March 31, 1983

After 10 days of deliberation and a temporary deadlock in the trial of Erin Leslie Fleming, Groucho Marx's longtime companion, jurors today awarded the Bank of America more than $450,000 in a judgment against her. As executor of the comedian's estate, the Bank of America was awarded $221,843.09 in compensatory damages and $250,000 in punitive damages. The bank had charged that Miss Fleming had manipulated the elderly comedian to obtain money and gifts. The bank had sued Miss Fleming for $500,000 in punitive damages, and recovery of two houses, a Mercedes-Benz, municipal bonds and other gifts totaling more than $400,000 that it said she had received improperly.

''ICAN'T stand living with things I can't use,'' says Robert Bishop, the director of the Museum of American Folk Art in Manhattan. The man who in six years has helped shape the institution into the major folk-art museum in the country has in fact managed to keep his own home from becoming a museum. ''I'm not a collector in the truest sense - I've never pursued an object only because of its period,'' he says. There may be 17th- and 18th-century pieces throughout the apartment, along with 19th-century Shaker furniture, but the interior is an unpretentious, comfortable and personal environment in which Mr. Bishop, 44 years old, spends a lot of time working.

''When it comes to intermediate nuclear missiles in Europe, it would be better to have none than to have some.

An Associated Press dispatch Tuesday erroneously quoted a spokesman for the Weyerhaeuser Company in regard to the deposit of wastes at the Stringfellow Pits site in California. The spokesman, Tom Ambrose, said Weyerhaeuser ranked 11th in volume among 199 companies known to have used the site, but he said the Weyerhaeuser wastes were nontoxic.

International A new American arms control plan was announced by President Reagan. In a televised statement, he offered to reduce the planned deployment of new American medium-range missiles in Western Europe in exchange for a reduction in the deployment of Soviet medium-range missiles in Europe and Asia that would result in each side having the same total number of warheads. (Page A1, Column 6.) NATO allies hailed President Reagan for his new proposal for limiting medium-range nuclear missiles and called on Moscow for a quick and constructive response. (A10:4-6.)