Advance title: The 26th Annual Grammy Awards. By the end of last week's prize-giving gala in Los Angeles, though, it had unquestionably become The Michael Jackson Show. Jackson, 25, nimbly walked off with the gold-plated gramophone eight times, a record record. Among other categories, he captured album of the year (Thriller), record of the year (Beat It) and best male pop vocal (Thriller). The sylphlike Prince of Pop even dominated the show's commercial breaks. His two eagerly awaited Pepsi-Cola ads made their debut during the 3 1/2-hr. telecast. There was an unusual extra thrill for his tirelessly squealing fans when the soft-spoken superstar removed his dark glasses just once, explaining, "My friend Katharine Hepburn told me I should do it."

Like many a sun worshiper, Actress-Model Ann Turkel, 32, used to spend hours working on a seamless, all-over tan, but got tired of "always hanging out naked in my backyard." So she and her boyfriend, Austrian Designer Hans Buhringer, set out to find a solution to this two-tone torment. The result, appropriately, is called "the unsuit," available for men and women at $35 to $40 and made with a special cotton material that allows some, but not all, of the sun to shine through.

Says Turkel: "I don't know a woman who wants a white bottom and white breasts--it makes them look chunky."

Not everyone may be quite so concerned about running around in a bicolor birthday suit. But Turkel is not alone: she and Buhringer have already grossed $5 million.

She has long been a bombshell, on TV's Flamingo Road among other places. But in Time Bomb, an NBC-TV movie that will be aired later this month, Morgan Fairchild, 34, will add a more literal meaning to her reputation as a mankiller. Fairchild plays the leader of a gang of gun-toting terrorists who attempt to hijack a truckload of weapons-grade plutonium in Texas. "I hope it doesn't seem too Hollywood," Fairchild says. "I have this little porcelain face, and short of taking a hammer to it, there's nothing you can do." Still, the 100-lb. beauty says that she had fun "blowing away" burly Good Guy Merlin Olsen with her trusty AK-47. Says she: "It was like the ant who took Chicago."

Since she developed a knack for turning big behinds into big bucks, Activist-Actress-Activity Buff Jane Fonda, 46, has been speaking out more against flab than against the Government. But when Fonda announced plans to promote her new line of sweats and other workout clothes in a series of department stores throughout the country, a wave of resentment from her political past washed out her personal appearances one by one. Hundreds of angry callers, citing her antiwar actions during the Viet Nam era, detoured her scheduled stopovers in New Orleans, Miami and New York City (though she made quiet, unofficial visits to stores in both Miami and New Orleans). Finally, at Jordan Marsh in Boston, while two dozen Viet Nam veterans carried protest signs (JANE TRAITOR FONDA WE HATE YOU), the new booster of the free enterprise system did her thing. She was just a bit exercised about the earlier experiences, however, saying a sentence that might once have been directed at her, "The very small number of people [protesting]

not represent the way most people in this country feel."

He has been known to belt out a few bars after belting down a few beers at a pub of an evening, but one morning last week Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, 71, welcomed reporters to his daily press conference with a sober but boisterous--he knows no other way--rendition of Ireland Must Be Heaven for My Mother Came from There. The outburst was by way of confirming his aspiration to retire from Congress early next year so that he can be appointed Ambassador to Ireland. That plan, of course, depends on the election of his choice, Walter Mondale, as President. Should Ronald Reagan be reelected, the Massachusetts Representative said, he would stay on to fight the good fight as Speaker at least through 1986. Might Reagan make a grand gesture and ship Tip off to the Emerald Isle himself ? Not likely. Last week newborn Boston Sportscaster Carl Yastrzemski asked the

President in an interview what he would do if it were the last of the ninth of the seventh game of the World Series with the bases loaded and he were pitching to O'Neill. "I'd hit him right in the head," responded Reagan unhesitatingly. A nice line, but if the score were tied, wouldn't the President lose the game?

All right, knock off the snickers. This is going to be done straight. Larry Harmon, 59, better known as Bozo, "the world's most famous clown," was in Washington, D.C., last week to announce he is a candidate for the U.S. presidency. "I'm wearing glasses because they make me look a little more like a statesman than I already do," said Harmon, who is running in full regalia on the Bozo Party ticket. The native of Toledo, who started on TV some 35 years ago, claims that he got a hankering for the nation's highest office during a telephone conversation with President Kennedy, who told him, "Let us not ask what we can do for Bozo; let us ask what Bozo can do for us." Hold it; stifle that guffaw. The clown is serious about all of this. He really wants to do "something good for the world." But his campaign literature does have one glitch in it, he admits. The slogan "Put a real Bozo in the White House" should have been "Put the real Bozo in the White House."

O.K., end of announcement.

Now those who wish to make their own jokes are free to do SO. --By GuyD. Garcia On the Record

Margaret Thatcher, 58, British Prime Minister: "I don't think any woman in power really has a happy life unless she's got a large number of women friends ... because you sometimes must go and sit down and let down your hair with someone you can trust totally."

Edwin Newman, 65, newly retired NBC-TV correspondent, on a continuing weakness of TV news: "There are too many correspondents standing outside buildings and saying, 'Time will tell.'"

Grace Slick, 40, rock vocalist with the 1960s Jefferson Airplane (later Starship), on the apolitical content of lyrics in the 1980s: "If you wanted to write a song that directly affected the problems of today's college student, it would deal with the perils of being a preppie."

The license plates on his silver Cadillac bear the word GRINCH. But no one in his neighborhood of La Jolla, Calif., is fooled. The driver is no grouch. He is Theodor Geisel, better known by his flowing pseudonymous signature Dr. Seuss. He celebrated turning 80 last week by turning out his 42nd children's story, The Butter Battle Book (Random House; 48 pages; $6.95). An arms-race "preachment," as he calls it, the tale features no grinches, just a confrontational competition between average, everyday Yooks and Zooks who are suspicious of each other because the former prefer eating bread with the butter facing up while the latter like their butter facing down. The Yooks and Zooks devise bigger and more outrageous war machines, until each holds a Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo "filled with mysterious Moo-Lacka-Moo" capable of blowing the other to Sala-ma-goo. Says Geisel: "I don't know if it's an adult book for children or a children's book for adults."

The Massachusetts-born author is a long way (100 million books sold worldwide) from his 1937 start. But he still puts in eight hours a day, five days a week at his desk, although the desk now overlooks the Pacific from the dream house he helped design. Geisel, whose nom de plume is an amalgam of his mother's maiden name and a self-bestowed doctorate, "which came from the fact that I saved my father $25,000 by dropping out of Oxford," next plans a nonsense book. He is also working on a Broadway play for adults, and this year Coleco, purveyors from the Cabbage Patch, will offer a new line of Seuss dolls.

Like most of his books, Butter Battle took eight months to get right. He bristles at the suggestion that such fare takes less talent or work than literature for grownups. "When you write for kids, if you don't write more clearly and concisely and cut out all the mumbo jumbo, you lose your audience," he says. But the result can "seem frightfully barren because they only want the meat of it." If the idea of a Seuss book being barren seems surprising, imagine the reaction of the occasional young visitor bold enough to call on the Wizard of Whimsy. "They expect me to be a cow with a nose that lights up," says Geisel with a shrug. "I'm too square."