ENGAGED. Christie Brinkley, 30, supermodel who parlayed her appearances in Sports Illustrated bathing-suit issues into the design of her own line of scanty swimwear; and Billy Joel, 35, Grammy-winning songwriter supreme, who wrote one of his biggest hits, Uptown Girl, for Brinkley; in Lloyd Harbor, N.Y. The marriage will be the second for both.

CONVICTED. Harry Claiborne, 67, controversial chief judge of Nevada's U.S. District Court since 1978 and the first sitting judge ever found guilty of a crime committed while on the bench; of two counts of filing false tax returns for 1979 and 1980; in Reno. It was Claiborne's second trial; the first, dominated by additional charges that he took bribes from a brothel keeper, ended last April in a hung jury. Those charges have since been dropped.

SENTENCED. Peter Theodoracopulos, 45, acid-penned society columnist, earlier for Esquire, now for Vanity Fair, under his well-known nom de plume Taki; to 16 weeks' imprisonment for cocaine possession, after his arrest at Heathrow Airport last month with 23.1 grams of the drug, worth $2,000, in his back pocket; in London. Taki pleaded guilty, but plans to appeal the sentence.

DIED. Esther Phillips, 48, dynamic rhythm-and-blues singer who got her start and early hits as a child star in the 1950s with Johnny Otis' blues show, but whose lifelong battle against drugs turned her career into a series of retirements and comebacks punctuated by hits like Release Me (1962) and What a Difference a Day Makes (1975); of liver and kidney disease; in Torrance, Calif. Appearing with the Beatles on British TV in 1965, she was acknowledged by them as a major innovative force in rock 'n' roll. Her death came only three weeks after that of Willie Mae ("Big Mama") Thornton, a rip-roaring blues shouter who also had a profound influence on white singers.

DIED. Alfred Knopf, 91, New York book publisher for 69 years who brought to American readers a large part of the best contemporary literature of Europe, the U.S. and Latin America; in Purchase, N.Y. With his indispensable assistant Blanche Wolf, whom he married in 1916 (she died in 1966), Knopf brought out his first books only three years after he left college (Columbia), employing a Russian wolfhound as the firm's colophon. He not only had an uncanny ability to discover new writers who went on to achieve permanence and literary prizes, but he also set and maintained the highest standards of design and craftsmanship in book production. His early lists emphasized Russian authors, but he also published Thomas Mann, T.S. Eliot, Andre Gide, D.H. Lawrence and Franz Kafka, among other eminent Europeans, and such U.S. writers as Willa Gather, H.L. Mencken, John Hersey and Samuel Eliot Morison, and Latin Americans Jorge Amado and Gilberto Freyre.