Yes I had this problem too. I tried a few things that *should have* worked but didn't. In the end I forced it to in stall in /usr/local/lib and not the libevent directory. It was a little while back so fuzzy about the exact steps but the configure script was the problem. I did not specify any lib paths on my configure line.
One thing that does help it run the configure with sh -x ./configure [options] 2>&1 | tee report.dump and see exactly what configure thinks it needs to do.
The next problem you might encounter after this it the "test" of the libevent from configure giving and error. For me this was fixed by making sure LD_LIBRARY_PATH knew where to find it when configure was run.
Good luck.