By Guy D. Garcia

In the eyes of the Vatican, which is still considering her annulment request, she remains married to French Playboy Philippe Junot. But that did not stop Princess Caroline, 26, from tying the knot last week with Stefano Casiraghi, 23, son of a wealthy Italian businessman. After exchanging vows and gold bands in a 20-minute civil ceremony at Monaco's royal palace, the newlyweds waved magnanimously from a balcony to the cheering crowd outside. The tiny gathering--only 23 close friends and relatives, including Casiraghi's parents, Caroline's father Prince Rainier III, 60, Sister Stephanie, 18, and Brother Albert, 25--sampled a three-tier chocolate cake but dropped no crumbs of comment for the throng of reporters and well-wishers waiting below. Which led to some inevitable pishing and tushing. The hastily planned nuptials, in particular, appealed to the parturient interests of some. Speculation was only heightened by a newspaper report quoting Casiraghi as saying, "We want a child as soon as possible."

The invitation from Yuri Andropov to visit the Soviet Union last summer made her the nation's premiere pre-teen good-will ambassador. And last week Samantha Smith, 11, was on the road again, this time in Kobe, Japan, to address a children's symposium on the 21st century, sponsored by organizers of the technology and science fair Tsukuba Expo '85. Before the meeting, Smith visited a Buddhist complex set in the hills of eastern Kyoto, cheerfully signing handkerchiefs pressed on her by housewives who recognized her and sipping from three waterfalls believed to bring good fortune.

In her opening message to a group of 56 children the next day, Smith, with the help of some speechwriting tips from her dad, painted an optimistic picture of the future, where computers "will transfer good food, good shelter and good clothing to the people who need them." The "Angel of Peace," as she is called by the Japanese press, also proposed an "international granddaughter exchange" to increase understanding in the world.

"Then," said Smith, "the year 2001 can be the year when all of us can look around and see only friends--no opposite nations, no enemies and no bombs." As for the year 1984, she will start that back in Manchester, Me., where her what-I-did-on-my-vacation compositions must be making sixth-grade history.

As the laconic superpilot Chuck Yeager in The

Right Stuff, Actor-Playwright Sam Shepard, 41, said little and stole much of the show, and he is now mightily sought after by Hollywood. But for no strange reason, the film he has currently chosen to do, Country, is a Walt Disney movie that also stars (and is co-produced by) Actress Jessica Lange, his offscreen live-in companion. In what has been described as a modern-day Grapes of Wrath, Shepard and Lange, who teamed up in Frances last year, this time play a struggling Midwestern couple who are losing their farm. They have just finished shooting in two little Iowa towns during some of the coldest and snowiest weather anyone there can remember. "The harshness of the Iowa winter has totally dominated the filming," says Lange. "The subfreezing temperatures day after day brought home a certain physical reality that matches the economic plight of the Midwestern fanner." The project has brought together Lange's longstanding interests in the Depression and the decline of the American farmer. Once on the scene, the Minnesota-born actress, who likes to get away from it all at her wilderness log cabin south of Duluth, soon found herself as much at home with the harsh landscape as the "very tough, stoic" Iowans. Moviemakers, she observes, "seem to skip over this part of the world."

--By Guy D. Garcia

On the Record

Jorge Illueca, 65, U.N. General Assembly President, at the 1983 adjournment: "I fear that despite our best efforts, the state of the world has steadily and sharply deteriorated."

Rachel Flick, 25, White House staffer, on providing contraceptives for teenagers: "To tell a 13-year-old that it's O.K. to play with sex if she follows the rules is like telling a four-year-old that it's O.K. to play with fire if she is very careful."