IF EVER A WIZ THERE WAS

by Ruth Berman

Originally published in The Baum Bugle, vol. 39, no. 1 (Spring 1995), pgs. 15–17

Citations

Chicago 17th ed.:

Berman, Ruth. “If Ever a Wiz There Was.” Baum Bugle 39, no. 1 (1995): 15–17.

MLA 9th ed.:

Berman, Ruth. “If Ever a Wiz There Was.” The Baum Bugle, vol. 39, no. 1, 1995, pp. 15–17.

(Note: In print, this article was supplemented with a photograph that has not been reproduced here. However, at the request of the author, the text has been modified to reflect accuracy that was not present in the original published version.)

 

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” boomed Frank Morgan as the Wizard. But the man behind the curtain had a life that was well worth attention.

Frank Morgan was born Francis Philip Wuppermann, June 1, 1890, the youngest of 11 children in a wealthy and artistically gifted family. His family background imposed two paradoxes on him: he was a staunch actors’ union man from a family of capitalists, and an alcoholic from a family whose wealth depended on alcohol. As an actor, he had a distinguished career, but he was touched only once by lasting fame, and the fame was not established until after his death. Yet he seems to have known in advance that the Wizard was to be remembered.

Morgan’s mother, Josephine Wright Hancox, was the daughter of Commodore Joseph Hancox, who owned a line of steamers running between the island of Trinidad and Venezuela. His agent at Port of Spain, Trinidad, was George W. Wuppermann, the son of a German father and Spanish mother. In 1890, 18 year old Josephine traveled to Port of Spain with her father, met George Wuppermann, fell in love, and married him. George’s friends, Carlos and Alfredo Siegert of the Angostura Bitters family, gave them a lucrative wedding present: the rights to distribute Angostura Bitters in the United States, Canada, and Cuba. The young couple moved to New York City and when George died in 1915, Josephine became president of the company. She invited her sons to come into the business with her. The eldest, Edward, accepted and became general manager, but three of her other sons (and briefly Edward’s daughter Virginia) became stage struck and went on to professional acting careers. One of them was to become distinguished.

Frank’s older brother, Ralph Wuppermann (born 1884) was the first of the family to start acting and to take the stage name of Morgan. While at Columbia, he acted in college plays. Although he took a degree in law and practiced real estate law for two years, he went on acting in an amateur group called the New York Comedy Club. Warner Oland saw him there and gave him a small role in Love’s Comedy in 1908. That was the end of his law career. Unlike Frank, Ralph Morgan played serious roles more often than comic, among them Charles Marsden in the first Broadway company of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude. (The role was originated by another actor, Tim Powers, but Ralph replaced him during the play’s try out run in Chicago.) Among his films were the movie of Strange Interlude, The Magnificent Obsession, Anthony Adverse, The Life of Emile Zola, and Little Men.

Ralph’s daughter, Claudia, became an actress, too. Her roles included Maggie Cutler in the original Broadway production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, Madeline Arnold (with her father repeating his role of Charles Marsden) in the London production of Strange Interlude, and Nora Charles in the radio series of The Thin Man. She was the last of the acting Morgans, for her cousin George, Frank’s only child, did not go on the stage.

Another of Frank’s older brothers, Carlos Wuppermann (born 1897), a namesake of their Argosturan benefactor, Carlos Siegert, acted briefly as Carlyle Morgan. But he was more interested in writing. With Federigo Sarda, he translated Mariana (1909), a play by the 1907 Nobel prizewinner, Jose Echegaray. A book of Carlos’ poems, Quiet Places, appeared in 1911. He wrote an original play, The Triumph of X, but it had not been produced when he enlisted as a private in the Bellevue Hospital Unit, in 1917, to serve in World War I. By the time the war ended, he was a sergeant in the Third Army of Occupation, stationed at Treves, Germany, where he died in 1919.

Frank was not drawn to acting immediately. He had trouble deciding what to do with himself. He dropped out of Cornell to wander, working as a cowpuncher, a coal stoker on a tramp steamer, a pool hustler, and a traveling salesman, peddling brushes and what he sometimes later called Hoosis Bitters.

In later years he liked to tell how his father (or his brother Edward, he liked to vary the details) refused to give him a raise on his salary of $11 per week, saying, “You’re not worth anything.” So Frank quit and went to Boston, where he got a job soliciting ads for the Traveller newspaper, at $14 per week, and quit once he was making $27 per week. He got his boss to give him a written offer of $50 per week to stay on, so that he could quit anyway and take the letter home to slap on his father’s (or brother’s) desk.

At last he looked at Ralph’s success on the stage and reasoned that he ought to be able to do anything Ralph could. His first successful part was in a vaudeville sketch, The Last of the Quakers, in 1913. He caught the attention of producer Jessie Bonstelle, who had cast his brother Ralph in a few roles. She gave Frank a role in her revival of a Jacobean tragedy, Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness.

In the same year, he fell in love with Alma Muller, just the kind of prominent socialite his parents would wish him to meet, except that neither the Wuppermanns nor the Mullers thought a feckless actor was the right husband for Alma. So the pair got married secretly on March 11, 1914.

The Mullers, discovering the match, sent Alma off on a solitary honeymoon to study art by herself in Paris and, they hoped, forget her unsuitable husband. The ploy almost worked. When she returned in the fall, she told Frank that she did not care for him any longer.

He countered by sending a belated wedding announcement in the newspapers. With the affair out in the open, his own parents felt obliged to back him up, explaining to the Times that they had not objected to the match, except that they “thought both to be too young.” They would not oppose it now that they knew it had already taken place.

Frank had the advantage, for the moment, of being employed. He was acting in a new play, Mr. Wu. Offstage, he set himself to courting his wife. By Christmas, however, Mr. Wu had closed. Although Frank found more work, it was out of town, in a Richmond, Virginia stock company. He was trying to think of a way to go and visit Alma, when he received a telegram which stated: “If you don’t know any reason why I shouldn’t, I’ll join.” He didn’t, she did, and they stayed together from then on.

Jessie Bonstelle hired Morgan for more of her productions and he was soon playing leads in her company. After the death of his brother, Carlos, Morgan asked Jessie Bonstelle to produce Carlos’ play, The Triumph of X. It opened in August 1921, with Morgan in the lead, as the guardian of a girl with a hereditary tendency to alcoholism.

The play flopped resoundingly. Alexander Woollcott said in his review that the play’s climax “slips into a disastrous quagmire of wild behavior and riotous rhetoric,” and that Morgan played it bombastically, “in the manner of Sidney Carton mounting the guillotine.”

The failure must have grieved him the more because its theme applied to him. Frank Morgan was himself an alcoholic. He managed to control his drinking well enough to keep it from affecting his performances, but he had some close escapes. Edward G. Robinson acted with Morgan in 1924 in Edwin Justus Mayer’s play about Benvenuto Cellini, The Firebrand. He recalled in his autobiography how Morgan “loved his bourbon, more than once I had to make him up and guide him on stage where he would instantly sober up and play splendidly.”

Duke Alessandro in The Firebrand became one of Morgan’s chief successes on the stage and it helped to lead him to a permanent film career. The author had meant the play to be a romantic comedy and the director wanted Joseph Schildkraut (as Cellini) and the rest to play it as an authentic history. The actors rebelled. Morgan told Mayer that he was through trying to play the Duke straight. The Duke was fatuous and absurd and  Morgan was going to play him that way.

The result was a farce that charmed audiences. (It helped that the men all looked good in tights.) Until the Duke, Morgan had played comic and serious roles equally, but the scatterbrained Duke defined the comic persona that characterized him in most of his Hollywood roles.

Stark Young, the New York Times reviewer, described the Duke in terms that could have applied to many of Morgan’s roles: “the most likable booby of a prince imaginable, a noble loon, absurd, scatterbrained, afraid of his wife, and all the while ironically adequate to the necessities of his high station.” Morgan’s Governor of Louisiana in Naughty Marietta (starring Jeanette MacDonald), or his King Louis XIII in The Three Musketeers (starring Gene Kelly) were similar characters. When he was not being a genuine, if not fatuous, patrician, he was often a poseur trying as hard as he could to pretend to be one. The shady Professor, Shirley Temple’s grandfather in “Dimples,” or Dan the medicine show man trying to turn actor in “The Wild Man of Borneo” were examples. So was Professor Marvel/The Wizard of Oz.

When a movie loosely based on The Firebrand, The Affairs of Cellinii, was made (1934), Morgan repeated his Duke and received his only Academy Award nomination. The other nominees were Clark Gable in It Happened One Night and William Powell in The Thin Man. (Gable won.)

By then, Morgan was a regular actor in large film roles, although usually not starring parts. His brother Ralph was also concentrating on films by then and saw that Hollywood actors needed a stronger union to represent them. Ralph had already been active in strengthening Actors Equity in New York.

In 1933, film producers tried to set a code limiting actors’ salaries. Many prominent screen actors resigned in protest from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The protestors gathered together at Frank Morgan’s house and proceeded to reorganize the Screen Actors Guild. The nine member board of directors elected included both Ralph and Frank, and both remained active in the Guild. Frank Morgan, along with Boris Karloff, was the Guild’s spokesman in publicizing their opposition to the salary controls. (Ralph later served as president of the Guild.)

Perhaps in reaction to working so hard as a union organizer, Morgan gave way to his mother’s wishes in 1934 and became a Vice President of Wuppermann Angostura, or, at least, an actor who played one nicely. At the stockbrokers’ meeting, the formal investiture of the new Vice President took place. “Just another executive role,” said Morgan. “Sheer type casting.” For the most part, the “Vice President in charge of Western Operations” was content to please his mother and generate a little publicity for the firm without trying to live the role.

Morgan settled into Hollywood life, finding it comfortable both socially and professionally. Clark Gable, Morgan’s rival for the 1934 Oscar, became one of his best friends. They were arrested together in 1944 for shooting twice the legal limit of ducks. Actually, Gable hadn’t shot any of them. He’d started late and the rest of the hunting party had loaded his strap with all the extra ducks. When Gable caught up with the group, just in time to meet the suspicious wardens, Morgan was the only one willing to volunteer for a share in the blame.

A larger group of friends was “The Boys’ Club,” which met weekly in restaurants or in each other’s homes. They were Ralph Bellamy, Jimmy Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Frank McHugh, Lynne Overman, Spencer Tracy and Frank Morgan. The pleasant climate of Los Angeles allowed Morgan to meet with his friends outdoors as well as all year round, for tennis, golf, or yachting.

Morgan’s long series of comic roles was limited in emotional range, but the roles demanded great skill to seem as innocently devious and absurd as Morgan made them. With his double takes and wild lies, Morgan often stole all the scenes. Shirley Temple Black, in her autobiography, remembered with mixed admiration and resentment the tricks that Morgan would pull to steal a scene, such as carelessly setting down his high silk hat in front of her face.

In 1938 Morgan also began doing comedy on the radio, first as a regular on “The Maxwell House Good News Program,” co-starring Fanny Brice as Baby Snooks.

It would have been natural enough if Morgan, in the spring of 1938, had thought that The Wizard of Oz was just another of his stereotype roles, nothing out of the ordinary. Most of the actors in The Wizard of Oz saw it, at the start, as just another job; as Jack Haley (the Tin Woodman) told Aljean Harmetz in The Making of the Wizard of Oz, “We didn’t know it was a classic.”

But two of the actors saw something special in the production and demanded to be in it; Ray Bolger and Frank Morgan among them. Bolger, who had seen Fred Stone (the Scarecrow in the 1902 stage play of The Wizard of Oz) on stage in other roles, knew that the Scarecrow would be a magnificent role for an eccentric dancer. And Frank Morgan saw something in the Wizard.

Screenwriter Noel Langley told Harmetz that Morgan “begged for it. He said, ‘Let me go onto a stage and do an ad lib test.’ He did all the scenes as they were in the script. He knew the script backward. He did it all by himself with nobody there but himself and an assistant director. Harburg and Arlen and Freed and I watched the test afterward. And it was marvelous, as funny as Buster Keaton.”

Morgan had not been the first choice for the role. MGM wanted W. C. Fields or Ed Wynn. Harmetz commented that Fields in the role would have been “a con man, blustering and boisterous,” and Wynn would have been “emotionally and physically zany,” whereas Morgan was “a frightened little man assuring his survival through humbugging.”

Morgan’s frightened little man was the right choice. He was the Wizard L. Frank Baum described in the book: “a little, old man, with a bald head and a wrinkled face. ‘I am Oz, the Great and Terrible,’ said the little man, in a trembling voice.” Morgan was silver haired instead of bald, but for the rest he was the Wizard, the phony whose pretenses helped the others find the truths within them.

When the movie was released in August 1939, it got mixed reviews. Most of the major magazine reviewers thought it was tasteless and unimaginative, although most of the newspaper reviewers, such as Frank Nugent in the New York Times loved it.

Morgan’s opinion was unshaken. He wrote “Motion Picture Acting” for the entry on “Motion Pictures” in the 1940 printing of the Encyclopedia Britannica. (The article, with some additional material by Raymond Massey on technique, stayed in the Britannica until 1956.) Morgan did not puff any of his other movies in the article, but in a paragraph on the range available to film acting, he said: “The screen has continually been providing a broader canvas for itself. It has grown artistically and technically to a point where practically nothing in human imagination is impossible of realization, from the human characteristics with which Walt Disney has endowed his cartoon creations, as in Snow White, to the magical effects achieved where humans are placed in the realm of fantasy, as in The Wizard of Oz.”

During the 1940s, Morgan was given more chances to play serious roles. When Jerome Beatty interviewed him for American Magazine in  1942, Morgan said he was proudest of his work as a German professor in The Mortal Storm (1940), an anti Nazi film, and as the kindly shop owner in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), adapted by Samson Raphaelson from “Parfumerie” by Hungarian playwright Nikolaus Laszlo (S. Z. Sakall played the role when Judy Garland starred in the  1949 remake, “In the Good Old Summertime.”)

Newsweek singled out The Great Ziegfeld and The Wizard of Oz in their obituary note on Morgan. Most newspapers and magazines included The Wizard of Oz in a long list of Morgan’s credits. A few did not mention it at all. But in May 1949, The Wizard of Oz had been rereleased, and critics had begun to realize that it was something special. The annual showings on television that began in 1956 established its reputation and made it into an American institution. Audiences ever since have been going off to see the Wizard.

“Oh no, my dear,” said Morgan. “I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad Wizard.”

He was a very good Wizard, too.

 

A Note on Sources

The chief sources for information on Morgan and the Wuppermann family were articles indexed in the New York Times. Few magazine articles on Frank Morgan ever appeared. The most interesting is Jerome Beatty’s “Mr. Wuppermann Wows ‘Em” (American Magazine, Vol. 134, October 1942, pages 40, 41 and 82, 84). Some anecdotes about Frank have appeared in the biographies and autobiographies of other actors of the period.

I am indebted to Robert E. Hanson, President of Angostura International Limited, for some of the details on the Angostura Wuppermann Corporation; to Lars Mahinske, an Editorial Assistant on Encyclopedia Britannica for some of the details on Frank’s article on acting; to Dace Taube of the University of Southern California’s Regional History Center/Department of Special Collections for copies of articles mentioning Morgan from the files of the Los Angeles Examiner; and to Kristine Krueger of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ National Film Information Service for copies of releases from MGM Publicity Director Howard Strickling on the Morgans.

 

 

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