Looking at her mother’s face in profile as she gazed at the Hudson River out the train window, Charlotte could see a grim set to her mouth, the worry lines in her brow even at rest. She was devoted to her mother; “after some important event,” wrote a friend, “[Charlotte] could not rest till she had written her mother about it.” Her brother Charlie was working as a sales clerk in New York, and Susan was staying with relatives. So it was Mary Eliza and young Augustus who would be joining Charlotte in Albany. Augustus would go to school nearby in Greenbush while Charlotte worked. It was a sacrifice for everyone, but she was convinced it would be worth it.
By now, she believed that acting was her divine path. As her former pastor Mr. Emerson put it, “to create is the proof of a Divine presence… whoever creates is God.”
“God helped me in my art-isolation,” she later wrote. Even her father’s disappearance had pushed her toward this goal. “If I had been spared this early trial,” she wrote to a friend, “I should never have been so earnest and faithful in my art… given my entire self to my work.” While most women her age were having children, she determined to be married to her art. What she did want was to keep working so she could give her family some financial security and her little brother a new life.
Augustus sat next to her on the train. For him, travel was still a novelty. She loved having him close, and had found him a good school just across the river from Albany. Charlotte looked forward to the day when Augustus would surpass her. She believed he was the cleverest in the family and, though born into greater poverty than she, “keener, more artistic, more impulsive, more full of genius.”
Greenbush Classical School was a small boarding school for the sons of New York’s elite. Many of Augustus’s future classmates were the children of New York state senators who worked across the river. The ancient pine forests the area was named after rose up around it, deep green and intoxicating. Charlotte, who loved horses, admired the wide open meadows.
After getting Augustus settled, Charlotte and Mary Eliza continued on to the capitol. Crossing the Hudson River, they traveled along one of a series of roads that radiated from the center of Albany like a star, or like the wheel of fate. It was called a turnpike, named after the spiked wheel medieval kings placed across roads to defend against enemies or extort tolls from their people. The theatres here drew large crowds of many races, made up of the merchants who brought goods to and from the largest port on the Eastern Seaboard and to ships bound west along the newly completed Erie Canal—which connected the Hudson River at Albany with Lake Erie.
Charlotte performed almost nightly in starring roles. She and Mary Eliza lived in a hotel occupied by members of the state senate and house of representatives, and they soon discovered that one of the outgoing representatives was Mary Eliza’s cousin. The connection helped them gain the trust and patronage of the wealthy and powerful politicians who ran the city. The joke was that “more of the members of both houses could be found at [Charlotte’s] performances than at the capitol.”
In the mail one morning Charlotte received an invitation to the extravagant “fireman’s ball,” an annual dance and benefit that was also an opportunity to mingle. Making an impression there, she knew, could help her career, but it had to be the right one. On the night of the event she spent several hours getting ready, adding a surprising final touch to her usual simple silk dress. On top of her head she pinned an “immense bird of paradise,” with eye-catching orange-and-purple plumage. With her height, heeled shoes, and the bird on her head she towered above her companions.
Theatre folk knew how to camouflage flaws. For example, men concealed bandy legs under layers of padded stockings to create the illusion of fullness, while women dyed their hair or wore prosthetic bosoms. But instead of minimizing her oddities, Charlotte exaggerated what many considered her defects.
The effect was mixed. Men and women disagreed about her appearance; to many men she was simply ugly, a “bull in black silk,” while women tended to admire the way she embodied both masculine and feminine. One female critic described her face as “harsh, but harmonious as Beethoven’s chords and discords.” It pained Charlotte to be judged by her appearance, but she refused to hide and at the fireman’s ball she danced all evening. The local newspaper reported that, at the ball, Charlotte was “magnificently attired… she was the observed of all observers, the bright particular star of the evening.”
Fame can be fickle, but Charlotte had a canny sense of occasion, and knew how to use it to appeal to her audiences’ emotions. At one of her benefit performances, an evening where she would receive all the proceeds from ticket sales, she made the occasion about “Albanians” rather than herself. Before the performance, she found out the names of all the firemen in the city, including the name of every foreman and engineer and of every fire engine. After the benefit, she read a poem she’d composed in honor of the firemen. The literary critic for Ladies Companion magazine praised her writing, marveling that she had managed to fit in every name “without injuring the harmony of the verse.”
Charlotte’s fame grew, and her performances at the Pearl Street Theatre attracted Albany’s most fashionable crowd. She began to get offers to perform with famous actors. In October 1836, the legendary Junius Brutus Booth came to town and asked for her to be his Lady Macbeth. Charlotte had grown up hearing Booth’s name; when she was celebrating her first birthday, he was publishing the first volume of his memoirs. Booth was British, but America was his adopted home. He had
