November 17, 1982

New York City has obtained a court order against the New York Yankees to try to prevent the team from playing its opening home games in Denver next April instead of at Yankee Stadium. The city went to court late Monday after George Steinbrenner, principal owner of the Yankees, informed Parks Commissioner Gordon J. Davis that the Yankees intended to sign an agreement yesterday with the City of Denver, which owns Mile High Stadium. Under the proposed agreement, the Yankees would play the first three home games of the 1983 baseball season in Denver, beginning April 11. At issue is construction now under way at Yankee Stadium. According to Commissioner Davis, it will be completed in time for the Yankees to play their first home game at the stadium. The lease for the stadium stipulates that the Yankees must play all their home games there until the lease expires, in 2002.

A New York State drought alert to encourage conservation in New York City and in all or part of 25 upstate counties was issued yesterday by Robert F. Flacke, the state's Environmental Conservation Commissioner. The state alert followed a local advisory by Joseph T. McGough Jr., the city's Environmental Protection Commissioner, urging restraint in the use of water. The advisory and alert are the mildest drought-warning categories. The most serious are a drought emergency in the city and a drought disaster in the state.

President Reagan's national security adviser, William P. Clark, sought today to persuade the nation's Roman Catholic bishops that the Administration's policies on nuclear arms were guided by compelling moral considerations. ''It is important for the Bishops Conference to know our decisions on nuclear armaments and our defensive posture are guided by moral considerations as compelling as any which have faced mankind,'' Mr. Clark asserted in a letter. ''The strategy of deterrence on Text of Clark letter, page B4. which our policies are based is not an end in itself but a means to prevent war and preserve the values we cherish.''

IMPECCABLY tailored in muted browns, balding with steel gray fringes of hair, wearing thick glasses, Dino De Laurentiis looks very much like the movie mogul he is. He gesticulates broadly, smokes incessantly and talks rapidly in heavily accented English. But rather than act the part of the tycoon-producer and greeting visitors from behind his imposing 18th-century English partners' desk - which is so vast an entire board of directors could sit around it - Mr. De Laurentiis is waiting at the door. The desk overwhelms its diminutive owner and his spacious Central Park South office, but Mr. De Laurentiis says he will never part with it. It has traveled with him from London to Rome to Los Angeles and now to New York, where he lives and works. ''I bought it almost 30 years ago,'' he explained, ''just before I made 'War and Peace.' I am Neapolitan; I am superstitious.'' Mr. De Laurentiis was born in Torre Annunziata, on the Bay of Naples, 60 years ago, the son of a successful pasta manufacturer and miller, and there is nothing he loves more than a plate of hot spaghetti. He is considered an excellent cook, a judgment he shares. ''Spaghetti,'' he once said, ''should be cooked with love, fantasy and art. I cook pasta as Picasso painted.''

Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan is considering whether to move up the 1983 income tax cut from July to January as a way to stimulate the economy, Administration officials reported today. In conversations with his own staff and the White House, Mr. Regan has talked about proposing tax-cut legislation in the special session of Congress that starts Nov. 29. The officials said it might not be possible to change withholding tax rates before the end of January, even if Congress moved swiftly, but there would be no problem in effecting the 10 percent acrossthe-board cut in personal income taxes on Jan. 1 instead of July 1. Drop in Industrial Activity The Treasury chief was reported to be persuaded that the continuing decline in industrial activity required the Government to take some action, lest 1983 turn out to be a year of sluggish economic growth and unemployment in excess of 10 percent.