On April 2, 1968, America watched as, for the first time, a white woman touched a black man’s arm on primetime television. The white woman was Petula Clark, the two-time Grammy-winning British singer with a slew of top 10 hits, including “Downtown” and “My Love;” at the time, she was a popular guest on variety series ranging from Shindig!, Hullabaloo, and Where the Action Is (for the kids) to The Ed Sullivan Show and The Hollywood Palace (for the adults). The black man was Harry Belafonte, the Grammy-winning American singer and civil-rights advocate whose signature tune, “The Banana Boat Song,” brought calypso music to a mainstream audience. That fleeting moment was controversial enough to prompt an executive with the Chrysler Corporation, the program’s sponsor, to protest vehemently—turning what one critic would eventually call “a stylish, sophisticated musical hour” into an inter-racial cause célèbre.

To this day, Clark cannot believe that “the incident” caused such a “rumpus.” She didn’t invite Belafonte to appear on the special in order to make a cultural statement: “As far as I was concerned, he was just a great artist,” she says now. “I’m a very organic performer. There are no big statements. Things just happen.”

“To this day, I can’t think of another special that had such an impact on me as far as the emotional drama and trauma,” director Steve Binder tells Vanity Fair. (This from the man who directed The Star Wars Holiday Special.) He also directed some of television’s finest hours, including Elvis, the 1968 so-called comeback special, and Diana Ross: Live in Central Park, as well as what some consider to be the best rock-concert movie, period: The T.A.M.I. Show. (It’s the one in which James Brown upstaged the Rolling Stones.) Binder was recruited to step in when the special’s original director didn’t click with the Clark, putting the project in peril. “I got this panicked phone call to fly immediately to Switzerland, where Petula and her husband, Claude Wolff, had their winter home,” he recalls. “I pitched her my concept of the kind of specials I wanted to do—created from scratch and tailored to the artist, so that if the artist wasn’t able to execute it, that would be the end of it.”

A whirlwind 72 hours later, a “wiped out” Binder was back in Los Angeles. He got the call; Petula was in.