Inside the Margo Feiden Galleries in Greenwich Village last night, where Mr. Hirschfeld's work is displayed, were Elia Kazan, Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Regina Resnick, Bob Dishy, Kaye Ballard, Len Cariou, as well as a couple of hundred other people from the worlds of theater and art. They were there to honor Mr. Hirschfeld, who is celebrating his 85th birthday today and who for more than 60 years, for The New York Times and other publications, has created caricatures of the rich and famous, from Marlon Brando to Madonna, from Thomas E. Dewey to Albert Einstein.

Noisily oom-pah-pahing on the street outside the gallery was a straw-hatted brass ensemble - the Red Mike Festival Band. Inside, there were popcorn and cotton candy, and a birthday cake with a portrait of the artist on top, which Mr. Hirschfeld cut as the guests looked on and cheered. "He's wonderful," Mr. Kazan said. "I compare his work to Japanese drawings. He makes one line do so much. It's so spare."

All the guests seemed to agree. "He's an original," Ms. Jackson said. "He's not a sentimentalist. What he sees is what is there."

Doodling Began It All

Ms. Ballard said she owned the drawing Mr. Hirschfeld had done of her in "The Ritz." And Mr. Wallach said he was "the proud owner of an original Hirschfeld - Zero Mostel and me in 'Rhinoceros'."

Al Hirschfeld creates his caricatures in the studio on the top floor of his home, sitting in an old barber chair before a heavily scarred wooden drawing table, with the northern light streaming in. But that was not how he got started.

"It was in the 1920's," he recalled, sitting in his dining room. "I was in the theater with a friend, Richard Maney, who was a press agent - it was his first show - and I was just nervously sketching on the program during a performance by Sacha Guitry and Yvonne Printemps. It was a drawing of Guitry. And Dick looked at the thing I had drawn and he said, 'Look, Al, why don't you put that on a clean piece of paper and I'll take it around and see if I can sell it.' So he took it to The Herald Tribune, and they published it - large, over four columns. The following week I got a call, and it was The Tribune, and they wanted another one.

"Then, six months or a year or so later, I got a telegram from The Times, from Sam Zolotow in the drama department, and he wanted a drawing of Harry Lauder. For two years, I received telegrams from The Times, giving me the assignment and telling me what size they wanted. And i would deliver them to The Times's receptionist. I never met anybody at the paper except the man at the desk. Finally, one day in the theater a mutual friend introduced me to Sam Zolotow, and I went up to the drama department and met George S. Kaufman, who was the editor, and Brooks Atkinson, who was the drama critic, and Atkinson and I became friends for 50, 60 years."

"I was a sculptor," Mr. Hirschfeld said. "But that's really a drawing - a drawing you fall over in the dark, a three-dimensional drawing. Then I became interested in painting, because making a living in sculpture seemed impossible. I got into drawing by accident, and it wasn't even particularly a love for the theater. Like everything else in my life, it has been unplanned, unpredictable, crazy. And this accident catapulted me into my insatiable appetite for pure line, for distillation, for bringing things down to the simplest form. It's impossible to describe in prose, but it does seem to communicate what I'm trying to say to the viewer."

"What I do, across all the years of staring at a blank piece of paper," he said. "is create a new problem every time, and then solve it to my own satisfaction."

Over the years, Mr. Hirschfeld estimates, "conservatively," he has created more than 3,000 drawings for The Times alone. And. for more than 40 years, those drawings have contained a game for the reader. Hidden in them is the name of his daughter, Nina - who was at the party, as was his wife, Dolly Haas Hirschfeld. Next to his signature is a number, and that number is the number of Ninas in the drawing. (By the way, the number next to the byline above indicates the number of Ninas in this article. If you can't find all of them, the answer is below.)

"Nina was born on Oct. 20, 1945," Mr. Hirschfeld said, "and on that day I put in a drawing, in a circus poster in the background; a little baby reading a book called 'Nina the Wonder Child.' And since then it has become a national insanity." That drawing was of Johnny Downs and Joan Roberts, in a play called "Are You With It."

Of all the drawings he has done, he said he has no one particular favorite. "I enjoy doing drawings of people like Carol Channing and Zero Mostel," he said. "The explosive actors, the glandular actors. The ones with the bulging eyes who don't close the doors - they slam them. They communicate to the last row of the balcony. That kind of actor is disappearing. It's understandable, because of the economics. They have to make their living in television and the movies, where they don't have to project."

There have been many other changes in the theater since he first began drawing, he said. "The job of the playwright has been almost impossible in recent years, especially competing with all the other things going on in the world. It's a really rough profession. There's no way for most of them to make a living. If you want to make a living, you open a delicatessen."