Wuppermann and Angostura: the bitters fortune behind the actor who played the Wizard of Oz
Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery is the resting place of major American figures including Leonard Bernstein, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Henry Ward Beecher. Perhaps the most easily missed visitor among them is the actor who played the Wizard in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz — because Frank Morgan is buried not under his stage name, but under his birth name, Francis Phillip Wuppermann. The headstone records not a Hollywood legend but an older Caribbean-Germany-New York business story.
Morgan's story begins in New York in 1890. He was one of eleven children, born into a German-rooted family that had moved from Trinidad. The Wuppermann family had taken over the distribution of Angostura bitters in the second half of the 19th century — a bitters liqueur of Trinidadian and Venezuelan origin, whose global reach grew with the cocktail's spread through the British imperial century. Moving to the United States in the 1860s, the family became the principal North American distribution channel for the product.
The childhood home was a large mansion on Manhattan's Upper East Side, and the family devoted significant resources to educating the Wuppermann children. Frank was admitted to Cornell University and would most likely have continued the bitters legacy. But his older brother Ralph chose theatre, and that path drew Frank in too. Ralph began with small roles on Broadway in the early 1900s; Frank turned to theatre after finishing Cornell in 1908.
His first professional roles were in stage plays; he made the move to film in 1916 with The Suspect. The decision to use "Frank Morgan" as a stage name turned out to be useful: "Wuppermann" was an unmistakably German surname, and the post-World War I anti-German atmosphere in the United States created a real professional barrier. The stage name brought Morgan modest success in early-1920s film; major fame came with The Wizard of Oz in 1939.
In The Wizard of Oz, Morgan played five distinct roles: Professor Marvel, the gatekeeper, the taxi driver, common guards and the Wizard himself. The multiple casting was a design that came out of MGM director Victor Fleming's confidence in Morgan. It was the peak of Morgan's career; he played in more than 50 further films over the next decade, and was Oscar-nominated for Tortilla Flat (1942), though no second nomination followed.
Morgan's ties to the family bitters business persisted, however, throughout his life. The Wuppermann family expanded its US and Canadian distribution of Angostura in the 1920s; by the 1930s his cousin James Wuppermann was running the family's principal business line. Despite his successful theatre and film career, Frank Morgan continued to receive a meaningful share of his income from the bitters business. The family adapted the Angostura product mix during US Prohibition (1920-1933): it was taxed not as an alcoholic ingredient but as a flavoring product, and so was legally sold throughout.
In 1949, after his success in The Wizard of Oz, Morgan was rehearsing for the film Annie Get Your Gun. The production was about to begin filming when he died of a heart attack at 59 on 18 September 1949. He was replaced in the picture by Louis Calhern. Morgan was buried in the Wuppermann family plot at Green-Wood Cemetery under the family name; visitors who know him only by his stage name may not recognise the grave.
The headstone reflects the multilingual complexity of an early-20th-century American family: a German surname, a Caribbean business heritage carried through Trinidad, and a Hollywood legend hidden under the stage name — all gathered on one stone. The plot is still in use by the American line of the Wuppermann family; Frank's brother Ralph is also buried nearby.
The Angostura family's historical importance does not derive only from the bitters. The family contributed in the 1920s to the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera; it occupied a position in the social elite. That was relevant to Frank's career too — he had access to family connections during his entry into Hollywood. Biographies note, though, that Morgan was reserved on this point; he is said not to have leaned on his family's wealth as a career lever.
Green-Wood Cemetery's 478 acres include a research-curated tour by the cemetery's history office that highlights the Wuppermann grave, which receives perhaps four dedicated visitors a year. The grave is both a clue to Hollywood's golden age and a record of the early Caribbean-New York business networks of global trade. A pamphlet handed out at the cemetery entrance in Brooklyn's Sunset Park district lists Frank Morgan's grave under the heading "a hidden film history of the city."