By E. Graydon Carter

Forgoing Wimbledon for a small island in the Pacific, Argentine Tennis Ace Guillermo Vilas, 29, has chosen a new partner: Princess Caroline, 25, daughter of Princess Grace and Prince Rainier of Monaco. The doubles team started playing, according to Paris-Match, after a tennis tournament in Reno, and were spotted on a flight together from Los Angeles. Since her divorce from Philippe Junot, 42, in 1980, Caroline has reportedly dallied with Robertino Rossellini, son of Ingrid Bergman and the late Italian film maker Roberto Rossellini, and Robert Shriver III, offspring of Sargent and Eunice

Shriver. The somewhat less rambunctious Vilas is said to be engaged to Gabriela Blondeau.

Monaco's royal family has remained blase. After all, "she has known him for about ten years," said a spokesman for the Rainiers somewhat ambiguously, "just as she knows the racing drivers and other tennis players in Monte Carlo."

In television, as in cosmetics, packaging is everything. Take Bare Essence, a CBS-TV movie to be aired next season. The production has all the ingredients for a prime-time megasoap: a four-hour, two-part schedule, glamorous locales and three beautiful people: Linda Evans, 39, from Dynasty, Genie Francis, 20, late of General Hospital, and Donna Mills from Knots Landing. Francis plays a gung-ho executive who goes to work for a large, shaky corporation. She saves the situation by teaming up with the race-car-driving, playboy heir to the company to steer the organization into the fragrance business and a perfume that is Bare Essence. The show is obviously musk viewing for the heads of any financially troubled corporations.

Hastily created in 1928 from the remnants of the Keith-Orpheum theater chain by RCA Founder David Sarnoff and Joseph P. Kennedy, tiny RKO became the studio mouse that roared like MGM's lion. RKO produced the first Technicolor feature, Becky Sharp, starring Frances Dee, now 74 (and in a bit part, a then unknown 23-year-old actress, Pat Ryan, later Pat Nixon), Citizen Kane and the nine best Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers pictures. Last week the final vestiges of the studio--30 years' worth of scripts, musical scores and papers--were donated to the film archives of the University of California at Los Angeles. The presentation at U.C.L.A. looked like lunchtime at the studio commissary 40 years ago. On hand were Fred, 83, and Ginger, 70, Dee and husband, Joel McCrea, 76, Jane Russell, 61, Sam Jaffe, 91, Ralph Bellamy, 78, Rhonda Fleming, 58, Rudy Vallee, 80, Harriet Nelson, 67, Laraine Day, 61, and Jane Wyatt, 69. Another famous former RKO star couldn't make it but sent his best. He starred in Cattle Queen of Montana in 1954 and Tennessee's Partner in 1956 for the studio, but Ronald Reagan, 71, was busy playing to a full House back East.

Chicago Sun-Times Columnist Mike Royko, 49, who owns Chicago, doesn't like what has gone up next door: Indiana. He recently called the state "the most miserable in the union," and its capital, Indianapolis, "the dullest large city in the U.S." Royko polled 1,000 of his readers on whether the U.S. should go to war if Argentina were to invade the Hoosier state. According to the columnist, 999 voted no; the sole holdout was undecided. Hoosiers hit back with a booster campaign of T shirts labeled ROYKO WHO? and ROYKO DOME--a swipe at his observation that it is silly for Indianapolis to plan a domed stadium when it has no major baseball or football franchises. Letters began coming in from across the state. "I was amazed how many people from Indiana could write," admits Royko, "though most of the letters were done in crayon."

--By E. Graydon Carter

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