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It made Elvis feel good to have Susan nearby. They were always joking and joshing and teasing with everybody, and to her, “he seemed very comfortable. He was happy to be back working.”

Elvis never let her know about his anxiety, but still, she saw herself as his support, since he asked her to stay for much of the taping. “I almost feel I was there to be his strength during that time. I would just be off on the side, and when he’s singing, you can often see him looking over that way.”

They saw each other for a year and a half. “And certainly we talked about the future.” But in the end, she didn’t think they had enough in common. She was ready to phase out of show business, and he was going in deeper. And while they shared a love of horses, his was an occasional interest, and hers was a passion—she would become one of the top horse breeders in America.

“The sparks and chemistry lasted with us. But I wasn’t prepared to follow anybody around the country. I still had a lot that I wanted to accomplish.” And, of course, there was another problem: “He had a multitude of women.”

The Bordello sequence would be cut from the original broadcast, as the sponsor was afraid it “might offend the little ol’ ladies in the Singer Sewing Centers across the country,” as Binder puts it. However, the segment was reinserted in the airings that followed.

On June 27 Elvis rehearsed the gospel medley, taped the carnival segment, and then went to his dressing room to rest before his two, one-hour sets before a live audience that evening. But shortly before the six o’clock taping, he panicked, reporting “sheer terror” that he might lock up once he got onstage. Binder had seen him agitated only once, when Finkel suggested they might need to lighten his hair (“Do you think my hair’s too black?”). But now Howe recognized a crisis: “He sat in that makeup chair and literally trembled, just really sweated. He said, ‘What am I going to do if they don’t like me?’ ” Binder reasoned with him and then asked Elvis to do it as a personal favor: “If you get out there and you have nothing to say and you can’t remember a song, then say, ‘Thank you,’ and come back. But you’ve got to go out there.”

It was his first serious musical performance in seven years. Although he was so nervous that his hand shook, he performed as an artist who was evergreen and timeless, and he revalidated his achievements and rendered himself fresh at the same time. When he lit into the rockabilly and blues that fueled the engine of his life, his energy blazed raw and palpable, his voice boasting a tough exuberance, his looks telegraphing sensuality, submission, cruelty. By the time he taped the arena segment two days later, he’d summoned such assurance that he was not so much a man, but a panther, feral in his black leather skin, growling, prowling, strutting across the stage.

For the production team, part of the thrill was seeing the metamorphosis take place. But Elvis may have had some help. After the first taping, when they had to peel the suit off him, Bill Belew went to Binder. “We have a problem,” he whispered. The suit would have to be cleaned: Elvis had experienced a sexual emission onstage. “That,” declares Binder, “is when I really believed that Parker had planted the seed through hypnotism that Elvis was the greatest sex symbol who ever existed. I don’t think he could have built himself up to have an orgasm unless there was a stimulus there to drive him to do that. I just felt it was not a normal act.”

The “stimulus” may have been Susan Henning, sitting offstage, but where Elvis could see her, as he requested. Either way, it was a remarkable reaction.

In a conversation with the late Dr. William Masters, who pioneered research into human sexual response with his wife, Virginia Johnson, psychologist Peter O. Whitmer asked about Elvis’s onstage climax, which was well known in show business circles. “Bill Masters said yes, it happens, but it’s very unusual. It shows the real depth of the drive of an individual to prove his abilities.