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Girls in poodle skirts and bobby socks helped turn Frank Sinatra into the first singer who opened up a young audience for pop music in the 1940s. Screaming teenage girls were part of “Sinatra mania,” but a decade later Elvis Presley upped the ante.

“There was something about Elvis Presley that gave them a joy that nobody else could,” says 86-year-old Maude Vance, a Memphian who remembers the debuts of both singers. “When Elvis started out, I thought his gyrations were so ugly, but once I got past that and learned to listen to him, I loved his voice.”

So did most of the world, and, more than 50 years later, music and movie producers compare Elvis with performers from Sinatra to Michael Jackson, and to film stars including Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe.

Can anyone else rival the enduring fame that regularly puts Elvis atop the annual Forbes magazine list of top-earning dead celebrities?

At Turner Classic Movies, Tom Brown, vice president of original productions, says Sinatra began as Elvis did, with screaming girls at his feet. “But people didn’t suddenly cut their hair real short, lose a lot of weight and wear a tuxedo to look like Sinatra.” Elvis arrived just as “history was looking for a change — something to break it out of that Leave It To Beaver-Eisenhower-Ozzie and Harriett mode. Elvis ignited that fire.”

From a musical standpoint, Rolling Stone music critic and historian Dave Marsh puts Elvis in a league by himself, describing him as the one enduring superstar. Marsh says such a level of celebrity will never happen again.

“It’s really inconceivable. You couldn’t get that many people unified with any one thing,” he says of the increasingly fragmented music industry. As for comparisons between Elvis and other superstar musicians, Marsh says, Elvis stands alone. Of potential contenders, he dismisses Barbra Streisand (”She was, like, for old people.”); Michael Jackson (”With all due respects to Michael Jackson, it was never even close.”) and Bob Dylan (”I don’t think so.”).

Michael Jackson, who billed himself as the “King of Pop” and was briefly wed to Elvis’ daughter Lisa Marie Presley, is in contention with Elvis and a select handful of artists, including The Beatles, as best-selling artists of all time.

Music producer and “American Idol” judge Randy Jackson says there are “only a couple of icons throughout history who changed music when they appeared. To me, the two biggest impacts were Elvis and Michael Jackson. He (Jackson) is not quite in the same league.”

Among established musicians, Randy Jackson says, no one — not Prince, not Sinatra, not Justin Timberlake — has been in the same league. “Today there’s no one even in earshot. Elvis pulverized the world. Elvis is another thing — a whole ‘nother thing.”

Jackson’s fellow music producer and “Idol” judge Simon Cowell says he, too, is a major Elvis fan. To him, only Sinatra might rival Presley. “I think you have to factor in many things. No. 1, I have yet to see anybody who’s had 50 percent of his (Elvis’) charisma since the day he was launched. Secondly, at the time he was launched what he did had an incredible shock value.”

Cowell said the world is no longer subject to being shocked. “We’ve practically seen inside of Madonna. There’s practically nothing else to see.”

Musical director Joe Guercio, who directed Elvis in concert during the latter part of his career, says that, like Elvis, Marilyn Monroe has endured longer than many would have imagined. Unlike Brando — “who grew up and got fat” — Presley and Monroe will be remembered primarily as young and attractive because of their early deaths. “Michael Jackson wouldn’t even have been in second place,” he says.

The Beatles are often compared to Elvis as ground-breaking musicians. “I think The Beatles, if they were one human being, could approach that,” says Guercio.

Arizona musician and art professor Bill Slater is co-author of a book devoted to comparing Elvis and The Beatles. Slater says that he agreed to play advocate for The Beatles in the book, but, in fact, he thinks Elvis is No. 1.

“He was in the right place at the right time with the right look. He managed to make something happen that has never happened before.” His co-author, Mike Shellans, wrote: “Elvis was the musical source, and The Beatles the greatest exponents and innovators springing from his musical well.”

Former University of Memphis communications professor Dr. John Bakke, who staged the first scholarly conference on Elvis in 1979, says that to find another Elvis would mean finding another time in history when the entire culture was on the verge of shifting. Then, someone would have to emerge with “enormous talent” able to bridge every division in society. Until then, Bakke says, Elvis is at No. 1 and no one, past or present, is a contender. “It’s not even close.”

Lester Bangs, the legendary Village Voice and Rolling Stone music critic, wrote at the time of Presley’s death, “I can guarantee you one thing: We will never again agree on anything as we agreed on Elvis.”

–Michael Lollar: 529-2793