Friday January 16th 2004 (12.01am)

Search has been a hard day's night

Fans seek the girl who jump-started Beatlemania

By Edna Gundersen
USA TODAY

For the moment, she's a real nowhere fan. Fab Four fanatics are searching for one of their own, a Maryland fan whose letter to a local DJ in 1963 helped incite Beatlemania.

Today, exactly 40 years after I Want to Hold Your Hand was certified the band's first No. 1 hit in the USA. The Fab 40! Committee, a collective of Beatles experts and enthusiasts, will announce details of its search for Albert at a news conference in New York.

Marsha Albert, now 55, was a 15-year-old schoolgirl when she wrote a note to Carroll James at WWDC in Washington, D.C., the day after hearing Walter Cronkite's CBS report Dec. 10 on The Beatles phenom in England.

"Why can't we have music like that here in America?" she queried. James quickly obtained a copy of I Want to Hold Your Hand from a British flight attendant, enlisted Albert to introduce the song on the radio Dec. 17, and the fuse was lit. Requests flooded in, the buzz mounted, and stations elsewhere took notice. Though Capitol Records initially reacted with threats of a cease-and-desist order, the label ultimately rush released the record to stores Dec. 26, three weeks earlier than scheduled.

Fab 40! organizers hope to toast Albert at a party in New York's Hard Rock Café on Feb. 9, the 40th anniversary of The Beatles' first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. They were able to track the former resident of Silver Spring, Md., a mother of two, through the mid-'80s, but her whereabouts today are unknown. The Fab 40! plans to shower Beatles memorabilia on the first amateur sleuth who locates Albert.

(For details, visit www.thefab40.com.)

Though Sullivan is credited with breaking The Beatles here, Albert is considered by some the catalyst who set the stage for their frenzied reception. Albert's story is detailed in Bruce Spizer's The Beatles Are Coming! The Birth of Beatlemania in America, out today. When the band appeared on Sullivan Feb. 9, 1964, an unprecedented 73 million viewers, about 40% of the U.S. population, tuned in.

"There's no doubt whatsoever that The Beatles would have conquered America anyway," says Beatles historian and Fab 40! member Martin Lewis. "But the speed and magnitude of that stratospheric kick-off could not have happened without Marsha Albert. If the record had been released Jan. 13, as first planned, kids wouldn't have heard it 20 times a day, as they did during the school break. It would never have sold 1 million copies in three weeks. There wouldn't have been 10,000 kids at JFK to greet The Beatles. Marsha didn't start Beatlemania; she jump-started it."

Despite the band's enormous success at home, its explosive arrival here caught many by surprise. Capitol had declined to sign The Beatles four times. The music community was skeptical that legitimate rock 'n' roll, till then a homegrown commodity, could be imported.

"There was a history of one-hit wonders from Britain, and conventional wisdom said The Beatles would be a fad," Lewis says. "The attitude was, 'What can people overseas teach us about rock 'n' roll?' Thanks to the persistence and conviction of a few, we soon found out."

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