History Matters: The story behind ‘Lost Boundaries’

Albert Johnston Jr. was 16 when he found out he was black. His fair-skinned African-American parents had been “passing” as white, they told him, since moving from Chicago to rural Gorham, New Hampshire, and later to Keene. Albert’s father had been the town’s country doctor with 2,500 white patients and an active member of the school board, the Masons and the Rotary. His mother, Thyra, was a two-time president of the Gorham Women’s Club and active in the Congregational Church.

Born in 1925, growing up skiing the White Mountains of the Granite State, Albert had only a single black acquaintance in high school. In an era of widespread racial segregation and discrimination, Albert felt a seismic shift as he adapted from a dark-skinned Caucasian to a light-skinned “Negro.”

Then Albert took a road trip. Two decades before Ken Kesey and Easy Rider, with only a few dollars in their pockets, Albert and an old school chum named Walt hitchhiked and hopped freight trains from New Hampshire to California. For Albert, it was a spiritual journey into the homes of his long-lost African-American relatives and into the roots of black culture. For Walt, who was white, it was a great adventure with a good friend. Albert eventually found his way home. Renewed and focused, he enrolled in the well-regarded music program at the University of New Hampshire.

And here, in a UNH college lounge in front of 20 fellow students, Albert Johnston Jr. finally laid his burden down. During a seminar on the “race problem” in America, the topic turned to “cross-bred” people. He could offer some insight on that topic, Albert told his classmates, because he, himself, was a Negro.

The room got very still, he later recalled, like the sudden silence after the climax of a concerto. The Johnston family secret was about to explode, first into the pages of Reader’s Digest magazine, and then as a controversial book and feature film called “Lost Boundaries.”

Enter the maverick movie mogul

While attending UNH, Alfred began to embrace his African-American roots and befriended other black students. When the group heard that an Academy Award-winning film producer lived only a few miles from the Durham campus, they arranged a field trip to meet him.

Louis de Rochemont, New Hampshire’s version of Cecil B. DeMille, was at the peak of his game and fame when the UNH contingent drove to the nearby town of Newington. They pulled up the circular driveway of the film producer’s grand home known as Blueberry Banke, settled on acres of farmland near the fast-flowing Piscataqua River.

De Rochemont was physically imposing and renowned for his mercurial moods, hard drinking and boundless curiosity. The creator of the famed “March of Time” film clips, de Rochemont had been a key source of news for millions of Americans before the advent of television. His previous two films had included FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and actor James Cagney.

“Sleep and rest don’t figure in his schedule,” the Reader’s Digest magazine reported. “He turns every job into a major adventure and all the time he talks your ear off about some new enthusiasm.”

According to film historian Larry Benaquist, the young black UNH students found de Rochemont seated in his sunny wood-paneled office, the walls lined with bookshelves.

“What can I do for you fellas?” de Rochemont asked.

“We know you make films about famous Americans,” Albert boldly told the producer. “There’s been all these movies about famous white Americans, like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison. Why don’t you think about making films about famous black people like George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington?”

De Rochemont was intrigued. Forever in search of bankable ideas for his films, he was fiercely patriotic, but also a progressive thinker with an urge to shape public opinion in postwar America.

‘Have I got a story for you!’

“Well, I can understand why these fellas are asking this question,” the producer said, referring to the young African-Americans. Then addressing Albert, he added, “But I don’t understand why you are - because you’re white - aren’t you?”

On hearing Albert’s story, legend says, de Rochemont immediately picked up his phone and called Hollywood studio executive Darryl F. Zanuck. “I have a great story idea for you, Darryl,” de Rochemont said.

But Zanuck, in an amazing coincidence, was at that very moment struggling to produce his own movie about racial passing. Zanuck’s film “Pinky” was about a light-skinned “mulatto” woman. After passing as a white nurse in the North, Pinky decides to return home to the South and run a school for black children, stirring controversy as she embraces her true identity.

Like de Rochemont, Zanuck was a social reformer who believed that movies could change attitudes. “We [filmmakers] must play our part in the solution of the problems that torture the world,” Zanuck told a congressional hearing in 1943. But one risky race film was enough for Zanuck, who turned down de Rochemont’s suggestion.

Breaking their silence

“I’ve got an arrangement with the Reader’s Digest,” de Rochemont then told Albert. “I can feed them stories. Then a year later, I have the rights to make a movie of it if I want to.”

So Albert hitchhiked home to Keene to confront his parents. They stayed up all night debating whether to go public with their family secret. After 12 years posing as a white country doctor, Albert Sr. was dead set against it. But his wife, Thyra, was weary of the deception.

“It was my decision,” Thyra told film historian Larry Benaquist many years later. “We were tired of hiding. It was time to tell our story.”

Albert wrote down the Johnston family story and got his parents to sign off on it. Reader’s Digest assigned the piece to William Lindsay White, whose previous book had been turned into a hit movie starring John Wayne. White’s article about the Johnstons appeared in December 1947 and brought a flood of letters from both whites and blacks praising the family for having the courage to speak out. It was followed by a slim 92-page hardcover called “Lost Boundaries,” centered primarily on Albert’s journey to find himself as “a Negro in a white-man’s world.”

Blurring the lines

True to his word, Louis de Rochemont began filming his version of “Lost Boundaries” soon after it appeared in print. But his Hollywood backers were not interested in a film about race relations. So the producer mortgaged his Blueberry Banke house toward a $664,000 production budget. After decades of globetrotting with “March of Time,” de Rochemont wanted to stick close to his Seacoast home. “Lost Boundaries” was shot locally using locals as extras. His next two feature films about a wildcat factory strike (“Whistle at Eaton Falls”) and stolen plans for an atomic bomb (“Walk East on Beacon Street”) were also filmed nearby.

De Rochemont’s decision to use white actors to play the Johnstons, renamed the Carters in the film, drew fire from some reviewers. But it was “Lost Boundaries” director Alfred Werker who enraged black movie critics when he explained that there were no qualified light-skinned black actors available who “could depict Negroes as fully realized citizens.” Both “Pinky” and “Lost Boundaries,” therefore, relied on white actors in key roles playing black people, who were passing as white.

While the concept of “passing” may appear offensive, politically incorrect, or merely silly today, de Rochemont has earned at least a footnote in history. He was the first to announce that a film based on the race issue was in production.

“Lost Boundaries” and other artistic works about “passing” blurred the color line. This tactic, de Rochemont believed, might help white Americans turn away from outmoded “separate but equal” legislation. But even as his fictionalized version of the Johnston family advocated for equal rights, it perpetuated racial stereotypes. The Carters were seen as “exceptional Negroes” who fled their ethnic origins to earn their place in white society. Also unfortunately, Louis de Rochemont’s film veered away from Albert Johnston’s journey of self discovery in an effort to create a family drama that would appeal to white audiences at the box office.

Made in New England

As many as 350 UNH students appeared as extras in the film. Seacoast residents will also recognize scenes shot at the Isles of Shoals, Whaleback Light in Kittery and Nubble Light in York, Maine. The director also features churches in Kennebunkport and Portsmouth, a dam in Durham, and Calef’s Country Store in Barrington. The rambling Colonial Sparhawk Mansion in Kittery Point, Maine, site of the fictional Carter family home in Keene, was torn down three years later.

The filmmaker earned his spot on the Portsmouth Black Heritage Trail when he stood up to the owner of the Rockingham Hotel during location shooting in the summer of 1948. De Rochemont had designated the historic Rockingham as his base of operations, but owner James Barker Smith was running an “exclusive” or “restricted” hotel. Black cast members were not welcome in the hotel. Flexing his financial muscle, the producer informed hotelier Smith that he could either accommodate the entire film cast and crew, black and white, or the entire operation would move elsewhere. Smith relented, if only briefly.

Portsmouth’s first-ever world film premiere on June 22, 1949, drew 3,100 viewers to four showings at the Colonial and Olympia theaters downtown. The Portsmouth Herald reported that the audience had to “choke back the emotions aroused by the bold story.”

Black actor and former boxer Canada Lee, who played a small role in the film, attended the Portsmouth premier. As he watched “Lost Boundaries” for the first time, Lee found himself warming to the film. It made him proud. Then the lights went up, he heard his name, and the burly man in the dark suit walked slowly onstage.

“It’s about America,” Canada Lee said of the film, “Our America that I read about in books when I was a boy - but was not so for me.”

“You see a picture like this, and hear all the applause coming from you people for what it’s trying to do,” Lee said, “and you begin to believe again.”

In an emotional moment, Lee spontaneously recited the lyrics to “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” then slipped away. When Albert Johnston Jr. and his family made a brief appearance on stage, the Portsmouth audience, filled with pride and admiration, erupted into thunderous applause.

This essay is copyright 2018 by J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved, and is adapted from a larger work on Louis De Rochemont’s film. Robinson’s history column appears in the Portsmouth Herald every other Monday. He is the author of a dozen history books available in local stores and online, on topics including the 1873 Smuttynose ax murders, the Privateer Lynx, Strawbery Banke Museum, and Wentworth by the Sea Hotel. He can be reached at dennis@myseacoastnh.com.