What was going on when I was born?

They were, Peter Shaffer recalls, quite the odd couple. To turn his play ''Amadeus'' into a film script, the English playwright spent four months holed up in a Connecticut farmhouse with Milos Forman, the Czech film director. Isolated from the rest of the world in what they called their ''torture chamber,'' the collaborators suffered from writer's block together, listened to Mozart records together, and improvised scenes from the play together. Much of their afternoon work sessions, however, was devoted to arguing. They argued about scenes and words, and the order of scenes and words. They argued about who would say what in the film. They even argued about which of them would cook dinner. In the end, nothing went into the movie that both did not agree upon; and on Wednesday at the Paramount and Tower East - some two and half years after their first argument - ''Amadeus,'' the motion picture starring Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham, is finally opening. Filled with scenes from Mozart's operas and permeated with the sounds of his glorious music, the movie of ''Amadeus'' not only works a glittering improvisation on the composer's life - as the original play did - but also conjures, in sumptuous detail, the musical worlds he inhabited and created. But if Mr. Shaffer succeeded, as Mr. Forman puts it, in ''giving birth to the same child twice,'' the task was anything but easy.

TOP-ECHELON hotel-casino executives here say that unless government at every level, especially the city, finds effective solutions to transportation and parking problems and has them in place by 1987, the gaming industry is heading for dangerous financial shoals. Some have raised the specter of bankruptcy for one or more ''marginal'' casinos. Analysts had predicted that the growth in the number of visitors here would level off at 20.8 percent this year; instead, it is between 10 and 11 percent. Twenty-three million people visited Atlantic City last year; 27.5 million were expected this year, but it appears that the actual number will be about 25.5 million. The number of casinos has grown from one to 10 in six years, and four more are expected to be opened by 1987.

FINDING THE CENTER Two Narratives. By V. S. Naipaul. 176 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $13.95. Two schools of writing have been exciting great enthusiasm lately. The Latin Americans, with their tall tales of limitless extravagance and abundance, of myth and passion - so many stories bursting the covers of each novel that it seems the au thor could have lighted his cigars with the surplus of them - remind us of our own frontier beginnings, our virgin exuberance, when North America too was an oyster bed, a goldfield for a writer. The Eastern Europeans, on the other hand, in briliantly elucidating their boxy anxieties, their governed, circumscribed and claustrophobic expectations, present us with the sort of diminished future that even without a Czechoslovak dictatorship we fear for ourselves. V. S. Naipaul, who swims with neither school but is one of the most interesting writers alive, rather splits the difference. His novels picture a kind of limitless

He is a slight man of 37 now, confined to a refugee center and looking for a new home. In 1975, when the North Vietnamese took Saigon, he was a captain in the South Vietnamese Army and, like tens of thousands of his compatriots, he was sent for ''re-education'' to a prison camp. There, he spent the next six years of his life. One day, without explanation, he was freed.

Any day of the year, somewhere in the world, an audience will be found applauding a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. The play is most likely to be ''Oklahoma!'', the first, the favored work; these days, the players are apt to be amateurs on high school stages - youngsters born after death had ended that wondrous Broadway collaboration. But a revival of ''South Pacific'' will open a national tour on Christmas day in New Haven and ''The King and I,'' with Yul Brynner, continues to tour, closing today in Toronto and opening tomorrow in Boston. In addition, every year a few of those profoundly American works are also rendered in a scattering of foreign tongues. Not long ago, ''The Sound of Music'' finished a two-season run in Swedish in Stockholm. For reasons no one can fathom, the Japanese are partial to ''South Pacific,'' a play in which they are the unseen, omnipresent foe. It is possible to know all this and more because Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein 2d were not only the most successful creative team in the history of the American musical theater, but they were also practical men. The place from which all permissions flow, the address to which royalty payments stream, the enterprise, in fact, that controls everything the two partners wrote together and the best things they produced with others is the Rodgers and Hammerstein office on Madison Avenue at 57th Street.

WASHINGTON D.C. CONNECTICUT lawmakers and environmentalists led the applause last week as the United States House of Representatives authorized the Government purchase of three islands and a sandy peninsula in Long Island Sound to form the Connecticut Coastal National Wildlife Refuge. ''Fantastic,'' said Representative Stewart B. McKinney, Republican of Westport and sponsor of the $2.5 million bill to safeguard the four sites, which had been designated in an early draft as the Chimon Island National Wildlife Refuge. ''Without getting maudlin about the whole thing,'' he said, ''there's very little you do around here that lasts forever. What really excites me about this is that it's permanent.''

The Brakes Are On The indicators are coming out, and they all say the same thing: the torrid first-half pace of expansion of the United States economy has cooled, bringing relief to those who feared more upward pressure on interest rates. Wholesale prices and retail sales were both down in August, and industrial production edged up only two-tenths of 1 percent - the smallest increase in nine months. The Government's ''flash'' estimate of third- quarter gross national product, to be released by the Commerce Department on Thursday, undoubtedly will reaffirm the slowdown. Economists predict that this summer's growth, adjusted for inflation, will turn out to be between 4 and 5 percent, down from the unsustainable 10.1 percent and 7.6 percent rates of the first two quarters of 1984. Bankers Trust economist Jay N. Woodworth expects only 4 percent growth. ''We had been at 5,'' he says, but the pinch in automobile supplies and the surge of imports prompted a retreat.

An array of new evidence linking human illness to drug-resistant bacteria in meat has rekindled a campaign to ban the use of antibiotics in animal feed. One new study, conducted by the Federal Centers for Disease Control and published last week in The New England Journal of Medicine, connected 18 cases of human poisoning, including one death, to hamburger meat infected with a resistant strain of the bacteria salmonella. A ban on the antibiotics was urged by the Food and Drug Administration in 1977 but has been blocked in Congress by farm state legislators at the urging of the livestock and pharmaceutical industries. Officials at the agency predicted this week that they would revive their proposal in light of the new studies. The new evidence also appeared to greatly improve the chances that Congress would no longer stand in the way of a ban. But no action appears likely until next year.

AS SHE toured two of the state's seven regional neonatal intensive-care units last week, Assemblywoman Jacqueline Walker, Democrat of Matawan, asked doctors and nurses some tough questions: - Why did New Jersey's infant mortality rate rise in 1982? - Was the increase significant or just a one-year variation? - Can the increase be linked to cuts in Federal funds for maternal and infant-health programs? - What could be done to save more lives?

A GRADUAL change in climate, plus the inexorable laws of probability, make it virtually certain that a disastrous storm is headed for Long Island, weather experts and planning officials say. One, a Southampton geology professor, Larry McCormick, compares the threat to that faced by Californians in the San Andreas Fault earthquake zone, adding that Long Islanders, like their California cousins, are unfortunately inclined to shrug it off. ''We know that a catastrophe is on its way,'' the coastal geologist wrote in a book, ''Living With Long Island's South Shore,'' recently published by Duke University. ''We lack only the knowledge of when it will strike.''

For generations of German-Americans, the New York Turn Verein hall at 85th and Lexington Avenue was a focus for athletic events as well as social and educational activities in Yorkville. And many East Side residents knew the Yorkville landmark as the home of Hans Jaeger's, one of the city's best-known German restaurants, which occupied the street floor and had cozy, dark-wood booths for dining.

DR. ELIZABETH MOORE, a professor of botany at Glassboro State College, says she does not know how she ever got along without her Apple IIx computer. But when she first got it, she found herself facing a nightmare. ''It was terrible, just awful,'' Dr. Moore recalled. ''I was sent home with all these things in boxes, and I had to put them together. No one told me how to connect the various parts, and the manual wasn't much help. I just couldn't get it all to work together.''