On a golden afternoon in a leafy season, at the tippy-top of a terra-cotta-red townhouse, Al Hirschfeld is in a barber's chair. Perched on two small pillows and a torn leather cushion, his slippered tootsies parked on an iron footrest, the artist is at work. In the waning northern light, he ponders the product before him: a penciled sketch of Liza Minnelli or Richard Kiley or Kevin Kline that will, when he puts his crow's-quill pen to it, become an India-ink drawing of Minnelli or Kiley or Kline fit to print in The New York Times. The cast will change, but the process does not, nor has it for nearly sixty years.

Every Sunday since 1929 (with a few rare exceptions), Hirschfeld has hatched and crosshatched the Broadway flock, without fuss, without peer and, except for the first thirty years or so, without reproach. To tread the boards and not his twenty-by-thirty inch triple-ply cold-pressed illustration board is to be forever in the wings. To be Hirschfelded is to arrive.

The swirls, the curls, the ginger, the bounce! Gaze upon Groucho and Lemmon and Ball, Coco and Coca, Bikel and Bacall, Zero and zephyr and Gilda as kvetch, Eartha as cobra and Bancroft as wretch, Horowitz the pianist and Heifetz the fiddler, Fiedler and Fonda and Mitchum and Midler. The moues, the sloches, the prances, the crouches!

With the surgical line of a Daumier, he catches a gesture or a nuance an actor doesn't know he's throwing. "Oh, my God," says Carol Channing in that voice of hers. "I look at what he's done and think, That's what i was hoping to look like! Onscreen or on the stage I look like George Channing's daughter, like Aunt Alice, like the whole Channing family. But in a Hirschfeld drawing I look like the character I'm trying to be."

Which is precisely what the artist intends. "I consider a successful likeness has been achieved when the subject begins to look like the drawing rather than the other way around," Hirschfeld himself has written. "The problem I have created for myself is to translate a specific person or object in legible symbols so that the reader, when confronted with my arrangement of lines, will recognize their meaning as clearly as he would the letter A."

While the artist maintains that anatomical exaggeration is not witty, one of the most devoted subjects thinks otherwise. "W-a-l-l-l," says Walter Matthau in that voice of his, "I think what he does is he stresses a feature, and that feature gives away a person. It's like my imitation of President Reagan: I do it by nodding my head a lot." And while caricaturist David Levine says that Hirschfeld is "the most original, creative caricaturist of our time," Hirschfeld himself shrinks from the word "caricature." "In relation to art, it's often misused," he says. "In literature, it's understood. It's an exaggeration of character, and a denigrating term." So call it a drawing, call it a likeness, but don't call it a caricature. Hirschfeld doesn't.

Here's what else he doesn't: wear reading glasses, a hearing aid or a crutch, huff or puff when scampering up and down the three flights to his studio, swallow pills or castor oil. He doesn't smoke three or four packs a day, not since he gave it up twenty years ago because he got tired of coughing. (No hypnosis, no Smokenders for this fella; he'd go sit in the movies, ride the subways, wander backstage...put himself where smoking was taboo. After a week the habit was kicked.)

He doesn't watch his calories either, being fond of a sweet every day with his four-o'clock tea, and doesn't much care if his calories watch him. Tha man hasn't suffered bodily harm since 1947 when, in Thailand, a vicious white moth wriggled through the mosquito netting and flew into his eye.

Hirschfeld is 84 and his eye is sharper, his hand steadier, his line surer now than ever. "it is a virtuoso line," says Lloyd Goodrich, former director of the Whitney Museum. "It can carve a face, simulate hair and whiskers, describe a dancer's leap, caress a chorus girl's thighs." Says John Russell, art critic of the Times, "His black inks can look blacker than black, and he can make the untouched white of the page work for him as a henchman or a friend." As a superb designer, Hirschfeld knows from white space. But often he can't, for the life of him, get the Times to dispense with the line around the drawing.

Never mind. When he later sells the drawing to the actor he's drawn, he gets $2,500...minimum (if, indeed, the actor can afford it). To draw you it's $5,000.

Since 1920, when he was 17 and a gofer in the art department at Goldwyn Pictures, Al has been doodling for dollars. Five years previous, the family Hirschfeld had made its exodus from St. Louis after the boy's art teacher persuaded his mother to close her candy store and get him out of town or he'd wind up doing price tags for department stores. they came to Manhattan, where Al sculpted and studied "the only things in art that are capable of being taught: anatomy, perspective, lithography...learning the rules that you later break."

He toiled in Tin Pan Alley, turning out covers for song sheets and plugging songs aboard the Albany night boat: fancy the lad warbling 'Scandinavia' whilst strumming the ukelele! He drew ads for MGM and Warner Bros. and, at 18, became the art director for Selznick Picures. He bought himself a Stutz bearcat and managed never to live in Hollywood.

And then, one night in 1925, he and the legendary publicist Richard Maney were attending a Broadway performance by Sacha Guitry. Perhaps in awe, perhaps in order to stay awake, Hirschfeld scribbled a sketch on his program. Maney, manic, grabbed it and galloped off with it. The next Sunday it appeared in The New York Herald Tribune, and a regular feature was begun.

The next year he received a telegram from The New York Times asking for a picture of Sir Henry Lauder, who was making yet another of his farewell appearances. Hirschfeld said yes; the drawing was published; he got another telegram. And so, for years, it continued. Always a telegram, never a call. Now he gets a call. But he still doesn't have a contract.

Soon his work was appearing in all of the papers, and there were a lot of them. But the Times, weary of competition, requested exclusivity. So most Sundays since 1929, and every Friday since 1976, that's where he can be found. (He can also be found in books, on the walls of the Margo Feiden Galleries in New York City and on the tiles around his own living-room fireplace.)

In the Thirties, Hirschfeld traveled to Bali, where he did watercolors and spawned the theory that would define the oeuvre. "It's no accident that painters come from Europe, where it's foggy and always raining," he says, "and that the great graphic artists come from arid countries, where there are deserts and sun. I discovered that the Balinese sun bleached out all the color, leaving only black and white - shadow and line. Pure line."

Bali in the heat, Paris in the cold (where he lived to paint, tap-danced to live and grew his trademark beard because the water was too icy for shaving), the Soviet Union (where he lived for a year), Germany ("Where the Nazis looked like something out of a Theatre Guild production, with long coats and hamantaschen on their heads"), Kentucky (where he drew the Derby and learned from a pro how to pick a pocket), Philadelphia (where 'Sweet Bye and Bye,' his first and last Broadway-bound musical, written with longstanding friend S. J. Perelman, Ogden Nash and Vernon Duke, swiftly went bye-bye), Japan on a freighter, Dayton on a dare - the guy'll go anywhere.

Or almost anywhere. Sure, he waters the plants on his studio windowsill. Sure, he tends the crocuses, daffodils, magnolia and occasional stray cat in the garden. And yes, he was recently spotted near a Times Square fruit stand admiring the symmetry. But nature remains a nuisance. "I don't like landscapes and trees," he told a friend who naively invited him to spend a day in the bosky burbs. "I like people."

Most people. Then there's David Merrick. Years ago, Hirschfeld did the drawings for Garson Kanin's novel 'Do Re Mi,' for which he was advanced $500, or "delicatessen money." Kanin then sold the book to the producer for a musical. Merrick's press agent called Hirschfeld, "asking if I'd revise the drawings for twenty ads, sticking Phil Silver's head head on my pictures. I said nothing doing. Then I got a call from Silver's manager, asking if I'd ever done a drawing of him. I had, a TV Guide cover and a few theater drawings. I told him this, never heard from him. One day I pick up the paper and see the ad, copied from my drawing." This is not done. But Merrick did it.

And so, in a rare exhibition of wrath, Hirschfeld included the producer in a series of Playbill of "impossible casting": Zero Mostel as Peter Pan, Buddy Hackett as Hamlet, Bea Lillie as Ophelia, Carol Channing as Lady Macbeth, Sir John Gielgud in 'Tobacco Road' and Merrick as Santa Claus, "with bell, book and candle, with snaggletooth and spit and everything.

"I was sure he'd take umbrage," Hirschfeld says, "but I never heard anything. So I had my gallery put it in the window. I wanted to get at him because he'd gotten to me. He came in and bought the thing! I used it as a Christmas card. It's impossible to offend anyone anymore." In most cases, he tries not to.

When he gets his assignment from the Times, his first stop is a rehearsal or preview, in town or out. He carries a black-covered sketchbook with his pencils taped inside. On more covert occasions, he sneaks a nimble right hand into his right-hand pocket to draw on loose scraps of paper. The ensuing squiggles and notes ("baby's behind," "spats," "Brillo hair," "fried eggs"), often in collaberation with head shots and costume sketches provided by the press agent, serve as his research. He then dispatches his verdict - "Sometimes it goes quickly, and sometimes it just produces a small ulcer" - from pencil to ink to the Times. And no matter what his opinion of the jinks onstage, he insists that he makes no pictorial judgment. "I'm not a critic. The character is established by the playwright. The editorial right is his, not mine." David Levine agrees. "I'm more critical, show my biases," says he. "Al doesn't. And I think he's right."

On opening night (he's on the first-night list), he's back again, not for study - since the work has already been published - but for fun. He and his wife, Dolly, sit in third or fourth row on the left side of the aisle and usually stay put, even at intermission.

You'll know him when you see him. Some would say he looks just like a Hirschfeld. Others, that he looks like a gargoyle adorning his home. "I'd say he looks like Moses, Christ, Santa Claus and, if you close your eyes and imagine it, the doctor who still makes house calls," says Stella Reichman, the author and artist. Says Matthau, "He has that midwestern way of talking, and yet he looks like an Italian nuclear scientist from maybe Lower Slobovia."

S. J. Perelman saw this when he looked: "A pair of liquid brown eyes, delicately rimmed in red, of an innocence to charm the heart of the fiercest aborigine, and a beard which would engulf anything from a tsetse fly to a Sumatra tiger. In short, a remarkable combination of Walt Whitman, Lawrence of Arabia and Moe, my favorite waiter at Lindy's." The attraction was reciprocted, and in 1947 the two decided to take on the world.

Shared with the public first as a series of monthly articles in Holiday magazine and then in a best-seller called Westward Ha!, the Perelman-Hirschfeld travel log had nothing to do with Frommer or Baedeker. Perelman's malevolent descriptions of the cargos, the camels, the company, the chow were made more so by Hirschfeld's sardonic pen.

Over dune, over dale, through pyramid and puddle, they sailed, slogged and choo-choo'd because, due to an imperfect Eustachian tube, Hirschfeld - born in the year the Wrights took flight - cannot. Mostly, he drives. He drives to tryouts in Washington and exhibits in Boston. He drives to Texas. He once drove to Key Biscayne for dinner, then turned around and drove right back. And he drives his passengers crazy. Carol Channing tells a horrible tale of his way with a one-way street. Hirschfeld himself tells of how Dolly sits in the backseat, of how they stopped at a Ft. Lauderdale gas station, of how they both debarked and of how he didn't realize she had not reboarded until thirty miles later. You get the idea.

Otherwise, Al Hirschfeld and Dolly Haas have traveled along, singing a song, side by side for the past forty-six years, In the Twenties and Thirties, when he was making his mark with theater and movie stars, she was making movies in Hamburg, where she was born, and in London. They married in 1941 and in 1945 they had Nina, named, Hirschfeld says, for the number nine which has always been a lucky one for them. The introduction of Nina into their lives immediately meant the introduction of Nina into his work - a decision for which the daughter has probably never forgiven the father nor the father forgiven himself.

When a Hirschfeld drawing appears in print, it bears his signature - the last name, all in caps - and, usually, a number following it. The number, introduced as a reader's aid in 1960, refers to the number of "NINA"s woven into the picture. No number means one "NINA." Generations of devotees have spent their Sundays stalking the elusive "NINA" through tresses and laces. On the occasion of his daughter's marriage, when Hirschfeld attempted to save his sanity and end the tradition, irate Ninaphiles would simply not allow it. So Nina - now divorced, with a son of her own - the girl who made her linear debut in a 1945 drawing for a musical called 'Are You With It?', remains, like it or not, with it, the father and daughter in mutual thrall.

Like many of us, Hirschfeld remembers theater when there was more of it, Broadway when it was a domestic, not an imported, treasure. In palmier seasons, he'd go three and four times a week with is beloved friend Brooks Atkinson, the Times drama critic from 1925 to 1960. Those were the occasions when a gentleman dressed in tie and tails. But not our gentleman. He does not own, nor can he imagine wanting to own a tie. "Ties are useless, serve no purpose that I can see," he mutters. He need not, of course, wear one to dinner at the Algonquin Hotel - where Mr. Hirschfeld often takes the same corner in the Rose Room that Mr. Shawn, late of The New Yorker, takes at lunch - nor to the Players club, where he is a honorary life member.

He rarely enters a movie palace but persists in attending the theater, wherever it plays. He wishes more of today's celebrities were, like the Mostels and Mermans and Karloffs and Kayes of yesterday, bigger than life; he likes "overdesigned human beings." He wishes that putting something onstage weren't such a big deal. "Now it's a million-dollar package job," he laments. "It's no longer possible or feasible or sensible to put on a play unless the producers have one eye on the bank. The only thing left in the arts, actually, is the book. You can still produce a book for about $15,000 or $20,000. Even Off-Broadway costs more than that; it's the damned legal fees."

Show business may be no business, as one of Hirschfeld's book titles declares, but he doesn't mean a word of it. There's no business he knows better, and probably no one who knows it better than he. "He's unique, he's terrific, he's done something a lot of artists would dearly love to do: He's made his own world," says Lou Silverstein, former art director of The New York Times. "I used to wonder, Where's the next Hirschfeld going to come from? And I suppose the answer is, There isn't going to be one."