Sinatra, Cerritos Center Take a Star Turn : Concert: Celebs, fans come out to catch ol’ Blue Eyes as he helps inaugurate the suburb’s new arts center. ‘This is the biggest thing to happen to our city,’ says Cerritos mayor.

Rain fell steadily but that didn’t stop hundreds of people from turning out Wednesday night to help suburban Cerritos inaugurate its glittery new $60-million Center for the Performing Arts.

Fans with autograph books and cameras lined both sides of the theater entrance, excitedly picking out stars from the throngs arriving beneath a big white canopy.

“I got Lee Meriwether, Tony Curtis and Brenda Vacarro and saw Phyllis Diller,” said 16-year-old Jeff Dicker, an autograph collector from Westminster.

Inside the lofty atrium lobby, where lighting cast hues of purple, silver and gold on concrete columns and etched glass, formally-dressed first-nighters sipped champagne and sparkling cider and munched on hors d’oeuvres as they took in the decor and waited for the high point of the evening--”Frank Sinatra in Concert.”

For a host of Cerritos officials and business leaders, it was a night of pride, the culmination of a 10-year effort to create an arts center for their affluent bedroom city that television commercials have made synonymous with Cerritos Auto Square, which claims to be the world’s largest auto shopping center.

“This is the biggest thing to happen to our city,” said Cerritos Mayor Sherman R. Kappe. “It will put Cerritos on the map culturally.”

But if Cerritos was basking in community pride, the stars were there for Sinatra, who drew a capacity audience of 1,850. His five-night engagement is sold out.

Comedians Buddy Hackett and Jack Carter said they came to see an old friend perform. “I’ve known him for 40 years,” Carter said. And Meriwether said she’d never seen Sinatra on stage and the evening was a “dream come true. I’m a fan, unabashed.”

Diller said she’d “go to the top of the mountain” to hear Sinatra, adding that she didn’t know where Cerritos was until she got her invitation. “I thought Cerritos was a French designer,” she said. “It took nine years to get here from Brentwood. You can have an elephant.”

Other stars in the crowd included Angie Dickinson, Gloria Loring, Michael Lerner, Dick Sargent, Kirk Cameron, Belinda Carlisle, Ella Joyce, Anjelica Huston, Corbin Bernsen and Arnold Schwarzenegger. A few who were expected didn’t arrive--among them Sharon Stone, Vikki Carr, Billy Dee Williams and James Brolin.

If Sinatra was Wednesday’s headliner, the arts center itself also took a star turn. “It’s gorgeous,” commented Dickinson. “It’s not like anything else.”

Architect Barton Myers said he tried to capture a blend of old and new styles and materials in the theater, with its pyramidal roofs and glass towers, grand staircase and mixture of marble, bare concrete, tile, light woods and brass. In the auditorium, banks of boxes suggest a classical European opera house and movable floors and seats permit the space to be used as a flat exhibition hall, an 1,850-seat arena or a theater with 900, 1,450 or 1,963 seats.

Sinatra paid tribute to the house from the stage: “It really is beautiful, and not so big that you have to bring your binoculars.”