It will turn 30 years old on Sunday, December 2, but the Kennedy Center Honors is, more than ever, the hottest ticket in Washington. Created by the filmmaker George Stevens Jr. to uphold John F. Kennedy’s dream of an America that would value the arts as much as commerce, the Honors has recognized a roster of immortals from Fred Astaire to Tennessee Williams. An event that began in 1978 with Stevens’s wife, Liz, going door-to-door to sell $125 tickets raised $4.8 million last year for the Kennedy Center’s programs, and only its biggest donors will get the chance to buy seats at $4,000 a pop to cheer this year’s recipients: Steve Martin, Diana Ross, Martin Scorsese, Brian Wilson, and Leon Fleisher, the pianist and conductor. “The most valuable thing I learned from my father was this idea of the test of time,” says Stevens, son of the director of such classics as Gunga Din and Shane. “When this started out, it was about people whose contributions had stood the test of time.” Now the esteemed program itself has proved it has endurance. Winners are recommended by a panel of artists such as Francis Ford Coppola, Christopher Plummer, Sean Connery, and Elton John, and chosen by the executive committee of the center’s board. They don’t have to sing for their supper; they don’t get to say a word. They just have to show up, which means that some big fish got away: the reclusive Irving Berlin and the egomaniacal Vladimir Horowitz (who said he’d accept if the ceremony were held at four o’clock in the afternoon, for him alone).