Mike Thomas

His wonderfully loyal sponsors were no doubt reluctant as well. For more than a quarter of a year, they’d lost their genius of a pitchman, whose show was left in the capable hands of fill-in hosts like Fox’s Bill O’Reilly, who, bless his smug, bestselling soul, is no Paul Harvey.

To be fair, though, there are few if any media figures left who loom as large as Harvey, and it’s unlikely there will be again. As the radio icon once remarked of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “Now this is not a man with whom I necessarily would have agreed with philosophically. But he was still a giant. Oh, my goodness, what a giant. And there are so few. We’re up to our ankles in pygmies.”

A few years ago, in the pages of Chicago magazine, radio storyteller Garrison Keillor fondly recalled his run-in with Harvey at a “stuffed-shirt” dinner in Chicago. “When the salad plates were whisked away and the entree brought in, he leaned over toward me and said, ‘Page … 2,’ just like he does on the radio,” Keillor wrote. “In fact, Mr. Harvey was exactly as he is on the radio. He read me a number of stories from a script in his pocket, most of them about ordinary Americans and their struggle to deregulate industry and give large corporations the freedom to do good in the world, and during all of this, he sold me a tin of liver pills and a utensil that dices, slices, chops, minces and prunes.”

It may be cynical to say so, but therein lies the key to Harvey’s longevity and success. Sure, he’s an astute dissector of current events, cultural phenomena and middle-American minutiae. But more than that, he is perhaps the finest huckster ever to roam the airwaves. He is so good that sponsors are said to be stacked high and deep, waiting to wow him with their products. Because if he is wowed, and only if he decides something is worthy of his own personal use, he will sell the hell out of it. And even while it is sometimes hard to believe that the multimillionaire workaholic finds time to strap on leaf blowers and operate load handlers, one willingly suspends disbelief if only out of respect and admiration for the magical way he woos us to spend money.

This, it’s fairly safe to say, is the main reason ABC Radio Networks, Harvey’s employer for 51 years, recently laid a 10-year, $100 million contract at his well-shod feet. Not because he commands a large and loyal enough audience to sway presidential elections (he leans unabashedly to the right, though less so now than in years past), and not because his “The Rest of the Story” segments, long written by his son and announcer, Paul Aurandt, are so brilliant (occasionally intriguing is more like it), but because he can move merchandise.

For the sake of example, say you’re an avid Harvey listener. Perhaps you realize this already, but the suits at ABC Radio truly care if you care about what Harvey says during his twice-daily news and commentary segments and his evening “The Rest of the Story” yarns. Why? Because if you care, it means you’re listening. Not just hearing, listening. There is, as many frustrated wives and preachers will tell you, a difference. See, if you care about Harvey’s stance on some foreign war, or about the German marathoner whose toes were fondled in the night or the Nebraska woman whose driveway sprouted watermelons, you’ll keep on caring when he proclaims, “Now, Page 2,” and seamlessly segues from current events to an impassioned pitch for Chevy’s Impala or the dietary supplement Citracal (the “cit” is for “citrus,” the “cal” is for “calcium” … did you know that osteoporosis is pre-ven-ta-ble?), or the Bose Wave Radio. Lord, how he loves that radio.

His uncanny ability to mesmerize en masse, and thus to sell en masse, is the lifeblood of “Paul Harvey News and Comment,” a truth in which even Harvey himself seems to revel.

“The ratings, I love to read. But the things that mean the most to me are when a sponsor calls and says, ‘You increased our share 2 percent last month,’” he has admitted. “Because this says to me, not only are people listening, but they’re paying attention, and that’s infinitely more significant.”

“I can’t look down on the commercial sponsors of these broadcasts,” he explained to CBS interviewer and fellow Chicago broadcaster Bob Sirott in 1988. “Too often they have very, very important messages to put across. Without advertising in this country, my goodness, we’d still be in this country what Russia mostly still is: a nation of bearded bicyclists with b.o.”

During another 1988 television appearance, CNN’s Larry King asked him if being such an unabashed shill (though not in those words) had affected his reputation as a broadcaster. Defending himself adamantly, Harvey proclaimed in that impossibly cool and confident manner of his, “These people are putting their money where my mouth is. And if I were to turn my back on them and say someone else has to do that commercial, I wouldn’t do it. This is a dreadful affront. Some days,” he continued, expounding on his oft-stated belief, “the best news in the broadcast is the commercial. You can keep your natural teeth all your natural life! There is a glove that doesn’t wear out! There is a car battery that keeps its promises! That’s good news! And I would use those things on the air if they were not in the body of the commercial.”

For the record — and Harvey himself has stressed this many times — he is not, nor has he ever been, a serious newsman, one to whom listeners turn for an unbiased, cut-and-dried view of the world. Rather, like his offspring Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh and Don Imus, he is beloved largely because of his biases, his willingness to take a stand on something, whether a political issue or a brand of motor oil. His views haven’t always been popular — as when he supported Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s 1950s witch hunt, or when he did a sudden flip-flop on Vietnam, declaring, “Mr. President, I love you, but you’re wrong,” or when he referred to welfare recipients as “pusillanimous parasites” — but they’ve always been his.

“I don’t think of myself as a profound journalist,” he told Larry King. “I think of myself as a professional parade watcher who can’t wait to get out of bed every morning and rush down to the teletypes and pan for gold.” Introspecting further, he declared, seasoned pro to seasoned pro, “I think all of us, if we’re worth our salt, we’re for certain things and we’re against certain things. And it seems more honest to me to call it ‘Paul Harvey News and Comment’ and just let it all hang out. Because each of us expresses comment if only by what we read and what we toss in the wastebasket.”

Nowadays, even if he isn’t quite what he used to be, and even if far more insolent men like Stern and Limbaugh make buckets of dough and boast millions of equally fervent fans, Harvey still rules the airwaves if for no other reason than he was there first; he showed them how it’s done. Following in the footsteps of such talk-radio revolutionaries as Edward R. Murrow and Walter Winchell, he damn near single-handedly, and without porn stars, strippers or drunken dwarves, supercharged a medium that had been underutilized and underappreciated for years.

Beginnings were humble, but it was an impressive climb to the top. From the early days at KVOO in his hometown of Tulsa, Okla., to his stints in St. Louis and Kalamazoo, Mich., Harvey’s onward and upward trajectory has rarely, if ever, veered far off course. Even when he branched into television and print, people watched, people read. This across-the-board success, as insiders know and Harvey frequently admits, has as much to do with his wife, Lynne Harvey, a former schoolteacher whom Harvey dubbed “Angel” shortly after he proposed to her during the first minutes of their first conversation more than 50 years ago, as it does with Harvey himself. It took Angel a year to say yes, but when she did the duo made history. “She is still one of the daintiest, most feminine creatures I’ve ever known,” Harvey often says, frequently following up the sentiment with talk of her Phi Beta Kappa key.

At St. Louis station KXOK, Angel began writing and producing for her husband, and together they began sculpting the Paul Harvey persona. When, during World War II, Harvey, who’d accepted a post in Kalamazoo, briefly enlisted in the Air Force Air Cadets, Angel assumed the helm. Shortly after his return, they moved to Chicago, where in 1945 he began hosting the postwar employment program “Jobs for G.I. Joe” on ABC affiliate WENR-AM. “Paul Harvey News” went national the next year. In 1951, Harvey moved on to a gig with ABC Radio Networks, and there he remains to this day.

“I was willing to settle for a much smaller responsibility elsewhere,” he confessed to “Tomorrow” host Tom Snyder in 1977. “I was rather terrified by the big city.”

And although he is rarely seen on city streets or at after-hours events (largely due to a grueling, self-imposed daily schedule that begins at 3:30 a.m. and goes until early evening), Harvey continues to base himself in Chicago, flying to corporate speaking engagements in his Lear jet, commuting via limo from his 27-room manse in River Forest, Ill., broadcasting from his 16th floor downtown studios, near a street sign that reads Paul Harvey Drive.

But why Chicago? Why not New York? Shouldn’t a powerhouse like Harvey disseminate the good word from our country’s media epicenter? Apparently not.

“I can’t keep my perspective in New York City,” Harvey explains to those who wonder why he stays rooted in the Midwest. “I’m very impressionable, and after a few weeks in New York I come to think that the sun rises behind the U.N. building and sets in the Appalachians and that’s all there is to this country. I want to be out there where the votes come from. I want to see our country with a wide-angle perspective.”

Fiery as ever, Harvey continues to bask in his regular-guyness, because those are the kind of guys Chicago breeds: regular ones, middle Americans with broad shoulders (if only figuratively), a taste for meat and a deep-seated disdain for East Coast haughtiness. In short, he continues to convince legions of listeners that he is one of them. Which is mostly true, except for the money, the power and the pipes, those exquisitely burnished golden pipes that recently picked up right where they left off — “Hello, Americans!” — for which more than 18 million devotees and countless sponsors were no doubt grateful.

And if Harvey has his way, he’ll keep going until he can go no more, or at least until his current contract expires in 2010, whichever comes first. “Retiring,” he believes, “is just practicing up to be dead. That doesn’t take any practice.” As the Voice of America would surely remind you, “Every pessimist who ever lived has been buried in an unmarked grave. Tomorrow has always been better than today, and it always will be.”

Then, out of nowhere, out of Africa, came Babatunde Olatunji, drummer, singer, sage. He of the primal chants and flowing robes and tribal beats, a strange stranger in a strange land. No one, not even his African-American brothers and sisters, really knew what to make of him at first. But if ever the country was primed for something new, something wild, it was now, and soon he turned gapes and murmurs into smiles and cheers, and hi-fi’s everywhere pulsed with the strains of the aptly titled “Drums of Passion,” Olatunji’s breakthrough release on Columbia Records. Four decades later, the album has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and has inspired beyond measure, musically and otherwise.

But then, it’s always been Olatunji’s nature to inspire, to teach, to enlighten. In fact, he has long looked the part of the proverbial sage on a mountaintop, the serene soul perched at the precipice, ready to illumine world-weary travelers. His visage, strikingly beatific, is the sort of preternatural mug that quells evil spirits and tames wild beasts. His voice, still thick with the timbre of his native Nigeria, is both soothing and fervid, equally suited for bedtime stories and suicide prevention. And his graceful comportment radiates an aura of supreme confidence, which no doubt helps stoke the illusion that he is vertically endowed, a veritable giant among men, when in fact he is only 5-foot-7. But these extraordinary attributes are mere complements to his most dazzling quality, that which has rendered Olatunji a near diety in the eyes of millions: his undisputed mastery of conga drums.

“Rhythm,” he often says, “is the soul of life!” It is a credo to which he has subscribed since he was raised on rhythm in Ajido, a Nigerian village peopled by the millions-strong Yoruba tribe. There, he was schooled early in what he has termed the “evocative power” of drums, specifically, conga drums hand-fashioned from wood and goat hide. They gave voice to happenings profound and mundane, to births and deaths and everything in between. They were, in effect, the chief chroniclers of village life and thus were carefully hand-crafted so as to resonate with maximum effectiveness. Even today, Olatunji’s instruments retain a certain proletarian quality owing much to workmanship that has changed little in centuries.

“There’s a trinity about drums,” he has noted. “There’s got to be a spirit in the body of the drum. And the wood has to stay alive in order for it to produce sound. The skin on the drum is alive, too. But you’ve got to know how to tan it, because when it [encounters] the spirit of the person playing it, it then becomes an irresistible force.”

In 1950, Olatunji applied for and received a Rotary scholarship to attend Moorehouse College in Atlanta. Bent on bettering the lives of his Nigerian compatriots, he strove to become a diplomat, spending his undergraduate years studying political science, sociology and psychology, disciplines in which he might find ways to quell the civil unrest that threatened the world, especially his motherland, Nigeria, and his adoptive land, America. It wasn’t until he formed a small drum and dance ensemble during his postgraduate days at New York University, where he continued his diplomatic track with the study of public policy, that he rediscovered the captivating, transcendent effect of his native music on American audiences. Olatunji soon ceased his academic endeavors and dedicated himself to the drums.

It was 1958, and the boy who had dreamed of one day becoming an ambassador was now a man on the way to attaining his goal. Not officially, and certainly not in the traditional sense, but what did it matter? Music and rhythm spoke louder than words, anyway. And the time was ripe for social revolution: His sudden rise to fame came during an era that witnessed America’s most epic (and tragic) struggle for civil equality.

In this same period, the year before he and his congas would pierce universal consciousness, he began his musical ministry in earnest. He even toured portions of the United States with Martin Luther King Jr., drumming at civil rights rallies and other such assemblies. He would do likewise later with Malcolm X. Consequently, Olatunji’s name soon became linked as much with social issues as with music, though his ardent activism never overtook his affinity for the stage.

Among the countless performances he gave was a high-profile gig with the Radio City Symphony at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, where there happened to be a Columbia Records executive in attendance. Impressed by Olatunji’s raw, exotic riffs, he immediately signed his new find and introduced him to one of Columbia’s top music producers, John Hammond. An A&R wiz who would go on to bring Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen into the Columbia fold, Hammond helped sculpt Olatunji’s unique sound while maintaining its searing integrity. The resulting “Olatunji! Drums of Passion” set ears and souls afire.

Before the album was released, or even titled, however, Olatunji, a spirited proponent of musical education programs, told the Columbia suits of his notion to tour elementary schools, first in New York City and neighboring states, then nationally, to promote the album and showcase this revolutionary sound of his. Of course, it wasn’t revolutionary to him, but to most everyone else it was cutting edge. Record company flacks also seemed to think it was a bit risqui, especially for children. Think of the children! “[Columbia] said, ‘What are you going to take that to schools for? What are we going to call it? ‘” Olatunji recalled. “And I said, ‘Drums of Passion!’ They hesitated. Now, when you think of the language on television today, the fact that they hesitated is amazing!”

Consequently, the tour received no promotional support from the label. But Olatunji maintained his course and, in the spring of 1959, having secured sponsorship from the Organization for Childhood Education and the Rockefeller Foundation, he struck an agreement with the New York Board of Education whereby he would perform at weekly school assemblies in Queens, Long Island, Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. He did likewise at schools in New Jersey and Connecticut, then convinced other school systems around the country to follow New York’s example, and began a nationwide sweep. At a few hundred dollars per gig, the tour would by no means make him wealthy, but it would allow him to showcase his music before throngs of malleable young minds, the next wave of voters and politicos and power brokers.

Two youths in particular who witnessed Olatunji’s awesome exhibition and, consequently, became lifelong disciples, were the late comic Andy Kaufman and Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, both of whom were elementary students on Long Island, where Yoruba tribesmen aren’t exactly commonplace. Thus, Olatunji, with his otherworldly garb and rough-hewn instruments of beast hide and teak (this was the anti-Fabian if ever there was one) had their rapt attention even before skin met skin.

Kaufman, for one, was so impressed that he soon purchased his own congas and sought out lessons from the master himself at one of Olatunji’s many outposts in Greenwich Village. Years later, he even went so far as to incorporate his own alien breed of conga drumming into many of his performances. Hart, similarly floored by Olatunji’s impassioned exhibit, followed a more predictable and infinitely more renowned percussive path, eventually joining forces with psychedelic kingpin Jerry Garcia to form the Grateful Dead.

During his promotional tour for “Drums of Passion,” and on tours for his subsequent Columbia albums in the early- to mid-1960s, Olatunji, whose fame was rising steadily, continued to champion education and social reform. His chant “Akiwowo,” from “Drums of Passion,” got frequent airplay on mainstream New York radio courtesy of WLWU DJ Murray the K, and on the television front, Olatunji made appearances on Ed Sullivan’s variety program in 1961, and Johnny Carson’s then New York-based “The Tonight Show” in 1963.

In late August 1963, upon completing an extended engagement at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, he sped (literally — he got a ticket along the way) cross-country to attend the March on Washington in the nation’s capital, the storied gathering at which King delivered his prescient “I have a dream” speech, which echoed Olatunji’s beliefs and hopes. Inspired, he began to more fully realize how his growing celebrity could be an effective vehicle for his own cultural and political agendas.

The next year, following performances at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, where he was hired as a featured performer on the African Pavilion, one of 36 such pavilions that spotlighted foreign artists, Olatunji used most of his modest paycheck to establish the Olatunji Center for African Culture at 43 E. 125th St. in Harlem. For the next quarter century, until it closed in 1988, he and his volunteer staff hosted workshops and offered music and dance lessons (only $2 apiece), all intended to promote African culture.

By 1966, Olatunji’s contract with Columbia ended following his sixth album for the label, “More Drums of Passion,” intended as a sequel to his triumphant debut effort. But it, as well as the four albums he’d recorded during the years in between (“Afro Percussion,” “Zungo!” “Flaming Drums!” and “Highlife,” the last being the most jazz-infused of the lot), failed to achieve the widespread popular and critical acclaim of their predecessor. And so, for the next two decades, Olatunji found himself spending much more time on the road than in the studio, tooling cross-country in a station wagon to various performances, largely at universities, where he happily, passionately preached his philosophy of peace, love and knowledge through rhythm.

He occasionally returned to the studio to make guest appearances on records of such celebrated jazzmen as Cannonball Adderly and Pee Wee Ellis. And while he never had a chance to do so with John Coltrane, he remained a prime influence on the lauded saxophonist who, impressed not only by Olatunji’s percussive prowess, but by his efforts to revive African culture in America, even lent monthly financial support to the Olatunji Center in Harlem until his untimely death in 1967.

Cut to: Oakland, Calif., New Year’s Eve, 1985: After toiling in relative obscurity for nearly 20 years, this was a second chance of which Olatunji had not even dreamed. His former pupil Mickey Hart, now a world-famous rock ‘n’ roll drummer, had reintroduced himself to his mentor at one of Olatunji’s shows in San Francisco and invited Olatunji to open for the Grateful Dead at a New Year’s bash at the Oakland Coliseum. Hart, from day one a fervent champion of Olatunji’s, figured it was about time student and teacher combined forces to blow some minds, not to mention roofs.

And his instincts were right. It was a stunning night, one that saw Olatunji in top form, flailing and tapping and thumping and chanting, ushering in the new year the only way he knew how: with a bang (actually, many bangs), not a whimper. The tie-dye ocean swirled. The capacity crowd crowed, grooved to the beat, even sang along. In short, they dug it, and dug it big. Baba, as he’d become fondly known, rocked the house. Baba was back.

Proclaimed Olatunji, “When I think of that night, it gladdens my heart.” Hart, too, saw the crowd’s zeal and realized what potential there was in collaborating with his boyhood hero. Beginning in 1986, Olatunji and Hart created “Drums of Passion: The Invocation,” a collection of Yoruba tribal devotions to various gods, with Hart producing and occasionally accompanying on hoop drum and concussion stick. The album, which also featured the guitar licks of longtime Olatunji fan Carlos Santana, hit the shelves in 1988. Hart also reintroduced Olatunji’s 1986 album of love songs, “Dance to the Beat of My Drum,” which was renamed “Drums of Passion: The Beat,” and re-released as part of Hart’s international series “The World” in 1989.

But it wasn’t until 1991, when Olatunji and Hart formed the group Planet Drum, that their efforts received large-scale attention and praise. The ensemble’s first album, “Planet Drum,” earned a Grammy award and exposed Olatunji to yet another generation of listeners. Six years later, their 1997 effort “Love Drum Talk” garnered Grammy attention as well, though this time only a nomination. Nevertheless, it got some critical raves. The Jazz Times review called the album “a powerfully infectious meditation on the nature of indiscriminate love that grooves as it teaches … [Olatunji] delivers the cure once again.”

Olatunji, now 72, still resides in New York, his epicenter for more than four decades. While he is somewhat grayer and slower-moving than when he began, his social activism is stronger than ever (not long ago he attended his first star-studded Hollywood charity function at the home of Goldie Hawn), He continues to teach and perform around the city, the country and the world; it is a calling taken seriously, heeded joyously. Plainly put, Baba loves his work.

“The spirit of the drum is something that you feel but cannot put your hands on,” he once mused, attempting to explain the allure of his craft. “It does something to you from the inside out . . . it hits people in so many different ways. But the feeling is one that is satisfying and joyful. It is a feeling that makes you say to yourself, ‘I’m glad to be alive today! I’m glad to be part of this world!’”

Upon arriving in Burbank, Calif., for taping, Lenzi learned that his transformation would be presided over by a man named Bill Belew. At first, the name had merely a familiar ring. Then it clicked. “You’re not the Bill Belew, are you?” Lenzi asked incredulously, almost reverently, when the two met.

“Yes, I am,” Belew said.

Lenzi’s jaw dropped — he knew, as any diehard Elvis maven would, that Belew wasn’t just any costume designer. He was, in fact, Elvis Presley’s costume designer and personal fashion guru for nearly a decade. “I was in awe,” Lenzi recalls.

The Belew-Presley union began in 1968, when the producers of Presley’s NBC “comeback” special, “Elvis,” who’d worked previously with Belew on a Petula Clark production, invited the designer to create some hip threads for the now-legendary program that would herald the swivel-hipped one’s second coming. When asked what “look” he envisioned for Elvis, Belew claims he knew almost immediately. “It always seemed like people assumed he wore black leather,” he says, “but he never did. He may have worn a leather jacket, but that’s about it. At that time, though, we were into denim, and I said, ‘What if I just duplicate a denim outfit in black leather?’ Elvis loved it.” And so the cowhide was procured and fashioned and fitted, then later, after the second stand-up show, pried by Belew with much difficulty from Elvis’ sweat-soaked body.

If clothes make the man, then Belew’s clothes made The Man — made him sultrier, flashier, manlier. Following the success of the NBC special, which reinvented Elvis not only musically, but physically, Belew realized what promise there was in this alliance. “He was a great person to dress,” Belew says. “He had a terrific build at that point . . . [But] at the time we started in Vegas, everything was Liberace. And I would see these outlandish things with fur and feathers and think, ‘That’s not going to be Elvis. And if that’s what he wants, he can get somebody else.’ I wanted the clothes to be easy and seductive and that was it. And I never wanted anything to compromise his masculinity.”

Of course, as Elvis’ popularity grew, so did his fans’ unconditional love. Consequently, Belew felt he had more freedom to produce increasingly intricate and outrageous designs. “I kept most of his things very simple in the early days,” Belew says. “We just watched the reaction from the fans, and that’s how we began to get more elaborate.”

In August 1970, when Elvis stormed Sin City for a triumphant stand at the International Hotel, Belew hunkered amid the capacity crowd, gauging its response to the conch-shell-studded, macrami-adorned, karate-style jumpsuit that Elvis worked expertly as though it were a second skin. Needless to note, it, and Elvis, went over big. Proclaimed a friend of Belew’s during the show, “He’s like a panther stalking that stage, exuding sexuality.”

Almost from the start there had been an unusual level of trust and familiarity between the two. To Elvis, Belew was never Bill, but Billy, and most of his designs were approved on sight, something that shocked and delighted Belew. In part, the fast fraternity stemmed from a shared sense of lineage, as both men were reared in the south — Elvis in Tupelo, Miss., and Memphis, Tenn.; Belew in Charlottesville, Va. — by doting, plump (“big-boned,” euphemizes Belew) matriarchs with a penchant for all things culinary.

In subsequent years, as Belew’s loyalty and talent continued to impress his employer, he became Elvis’ personal fashion designer (often spending upwards of $15,000 a month on custom clothing) and confidante. Elvis even bestowed upon him a coveted gold diamond-and-lightening-bolt-festooned “TCB” (Taking Care of Business in a Flash) necklace that was proffered to all the King’s men, a small inner circle often dubbed the “Memphis mafia.” Says Belew, “I thought, ‘Oh, shit, I really have come into it now!’”

As the years passed and Elvis’ career entered its high renaissance, Belew, though not under exclusive contract to Presley, was always on hand to conjure up eminently memorable stage outfits, including the fiery, Japanese-inspired “Red Dragon” jumpsuit, the “Burning Flame of Love” and the showy powder-blue number that Elvis wore during his 15-city U.S. tour in 1972.

But perhaps the most memorable get-up of all was the one Elvis sported for his fabled “Aloha from Hawaii” worldwide telecast in 1973. Not only was the outfit white, as they all would be subsequently (white was easier to light), and grandiose and profusely adorned with all sorts of fabulously gaudy trinkets, but its finishing touch was one that would be forever allied with Elvisian lore: The Cape.

There had been capes before this — the very idea having been inspired a year or so prior by Priscilla Presley, who showed Belew a black and red number she’d bought for her husband on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills — but never anything quite this ornate (it was adorned with a silver mirror-embroidered rendition of an American eagle) or cumbersome. In fact, says Belew of the latter quality, he purposely made two sizes for that reason alone: A hefty floor-length one for Elvis’ grand entrance, and a more functional mid-length mantle that would allow the singer a greater range of motion while performing. “It was such a swashbuckling thing, and he just had a way with it,” remembers Belew. “Immediately, he knew how he wanted to work it, what he wanted to do with it. And it just all came together.”

But it almost didn’t. “The night of the show, I got a call from [Elvis' friend and bodyguard] Joe Esposito, who said, ‘You’re not gonna believe what happened.’” Belew recounts. “And the only thing that came to my mind was, Oh, my God, he split the costume! Turns out he got a little wild during dress rehearsal and threw the short cape into the audience.”

As if that wasn’t enough, Esposito also informed Belew that when Elvis had tried on the long version, it was so heavy he literally couldn’t stand, much less strut about the stage. “He told me Elvis was lying on the floor, roaring with laughter,” Belew says. To compound matters even further, Elvis, generous to a fault, had given away his large white bejeweled belt, which bore the eagle motif in miniature, to a friend, the wife of “Hawaii Five-O” star Jack Lord.

It was, in short, sartorial pandemonium. So Belew, who’d remained in L.A. to invent frilly fashions for comic Flip Wilson’s popular character, Geraldine, quickly gathered his wits, marshaled his troops and in less than a day, had a new ensemble ready to ship off to Hawaii. Initially, Esposito offered to send Presley’s private jet to fetch costume and costumer and whisk them off to Oahu. But since Belew was busy dolling up Wilson, he sent a colleague to deliver the goods. “I was told that [Elvis' people] had two first-class tickets waiting for him,” Belew recalls with a hint of envy. “One for him, and one for the belt and cape. Here I am dressing Flip as Geraldine, and he’s flying to Hawaii to bask in the sun and have a great time. We joked about that for years.”

Belew remained Presley’s designer for another four years, occasionally, surreptitiously, adjusting garments to accommodate the King’s burgeoning girth. But the Count of Monte Cristos never caught on. When Elvis died in August 1977, wakes were held at Graceland and throngs of grieving mourners filed past Elvis’ coffin to pay their final respects. For his farewell performance, Presley was dressed in a simple white suit, a gift from his father. It was the first time in years he’d worn attire which had not been designed by Belew.

Now 71, Belew, semi-retired in Palm Springs, Calif., occasionally lends his talents to various productions. But he does so mostly to keep himself busy. A fixture among the music, film and theater set for nearly five decades, he has enjoyed an unusually long and fruitful career, during which he has dressed the likes of The Band, Lena Horne, Ella Fitzgerald, Gladys Knight, Milton Berle and scores of others. But the pinnacle of his life, he says, was his years with Presley.

“He was one of the few people I’ve designed for who was able to carry it off,” Belew says of Elvis’ innate ability to animate the fashion extravaganzas the costumer created for him. “To this day, people say to me, ‘So you’re the one who put Elvis in rhinestones and all that.’ And I just say, ‘Yeah, I’m the one.’”