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THE TIMES
Saturday 17th January 2004
The girl who gave a hand to America's Beatlemania By James Bone in New York THE teenage girl who prompted Beatlemania in America by requesting I Want to Hold Your Hand on the radio resurfaced yesterday as a middle-aged housewife after fans of the Fab Four launched a nationwide search. Marsha Albert, 55, was a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Silver Springs, Maryland, when she first heard the Beatles on a CBS television report about the group's phenomenal success in Britain. A snippet of the report had been shown on the morning news on November 22, 1963, the day that With the Beatles, the band's second album, was released in Britain, and the full four-minute version was to be broadcast on The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. But President Kennedy was shot that day and CBS cancelled its regular programming. Ms. Albert happened to be watching when the segment was finally aired on December 10. It opened with a clip of the Beatles playing She Loves You. The next day, she wrote to her local DJ, Carroll James of WWDC in Washington, asking: "Why can't we have music like that here in America?" Mr. James, who had also seen the CBS report, got a BOAC flight attendant to bring him a copy of the Beatles' latest single from Britain. On December 17, 1963, he invited Ms. Albert to the studio to introduce I Want to Hold Your Hand. Listeners went berserk. "The switchboard went crazy," Mr. James recalled. "They were begging us to play it again, and you know, I did something that I had never done until that day - and that was play the same song twice during my show. For ten days, WWDC was the only station in America to have a copy." Capitol Records had not planned to release the Beatles record until January 13, 1964, and hired a lawyer to seek a cease-and-desist order. But the record label decided that it would be wiser just to bring forward the release date. The first copies were delivered to radio stations on December 26, catching teenagers at home during the Christmas holiday, and "Beatlemania" swept the nation. Within two weeks, the record sold more than one million copies. When the Beatles arrived for a previously scheduled trip to New York on February 7, 1964, they were mobbed at the airport by thousands of screaming fans. Their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show two days later was watched by 73 million people: the largest TV audience at that time. "Marsha Albert was responsible for jumpstarting Beatlemania in America," said Bruce Spizer, author of a new book entitled "The Beatles Are Coming! The Birth of Beatlemania in America." "What I find incredible is that a 15-year-old girl forced a major record label to push up the release date of a single by a to-them relatively unknown band," he said. "We had in America about three extra weeks of extra airplay. What was significant was not just the three weeks, but the timing of the three weeks. We had kids out of school for Christmas who had money from Christmas presents." A "Fab 40! Committee" of Beatles associates launched a search for Ms. Albert to commemorate yesterday's 40th anniversary of I Want to Hold Your Hand, topping the charts as the Beatles' first Number One record in America. Martin Lewis, the organiser, said: "If she had not done what she did the record company would not have put out the record in December, there would have been no fans at the airport and there would not have been 73 million people tune in. The search ended when The Washington Post found Ms Albert living with her husband in a 200-year-old home they are restoring in a suburb of the US capital. Ms. Albert bought all the Beatles records in her youth, went to college, worked as a computer programmer, and then became a housewife. She still has the BOAC-delivered disc of I Want To Hold Your Hand given to her by Mr.James. But she considers herself a "little asterisk" to Beatles history and avoids publicity. She says that watching the Beatles on CBS moved her to write to her local DJ. "It wasn't so much what I had seen, it's what I had heard," she said. "They had a scene where they played a clip of She Loves You and I thought that was a great song. I'd never done anything like that before. We had a crummy little radio, and WWDC was about the only thing we could pick up. "We lived not far from the transmitter, and it came in really well so I listened to that every day. "I wrote that I thought (The Beatles) would be really popular here, and if (Mr. James) could get one of their records, that would really be great." Ms Albert met the Beatles when they played their first live concert in America at the Washington Coliseum, two days after their appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Mr. James, who died in 1997, invited her to the mobile WWDC studio where he interviewed the Fab Four. "I was standing there, just listening and kind of giggling because they were pulling Carroll James's leg, but he didn't really realize it, so it was kind of fun," Ms. Albert recalled. "They didn't really say much other than when Carroll James mentioned that I wrote the letter; that's when they said 'Thank you, Marsha'. I didn't really talk to them, but I did get their autographs."
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