By E. Graydon Carter

A regrettable maxim of the '80s is that frivolity has become the mother of invention. The latest evidence: Andy Warhol, 51, the lifeless doyen of Pop art, is being immortalized as a lifelike robot. The copy is the work of Alvaro Villa, 42, a onetime Disney animator, who claims that the computerized dummy will be barely distinguishable from the real thing. Villa will bless A2W2 with preprogrammed speech and 54 separate body movements. Upon completion, the $400,000 robot will hit the road as the star of a $1.25 million multimedia road show called Andy Warhol's Overexposed: A No-Man Show, coproduced by Warhol himself. The man who epitomizes the idea of being famous for nothing other than being famous is for once moved. "I have always wanted to be a robot," says Warhol. "I can finally accept talk show invitations. The robot can go on for me." At last, the perfect match for Merv Griffin.

In the frenetic days of live TV in the mid-'50s, Sid Caesar was the king of comedy, a round-faced, neovaudevillian who was earning a million dollars a year by the time he was 30. For the quarter-century since, little has been heard from the no longer reigning Caesar. But three recent events have set off a minirevival. One is a retrospective of the best from Your Show of Shows and its successor, Caesar's Hour which opens this week at the Museum of Broadcasting in Manhattan. Another is the release last month of My Favorite Year, a film based on Caesar and his court of writers, including Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. There is also his autobiography, Where Have I Been? (Crown; $12.95). In the book, Caesar, 60, portrays himself as a guilt-ridden obsessive who even at the peak of his success was on an alcoholic slide fueled by two fifths of Scotch a day. Says Caesar now: "Two generations don't even know me or what I've done."

In film after film, Jacqueline Bisset, 38, has added a touch of the unpredictable to the most expectable of activities between the sexes. She had a steamy dalliance in a sauna in Together? and one in an airplane lavatory in Rich and Famous. The writers of Class, to be released next year, have provided her with yet another kinky roost: an elevator. Playing a philandering wife who prowls Chicago's singles bars, Bisset takes up with a virginal prep-school student, then whisks him off for a tryst. This is where the elevator comes in. Not the most transporting of conveyances, but it beats an escalator.

Beyond the footlights of the concert stage he cavorted like the devil, but oh how Nicolo Paganini could play. Considered the greatest violinist who ever lived, he was electrifying as he hunched his skeletal frame and hawklike features over his magnificent violin, crafted by Giuseppe Guarneri in 1742. "Perpetually conserved" in Italy by the city of Genoa, according to Paganini's will, the prized Guarneri, insured for $800,000, crossed the Atlantic last week, and in the skilled hands of Neapolitan Virtuoso Salvatore Accardo, 40, made its U.S. debut at New York City's Carnegie Hall. "I have played it several times," says Accardo, "and every time I do, it is like coming home."

--By E. Graydon Carter

Truman Capote, 58, on the gossip column he will write for the revived Vanity Fair: "It's to be more like a series of obituaries. After all, it will concern what I call 'the living dead.' "

Richard Nixon, 69, on the nature of international diplomacy: 'You have to dissemble, you lave to recognize that you can't say what you think about an individual because you may lave to use him or need him some time in the future."

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