-broken backs. First Icelander ever to win a Nobel Prize, he hoped that Iceland's tax collectors "will leave me 10% for brandy." Early next month, Leftist Laxness will get his gold medal, diploma and $36.720 jackpot from Sweden's King Gustaf VI Adolf.

TV Impresario Arthur Godfrey swung the ax at his "family" again. The decapitated: Co-Producer Larry Puck (whose bride, Soprano Marion Marlowe, was fired last spring), Conductor Jerry Bresler, Announcer George Bryan (a ten-year employee), Singer Lu Ann Simms (about to return from maternity leave). At the Pennsylvania National Horse Show in Harrisburg, Equestrian Godfrey rasped: "If I can't hire and fire people to suit myself, I'm going to quit."

On a zany Masquerade Party program (Thurs. 9 p.m.. ABC-TV), retired Admiral of the Fleet William F. ("Bull")

Halsey, 73, snorted delightedly as he hammed up his disguised role of a distant predecessor, iron-men-and-wooden-ship Commodore John Paul Jones. After the show, Iron-Man Halsey took off his fancy duds, let down his hair to make a wooden confession: "I'll bet there was nobody in the war more scared, more often, and for as long as I was."

Sailing into Manhattan, Italian Cinemactress Rosanna Podesta (35, 21, 33) inhaled expertly to register pleasure at her first glimpse of the U.S. Fresh from playing the coveted title role in Warner Bros.' Italian-filmed Helen of Troy, robustious Rosanna (who muffed her lines in 36 takes of a scene during Helen's early launching) was herself a thinly veiled suggestion of why the movie was converted from a simple love story into a thundrous spectacle.

At a brassy Manhattan nightclub, onetime Cinemactress Greta Garbo, 50. in her first such nocturnal foray within the memory of pub-crawlers present, popped up at a ringside table to catch the act of honey-throated Crooner Nat King (Forgive My Heart) Cole, whose autographed albums she likes to acquire under her favorite incognito identity of "Miss Brown."

Artist-Poetess-Actress Gloria Vanderbilt Stokowska, 31, was signed up by a sometime escort, Crooner-Cinemactor Frank (The Tender Trap) Sinatra, to make her movie debut as leading lady in Star-Producer Sinatra's first Western, Johnny Concho. In the script, Gloria will snap at Frankie: "I'll marry you only when you grow up!" At week's end, Gloria, who married long-maned Maestro Leopold Stokowski in 1945 when he was 63 and bore him two sons, flew to Juarez and signed off as his wife.

On leave from the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve to help put the international goodwill situation well in hand for the State Department, ist Lieut. Bob Mathias, 24, world and Olympic (1948, 1952) champion in the decathlon, turned out for an exhibition in Teheran. As admiring Iranians watched, he let a shaven-topped lad touch his discus for good luck.

After 32 distinguished years in the Army, Major General William F. Dean, 56, top-ranking hero of the Korean war and for three grisly years a prisoner of the Chinese Reds, packed his military gear for retirement this week. Highlight of Medal-of-Honorman Dean's last parade at San Francisco's famed Presidio: the award of a combat infantryman's badge, which he missed on the way up.

Alabama's easygoing Governor James E. ("Kissin' Jim") Folsom, something of a Baptist himself, was totally immersed in hot water all week long by disapproving hard-shell fellow Baptists. First off, the Bessemer Baptist Association accused Folsom of "profaning a prayer." Kissin' Jim's reported praise to a parson: "That was a damned good Baptist prayer!" The governor was then accused by high drys of shamelessly grappling with John Barleycorn during a late-hour press conference. Alabama newsmen, not overly fond of Folsom, had gleefully reported that Kissin' Jim, brandishing a three-quarters-full highball glass, had told them that he didn't mind if they reported the presence of whisky in the room, and furthermore, that he was drinking some of it.

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