Star Debate Upstaging Art Center’s Big Night : Torrance: Some of the patrons who will hear Susan Anton at the Cultural Arts Center gala are upset: They’ve never heard of her.

It is being fashioned as a gala affair: $100 tickets, black-tie optional, a catered dinner and a musical show titled “Bach to Broadway.” It promises to lend Torrance--however briefly--some of the luster associated with the Los Angeles’ Music Center or Manhattan’s fabled Carnegie Hall.

But the selection of singer Susan Anton as the “Broadway” quotient at the long-awaited Torrance Cultural Arts Center premiere is already causing a stir.

Some people say they never heard of her.

Some wonder why she was ever chosen.

Some seem to like her just fine--including certain city officials and arts supporters who were outraged two weeks ago when John Bogert, columnist for the Torrance-based Daily Breeze, denounced the blonde, willowly, actress-model-singer-dancer as the “Pat Sajak/Dan Quayle of womanhood.”

“Susan Anton, the woman from the cigar ads, the former girlfriend of Dudley Moore . . . good-looking in a too-many-teeth sort of way,” Bogert sputtered. “ . . . This, for crying out loud, is opening night, not a pancake breakfast.”

The furor is pointing up a larger issue: the role of a cultural arts center in Los Angeles County’s fourth-largest city, which lies a mere 45 minutes from Hollywood in light traffic but generally shuns publicity or glitz.

The decision to build the $12.5-million center was controversial. And the Susan Anton debate seems to reflect lingering uncertainty about what kind of persona--highbrow, middlebrow or locally grown--the center’s 500-seat theater will acquire.

One of Anton’s most outspoken defenders is Janet Payne, a member of the committee planning the Oct. 25 opening night.

“Susan Anton represents a caliber of entertainment that we haven’t been able to have before,” Payne said. “I’m not aware of anybody in the South Bay of her caliber. . . . We didn’t just build this for Aunt Matilda’s tap-dance group to tap on the stage.”

But others question just how big a star Anton really is.

“That has been a topic in the lobby down at the theater lately,” said Allan Ruppar, president of the board of the Torrance Community Theater. “Apparently whoever booked her thinks she’s a bigger deal than some of the people I’ve been talking to.”

“I never even heard of her until this came up,” said Bill Brugger, a longtime center supporter and vice president of the Arts Council of Torrance. He will stay away from opening night, in part because of Anton; he thinks South Bay talent should be showcased instead.

“What is she, a TV star or something? That isn’t to say she isn’t. But when I turn on my stations, she isn’t there.”

Old articles, reviews and a publicity biography suggest that Anton’s career has been a patchwork of ever-shifting roles: a former Miss California, star of a late-1970s television show that bombed, a country-and-Western singer, an R & B singer, a guest star on recent episodes of “Quantum Leap” and “Murder She Wrote,” and a cabaret performer who has had engagements at Caesar’s Palace in Atlantic City and Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe.

She was chosen the Muriel Cigar girl in 1976 over 400 others.

She recently made a nutrition and fitness video program called “Slimatics.”

She is not a star , by Hollywood standards, and has no known previous ties to Torrance.

Yet Anton apparently was the “consensus choice” of a local ad hoc committee that sought “a broadly recognizable name” for the arts center opening to complement the evening’s other performers, classical pianist Robert Haag of El Camino College and the Chamber Orchestra of the South Bay.

So, what precisely did bring Susan Anton and Torrance together?

For one thing, the city was strapped for money when it went looking for a big name and didn’t even have enough spare cash to conduct a formal search, Mayor Katy Geissert said. Anton agreed to perform for a mere $3,000, all of which will go to her musicians.

Furthermore, Anton’s friend and former agent, Alan M. Schwartz, has deep roots in Torrance, where he is managing partner of a real estate company, consultant to the controversial downtown redevelopment project and grandson of one of the city’s founding fathers, Sam Levy.

Schwartz claims that Anton is a logical choice to open Torrance’s center. When New York City’s Rainbow Room reopened after renovations several years ago, he said, “she was the act that reopened the room. . . . The community of New York . . . with that tremendous pool of talent to choose from, chose Susan Anton.”

People at the Rainbow Room say it was actually Lionel Hampton and Michael Feinstein who opened the posh ballroom on the 65th floor of New York’s Rockefeller Center. And when the room’s smaller offspring, the 90-seat Rainbow & Stars, opened in January 1989, it was Tony Bennett on stage.

(When asked about this discrepancy Thursday, Schwartz apologized for what he called an honest mistake.)

Susan Anton finally did sing at Rainbow & Stars 21 months after it opened, and impressed reviewers at two major New York dailies.

” . . . She reveals a strong, supple voice along with an intelligent, well-balanced interpretive approach,” wrote the New York Times.

” . . . It was almost startling to discover Anton’s hale and hearty voice and disarmingly warm stage presence . . .” Newsday exclaimed.

And thanks to columnist Bogert, Susan Anton seems to be fast-becoming a household name in Torrance.

Her opinion of Bogert--if she has one--is not known. “Susan hasn’t seen the column, because there’s no reason to see the column,” her manager, Jack Stein, sniffed.

“Where does she live, Beverly Hills? I don’t think we circulate that far,” Bogert said.

At City Hall, Geissert says she just wishes the fuss would go away so people would focus on the center instead of its much-debated headliner.

“We wanted something in the theater that would be upbeat and positive,” she said wearily.