Some stars came out the other night to honor the man who made them. Champagne flowed like water and Perrier flowed, well, like water, at a combination gallery opening and 85th birthday party for Al Hirschfeld, the caricaturist without peer who has been chronicling the American theater for more than 65 years.

"To be a star on Broadway is to have one's name in lights," Grendan Gill of The New Yorker once wrote, "but it is also, and more significantly, to be drawn by Hirschfeld."

"He's just the theater," said Hope Quackenbush, managing director of Baltimore's Mechanic Theatre, where Hirschfeld has spent many hours sketching performers in pre-Broadway tryouts. She had been invited to the birthday party at the new Margo Feiden Gallery in Manhattan's Greenwich Village but had to send her regrets.

Hirschfeld "is the greatest interpreter of the theater in any form of anyone I know," Quackenbush said. "His caricatures are the essence of any show and always have been...We're so excited when he's in the house. He is a star to us...He's unique. I don't know of anyone who compares to him...If we were like the Japanese, we'd call him a national treasure."

The short, bemused and luxuriantly bewhiskered object of this veneration sat in a folding director's chair Monday night, surrounded by elegantly framed examples of his art, and good-naturdly accepted congratulations, posed for photographs and chatted with some of the theatrical figures who could mark their own ascent to stardom by their appearance in Hirschfeld drawings. Among those sipping, snacking, viewing and chatting were director Elia Kazan and performers Eli Wallach, Anne Jackson, Bob Dishy and Len Cariou.

Cariou, who triumphed as the title character in the Tony-winning "Sweeney Todd," more recently starred in the ill-fated musical "Teddy and Alice," for which Hirschfeld last came to Baltimore during the show's pre-Broadway tryout in September. Carol Channing once said that a Hirschfeld drawing is "the best review you can get," and for "Teddy and Alice," it was.

Cariou said he considered it an honor to have his part in American theatrical history preserved by Hirschfeld's pen, adding that the likenesses Hirschfeld draws are "caricatures of caricatures, in one sense," since they capture not only the actor but the character the actor is playing.

When Hirschfeld comes to the Mechanic, he carries an 8-by-10 inch sketchbook and pencils. He fills the sketchbook with quickly jotted drawings - "hieroglyphics," he calls them - annotated with enigmatic notes, such as "fried eggs for eyes," and brief costume descriptions. Returning to his Victorian town house on New York's Upper East Side, he sits in a barber chair he bought 50 years ago, studies his "scribbles," and tries to "correlate the sketches into some sort of palatable design" in ink on 20-by-30 inch high-quality paper. "With these images, my memory - and luck - it works," he has said. "As time goes by, the people begin to look like the drawing."

He admits that this sounds - and is - like some form of alchemy that he can't begin to explain. "I've tried to rationalize how I arrive at what I arrive at, and I'm no closer to it than when I began."

Hirschfeld started drawing theatrical personalities in 1922. Since then, his lithe and witty caricatures have indelibly defined the personalities of the stage and screen, making him the theater's longest-running archivist and more discerning historian," according to John Russell, cultural arbiter for The New York Times, where most of Hirschfeld's caricatures appear on Fridays and Sundays.

Hirschfeld said that while the current Broadway season "was financially profitable, whether its contents will last...is in the lap of the gods. All the shows currently scheduled to come to town are revivals.

"Playwrights have a tough time now. Financially, it's easier to organize U.S. Steel than it is to get a show on Broadway."

Hirschfeld has been coming to Baltimore tryouts for decades and thinks the city itself is very theatrical. "That whole Harborplace complex is very attractive, and the food in Baltimore is sensational." He and his wife, retired actress Dolly Haas, have another reason to be fond of the city: They were married in Baltimore in 1942, while she was appearing in a show at the old Ford's Theater.

Although Hirschfeld's drawings are in New York's Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, Boston's Fogg Museum and the Cleveland Museum, for years the chief purchasers of his caricatures were the subjects themselves. He says that began to change in 1969, when he started doing limited, signed lithographs for art dealer Feiden, his representative in New York. She presided over the party at her 75 University Place gallery in a plaid dress with a floor-sweeping hoop skirt.

With an expression of mild wonder, Hirschfeld said his lithographs have "gone up in value tremendously" in recent years. "The whole art market is insane...I did a Marx Brothers that originally was published for $90, I think, and now goes for something like $4000. That's a pretty good appreciation, I'd say."

Since 1969, Hirschfeld has done more than 100 lithographs, all in editions limited to 150 to 200 prints. The latest is a double caricature of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall that sells for $500 unframed.

There were more stars on the walls than nibbling at the canapes at the Feiden gallery festivities. Along with dozens of others were Groucho Marx ($450 unframed), Laurel and Hardy ($600 unframed) and the fabled Algonquin Round Table wits - all of whom Hirschfeld knew - fetching $650 unframed. Original pen and ink drawings are priced from $2,700 to $12,000, Feiden said, and if you want a Hirschfeld of yourself, a 2-foot-by-3-foot likeness can be commissioned for $5,000. A double caricature of, say, a husband and wife, would be $6,500.

Nearly all of Hirschfeld's drawings feature the whimsical weaving of the name of his daughter, Nina, into each caricature. He playfully hid it in a drawing the day she was born in 1945, and "finding the Ninas" soon became a passion for his fans. If he leaves it out they go crazy, so he generously tells them how many he has secreted in a subjct's eyebrows, hairdo, costume or appurtenances by putting a small number beside his signature if more than one "Nina" is to be found.

The real Nina was at the party in person, along with her son, Matthew, 12. She said that having her name made part of so many famous people is "probably the most exciting thing that ever happened to me."

About the excitement of reaching 85, Hirschfeld said: "I don't fell any different than I did when I was 84."