In January 1973, Elvis Presley was about to do something no entertainer had done before. His concert in Honolulu would beam out live by satellite to living rooms all over the world, one of the biggest TV audiences ever gathered for a single show. He wanted to look the part.
So he went to the man who dressed him. Bill Belew was the designer behind Elvis’s famous jumpsuits, the one who had built his look for years. Elvis gave him a simple brief.
“He said ‘Bill, I just want the suit to say America’,” Belew remembered.
Belew answered with the white American Eagle jumpsuit, a gold eagle stitched across the front. And he dreamed up a grand entrance to go with it. Elvis would walk out with his back to the crowd, throw open a huge floor-length cape with the eagle spread wide, then turn slowly to face everyone. On the biggest night of his career, it would have been a showstopper.
The cape was finished and shipped to Hawaii. That’s where the trouble started.
Belew wasn’t in Honolulu himself. He got the news by phone. Elvis had put the cape on, gone to step forward, and, the way Belew tells it, fell over backward. The thing was simply too heavy to move in.
“The cape was so heavy that he couldn’t even walk in it,” Belew said.
Then came the call. “‘Bill, that the cape is great but Elvis can’t move in it’.” With the live broadcast almost on top of them, there was no time to start over properly. Belew’s team raced to build a second, much shorter cape from scratch.
“We had just a little over a day,” he said. “We worked literally 24 hours on it.”
That short cape is the one Elvis actually wore when the cameras went live, and the one millions of people around the world saw that night. The giant floor-length version, the one he couldn’t walk in, never made it on stage at all.
Here is the real long cape, the one Belew says knocked him off balance, filmed up close years later when it came up for auction.
The real floor-length eagle cape, seen up close at auction
The numbers tell the story. By one auction house’s measure the long cape weighs around 12 pounds and runs almost five feet. It stayed at Graceland for decades before a 1999 charity sale, and it has changed hands more than once since.
And the short cape? You can watch it do its job. This is Elvis opening the show with “See See Rider,” the lighter cape on his shoulders, exactly as Belew’s team rushed it into being.
Elvis opening the Aloha from Hawaii show in the cape the world saw
It worked. Nobody watching at home knew there had ever been another plan, or that the grand eagle cape was sitting backstage the whole time, too heavy to wear.