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On May 18, Elvis, Priscilla, and the baby flew to Honolulu, and while they had talked about the trip as being a second honeymoon, they also brought along Joe and Joanie Esposito, Patsy and Gee Gee Gambill, and Charlie Hodge. Elvis, determined to be in the best shape of his life, went on a crash diet and slacked off on his barbiturates so as not to impede his weight loss.

Still, he indulged his interests. A week after they arrived, the group attended Ed Parker’s championship karate tournament at the Honolulu International Center. Elvis had known Parker since 1961, but he had never met Mike Stone, the former international light-contact champion.

When the couple was introduced to the cocky young champ, Priscilla’s eyes lit up. She now looked at other men the way Elvis looked at women, and Stone was precisely her type. The twenty-four-year-old half-Hawaiian was the recognized bad boy of karate, a dangerous rebel who considered competition a blood sport. Moreover, he was dark-skinned and swarthy, which she found a turn-on. (“There is a certain strength I feel with dark men. They’re very virile.”)

Less than a year after their marriage, Elvis had heard that Priscilla was having an affair with her dance instructor, Steve Peck, a tall, dark, tough-talking Sicilian. And only recently, word had gotten back to him that she had danced and flirted with Little Anthony of the Imperials at a disco on a recent trip to New York. In fact, they’d had a terrible row about it.

Priscilla was just so tired of the lying, sick of the games, and especially angry that she and Elvis had not had full intercourse for ten months, while she knew he was getting sex elsewhere. As Joe remembers, “Often Elvis would say, ‘I’ve got to go away, honey, to get away from all the pressure.’ She’d say, ‘What pressure? You’re at home with your wife and daughter.’ And he’d go, ‘I’ve just got to get away,’ which meant he wanted to go out and fool around.”

What was good for the goose was now good for the gander. Priscilla’s flirtations with Steve Peck and Little Anthony wouldn’t amount to anything, but Mike Stone would be big trouble down the road. Elvis either didn’t see it coming, or didn’t care.

“This guy’s great,” he told her. “You should take karate lessons from him.” Priscilla would later tell Mike that she decided the day of the tournament that she would do exactly that. She also vowed that he would be her lover. There was something catlike about Mike Stone that she found irresistible. And the fact that Elvis admired him, that he couldn’t touch him in the sport they both loved and shared, made Mike an especially delicious conquest.

While Elvis was in Hawaii, Binder brought in writers Allan Blye and Chris Beard, who structured the special around Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1908 theater staple, The Blue Bird, in which a young girl and her brother leave home to pursue their cherished lost pet, quite literally the blue bird of happiness.

To tailor the theme for Elvis, Blye and Beard wove a medley of songs that told a story about an innocent, small-town boy who loves to play the guitar. Soon, he sets out to explore the world, traveling what he hopes will be the road to success. His journey leads him to a carnival boardwalk, a house of prostitution, a seedy dance bar, an upscale nightclub, and a stadium arena.

So that viewers would realize it was Elvis’s story, too, the team incorporated snippets of his own music, as well as a gospel segment that symbolized salvation. They’d use very little actual dialogue but rely on his song “Guitar Man” as an autobiographical cord to tie it all together.

It was a clever, if natural, concept, but a more inspired moment came from costume designer Bill Belew, who conceived Elvis’s now-famous black leather suit, a brilliant update of the classic ’50s motorcycle jacket, and an inside homage to James Dean and Marlon Brando, Elvis’s idols.

When he first saw the singer in the initial production meeting, Belew, a graduate of the Parsons School of Design, perked up: