Actor Burt Lancaster, 59, was ready to play Moses, whose eye at 120, according to the Bible, "was not dim, nor his natural force abated." Announcing his role in a six-part TV series written by Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), Lancaster said, ''Moses will be very different from the version put on the screen by Cecil B. DeMille." None of that larger-than-life stuff. "My Moses will be a real man," declared Burt, whose son William plays the young Moses in Egypt. "Not a hero, not a leader, but a man who is aware of his own and other people's failings."

Busily at work on a series of drawings and lithographs based on Stonehenge, Henry Moore, 75, was summering at his house in Italy. Back home in England, Mme. Tussaud's Wax Museum was getting ready to unveil a likeness of Moore leaning against a pillar, on the other side of which is a wax figure of Pablo Picasso. Moore had already donated a navy blue suit, shirt, tie and handkerchief for his effigy and had been photographed and measured by Jean Fraser, the museum's chief sculptor. But after recording the last statistic, she confessed to Moore that she really works by eye. "Oh, that's the right thing to do with measurements," said Moore, whose own sculptures are strictly free form. "Ignore them."

He was one of the founders o f be-bop in the 1940s. Now Dartmouth has asked Dizzy Gillespie to become a professor of music. For Gillespie, 55, and for a generation of jazz musicians, this recognition of the cultural importance of jazz was "a long time comin'." Added Dizzy, who is currently playing in Belgium: "A lot's changed since I began. A jazz musician can play with symphonies now. Jazz will be the classical music of the future."

Nicaragua's biggest fashion export thus far has been Rock Singer Mick Jagger's lookalike wife Bianca, who sports a walking stick and tuxedos. Bianca is not the only clotheshorse Nicaragua is betting on. The postal service has issued a series of "Famous Couturiers of the World" stamps that reflects a more staid image than Bianca's. The series of eight includes a five-cordoba stamp ($2.00) for Balmain of Paris, a one-cordoba stamp for the French designer Givenchy, and a 15-centavo stamp for Halston, the only American honored.

"I have great confidence in the polygraph. If this machine says a man lied, he lied." So said Philadelphia's law-and-order Mayor Frank Rizzo shortly before submitting to a lie-detector test. Rizzo was being tested along with Peter J. Camiel, city Democratic Party chairman, who accused Rizzo of trying to bribe him in his choice of a Democratic candidate for district attorney. The mayor lied on six of the ten questions, said the lie detector, while Camiel told the truth on all. After the test, Rizzo proclaimed his innocence, reaffirmed his confidence in the polygraph--then demanded a re-evaluation of the results by his own experts. Flattery, it seemed, got Rizzo nowhere with the machine.

Suspended from the dome of Manhattan's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum were five 6-ft.-long airplanes that had been painted with huge biomorphic swirls of red, yellow, blue and black by American Artist Alexander Colder, 75. Calder had been asked to use the DC-8 as a canvas by Braniff Chairman Harding L. Lawrence, who broke commercial flying tradition by ordering up his jets in brilliant colors. Calder, who invented both the stabile and the mobile, starts painting an actual plane this fall in Dallas--with his signature eight feet high on the nose. It's a bird, it's a plane--it's a Calder!

Rudolf Nureyev, 35, is used to getting his way. In Tel Aviv for performances of the Royal Ballet during Israel's 25th anniversary celebration, Rudi was learning to sail in the ancient harbor. By one account, he took command at once, ordered the sailing instructor off his hired dinghy and, with two fellow dancers, set out for the open sea. First they collided with another boat. Next it was the harbor wall. At this point, the instructor, who watched from a jetty, dived in and climbed aboard. Nureyev would have none of it. Into the water he went--his floppy knitted cap skimming the surface. He waited on some nearby rocks until the instructor abandoned ship. Then Rudi swam out and reassumed command.

Westerns have always played fast and loose with the facts, but The Real Life of General Custer, now being made in Paris, is hilariously and deliberately erroneous. Catherine Deneuve plays a French nurse who seduces Custer, acted with great inauthenticity by Italian Actor Marcello Mastroianni. The highpoint of the movie is not the last stand but Custer's seduction: Mastroianni, wearing long Johns, is writing a letter to his wife. Deneuve walks up, literally picks him up and carries him to bed --carefully turning to the wall the portrait of his Commander in Chief, Richard Milhous Nixon. Then, history be damned, her neck pierced with an arrow but her hat in place, Frenchie expires at Little Big Horn with her General.

Portsmouth, N.H., was celebrating the 350th anniversary of its founding and invited the British government to send a warship as a token of the fishing port's first 153 years under the crown (1623-1776). Who should turn up as a crew member on the H.M.S. Minerva, an antisubmarine frigate, but Prince Charles? The lieutenant, resplendent in his summer uniform (whites), proved himself quite the charmer on shore. Circulating through the crowd, he dazzled Mayor Arthur Brady ("A regular fellow," said the mayor), talked horses with Race Track Owner Joseph Sullivan, promised Housewife Molly Pike that he'd have a drink with her, and asked 84-year-old Mamie Daniel, a local widow, if she remembered the English town she left in 1910 for America. Portsmouth turned royalist quickly.

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