E-Reads spoke to Maggie Davis about her novel Stage Door Canteen in February 2004.

E-Reads: Many readers of romance are familiar with you as Katherine Deauxville, but over your career you’ve stepped out a few times from behind the pen name as Maggie Davis. Did you know from the outset that this would be one of those projects that would defy the Romance fiction category?

Maggie: Well, it was hard to think of Stage Door Canteen as a romance, even though it does have at least three “love stories.” But WW2 has often been dealt with romantically, even sentimentally. The men and women in many recent films and books about the era often seem candy-coated, as if writers are afraid readers don’t want to see us as we really were then. I wanted to take a different, more realistic approach.

Of course there’s a lot of passion – and sentiment, too – in Stage Door Canteen. Some is even pretty raw and unvarnished. I tried to handle the action scenes the same way. To do this, I went straight to the men and women who were actually there. Thank God there are still many of them around. They told me themselves what it was like. I owe a great deal to them, as they helped me re-create the dark days in New York in the winter of 1942-43, when the electric lights were turned off and people were genuinely afraid of an enemy attack like the one that had happened a bare year before at Pearl Harbor. Our country was at war; there was no telling where the next blow would fall. Today is very reminiscent.

The backstage production for the Broadway musical Oklahoma! figures prominently in your story. What drew you to this as a story line?

Every biography or autobiogrpaphy of people like Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Agnes de Mille and others connected with the original production tell the turbulent but true story of the problems involved in getting Oklahoma! (originally called “Away We Go”) to Broadway. Most of the critics and newspaper columnists were betting Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first effort as a team would never open. The director and choreographer hated each other, the lead dancer had a drinking problem and the ballet girls were ugly. Worse, in spite of heroic efforts, no backers were willing to invest money in what was definitely an oddball project by then-current standards!

The Stage Door Canteen, just off Broadway in the basement of the Forty-Fourth Street Theater building was staffed by volunteers from the New York theater (including, in the story, members of the Oklahoma! cast). Famous stars donated their time to fix food, wipe off tables and wield a mop, while pretty actresses danced with servicemen and generally kept things lively.

Oklahoma! when it finally opened, became an icon of World War Two. To everyone’s amazement – except the people who were connected to it – America and the whole world fell in love with this bouncy, poignant story of cowboys and their girlfriends and frontier life in the American West.

Right away critics recognized Oklahoma! as unique, even though Walter Winchell had scoffed that Agnes de Mille’s ballets were “cowboys in toe shoes” The music was wonderful. “People Will Say We’re In Love” and “Surrey With The Fringe On Top” went around the world to troops everywhere via radio. The songs are standard hits today, sixty years later.

SDC was a real club in New York during the forties and became widely publicized, even resulting in a classic movie. How were you inspired to bring that special ambience back to life?

The Stage Door Canteen was famous from the moment it opened because so many theater and movie stars were connected with it – Katherine Hepburn, Ray Bolger (the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz) Tallulah Bankhead, Ava Gardner. And on and on. A weekly show featuring dramas written around the Canteen ran on radio, and in 1943 a movie called Stage Door Canteen (1943) began filming on the premises. In the past few years the old black and white movie has become very popular on video and DVD. Over the last two decades I’ve seen the movie Stage Door Canteen (1943) many times, but I’ve always had a feeling a bigger, more comprehensive story could be told. There are spots that make modern day viewers like me wince, such as the awful Gracie Field song and that endless, rather sappy love story.

When I started doing research for Stage Door Canteen, I found my hunch was right. There were many more stories – moving and authentic – about the Stage Door Canteen and New York City in that fateful wartime winter of 1942-43. I am grateful, now, to be able to put them into my book.

Thank you, Maggie.