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

Informed of the Supreme Court's decision upholding state laws against obscenity (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), Author Philip (Generation of Vipers') Wylie, 55, declared himself unimpressed, fired off a Wylian philippic at the Great American Gaminess: "Are we going to stop publication of the bust measurements of movie stars? Perhaps we should stop using pictures of women at all. The idea that we can purge the American people by censorship is ridiculous. The favorite pastime of the American people is dirty jokes. The American people are more preoccupied with sex and more frightened of it than any others. We're just an obscene people." How does Wylie himself react to the national pastime? Yawned the savant of scatology: "I haven't heard a new dirty joke since I was twelve."

Asked by CBS' Ed Murrow to define his foreign policy, Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito gave it a game try, sounded like a sorghum Senator caught without his ghostwriter: "Well, it is difficult to say--how I shall put it--because it is a d'iffi-cult job. Our foreign policy is known. Well, we are not in any of the existing blocs. We stand for the principles of coexistence. And, of course, if it is necessary now to describe our foreign policy, then one--one must take care to--to--to do it in that way as not to--er--er--er--bring about any tension with--with anybody."

The wire services clucked and twittered like village matrons at a sewing circle. Was she or wasn't she? "Spokesmen" and "usually well-informed sources" said she was. Then, from Monaco's palace press service, came the crusher: a "formal and categorical denial" that Princess Grace was expecting a second child. Cause of the tizzy: Prince Rainier, continuing the battle royal with reporters that began before his wedding, censored some deceptively tumescent shots of Grace taken last month aboard the U.S.S. Forrestal.

Bowling down to Windsor Castle with Queen Elizabeth a few hours after he had exhorted Britain's Automobile Association that "anything is worth trying to reduce Britain's horrible casualty figure," Prince Philip tried to stop his elegant green Lagonda convertible when a Morris slowed for a turn, failed to brake fast enough, clonked into the tiny car. The Morris pilot hopped out in a huff, "thinking 'Some stupid clod's hit me,' " melted immediately when Philip cheerfully took the blame. Damage to Queen, Prince and commoner: none. To Philip's prestige as president of the auto association: sufficient dents that a London columnist suggested it would be just as well if he stopped chauffeuring the Queen.

Famed, ruddy-cheeked, Old Polar Hand Bernt Balchen, colonel (ret.), U.S.A.F., who flew rescue missions with the 1925 Amundsen Arctic expedition, piloted Rear Admiral Byrd's plane America across the Atlantic in 1927, in 1929 flew with Byrd on the first aerial crossing of the South Pole, dropped in at Washington's Mayflower Hotel to reminisce with some old friends. Among them: Lieut. General James Doolittle (now a vice president of Shell Oil) and onetime Air Force Chief of Staff Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz, now Civil Air Patrol head and director of four corporations. The two old flyers heard Norwegian-born Balchen's World War II exploits recounted (he built a secret Army Air Force base in Greenland, completed 51 rescue missions there, later parachuted supplies to the underground on 67 low-level flights to Norway, made no round trips in unarmed planes ferrying internees from Sweden to Britain). President Eisenhower sent his respects, and doughty Norwegian Ambassador Wilhelm Munthe de Morgenstierne paid tribute to Balchen. Then, to add to the constellation of honors (including the Legion of Merit and the Medal of Honor) he had already, Balchen got another: the National Pilots Association's Outstanding Aviator Award.

Mourning the japesters' heyday of James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Frank Sullivan and Robert Benchley, aging (54) Poetical Punster Ogden Nash laid the blame for lost laughter to the cold war and a generation of young writers "who feel it their business to attack incest." Invited by Night Beat TV Interviewer Al Morgan to select one poem from the Golden Trashery of Ogden Nashery most likely to survive the ice age 'of creeping exurbia and the great woolly adman, Nash moodily recalled "some hair-of-the-dog-gerel from my unregenerate youth: 'Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.' "

While sari-chasing Roberto Rossellim overstayed his welcome in Bombay, slim, blonde, comely Jennie Ann (Pia) Lindstrom, 18-year-old daughter of Rossejlini's wife, Cinemactress Ingrid Bergman, prepared to see her mother for the first time since she was twelve. With her father, Swedish-born Neurosurgeon Peter Lindstrom, she will fly to Stockholm, later travel alone to Paris, where Ingrid is starring in Tea and Sympathy, return to the U.S. in time to start her sophomore year at the University of Colorado. Brushing aside rumors of a cool relationship with Ingrid, Jennie said she expects a "wonderful reunion" with mamma.

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