Chip Somodevilla/Getty Harper Lee, photographed here in 2007, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 
 
 While Monroeville, Ala., is Harper Lee's hometown, she made New York City her town by choice. 
 
 It was here she wrote the bulk of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and sweated through the many rewrites of what would become one of the most cherished novels of the 20th century in an airless, one-bedroom apartment in Yorkville. 
 
 What has been little spoken of until now is the crucial role a New York couple played in bringing the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Mockingbird" to the page. 
 
 In Mary McDonagh Murphy's documentary, "Hey Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird," opening Friday at the Quad Cinema, Joy and Michael Brown sit down before the cameras for a rare interview. They relate how they came to give Lee the gift of a year free to write without the need to earn a living. 
 
 It was Christmas Eve, 1956, when Lee showed up at the apartment of her dear friends with her own modest presents. She'd been working for several years as an airline reservations clerk in a midtown office. She couldn't get the time off to head home for the holidays, so she came to the Browns. 
 
 Lee wrote about the evening for McCall's magazine after "Mockingbird" was published in 1960, recalling how she found an envelope addressed to her in the branches of the Christmas tree. 
 
 "I opened it and read: 'You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.' 
 
 "'It's a fantastic gamble,' I murmured, 'a great risk.' 
 
 "My friend looked around his living room, at his boys half buried under a pile of Christmas wrapping paper. His eyes sparkled as they met his wife's and they exchanged a glance ... 
 
 "Then he looked at me and said softly: 'No, honey, it's not a risk. It's a sure thing.'" 
 
 After briefly stepping into the public eye, the Browns have become reticent again in the wake of a controversy over an as-yet-unpublished biography of Lee. Excitement spread when Penguin Press announced that "The Mockingbird Next Door" had been written by a former Chicago Tribune reporter with input from Lee. 
 
 Lee, who is now 85 and suffered a stroke in 2007, made a statement through her 99-year-old sister Alice's law firm that she had not "willingly participated" with author Marja Mills. Mills then produced a letter, one prepared by her and signed by Alice, vouching that both sisters had acted as "invaluable guides." The matter is unresolved. 
 
 Meanwhile, the Browns speak eloquently in the documentary as Michael, a Broadway lyricist who performed in supper clubs around town, explains that in 1949 he received a letter from his friend Truman Capote, "in tiny, little handwriting," saying a friend of his was coming to New York and "would you kindly look after her." 
 
 The friend was Capote's childhood soulmate, Nelle Harper Lee, who had quit the University of Alabama to become a writer. 
 
 Those first years in Manhattan were rough going, says Charles J. Shields, author of the biography "Mockingbird." But though she would walk down streets smacking parking meters to shake loose dimes and nickels, Lee had an exceptional social life. 
 
 "She sort of followed Truman around. He was a literary lion and gave her entree," according to Shields. "All she would say about herself at parties was that she was from Alabama and working on a book." 
 
 That she was, thanks to the Browns. Michael had received a lump-sum payment, and Joy, a former ballerina who had studied with George Balachine, immediately thought to give it to Nelle. 
 
 "I knew that if she could get her work seen that she'd have it," Michael recalls, adding later. "But I never, never foresaw anything like this. Like what happened." 
 
 Joy still sounds incredulous more than 50 years later. 
 
 "They published 5,000 copies for heaven's sake. Who was going to buy 5,000 copies of this book?" 
 
 In fact, that first printing of "Mockingbird" fell at least 30 million copies short of the eventual demand. 
 
 After Lee retreated from fame, sidestepping all public exposure, New York City offered the anonymity that allowed her to ride the subways and visit secondhand bookstores without having to answer what came to be a harrowing question: When was the second book coming? 
 
 As Anna Quindlen, who pays homage in "Hey Boo" along with other notables like Tom Brokaw and Oprah Winfrey, muses: "I don't know if she felt she couldn't do it, but I prefer to think she wouldn't do it." 
 
 Lee being Lee, what are the chances we'll ever find out? ||||| More than 50 years have passed since Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird, her gripping novel about racial injustice in deeply segregated Alabama. Now the town where Lee was born and raised, and which served as the inspiration for her best-selling book, has once again become the scene of an unsettling legal dispute that has divided the community. 
 
 This time Lee, who at 87 is profoundly deaf and almost totally blind, is not the author of the story but – on the surface at least – its protagonist. 
 
 In a move which has shocked Monroeville, Lee, who resides in an assisted-living facility in the town, is bringing a lawsuit against the local museum, accusing the small, not-for-profit institution of exploiting her fame and the prestige of her Pulitzer-winning book without offering compensation. The museum is fighting back, condemning Lee’s lawsuit as “false” and “meritless” and warning that the legal action could destroy an institution that honours the author's legacy and provides an economic boost to the town. 
 
 It is the kind of ugly public dispute that Lee, an intensely private figure who has spent her life avoiding the spotlight, might have been expected to avoid. Unsurprisingly, Monroeville has been awash with with rumour about whether Miss Nelle, as the author is known locally, was personally responsible for the decision to sue the museum. 
 
 The answer to that question is complicated, but it appears to involve Lee’s 102-year-old sister, Alice, and a close associate, an attorney who happens to be married to a relative of Truman Capote. 
 
 Capote is the other literary great who spent much of his childhood in Monroeville, living in a house next-door to Lee. The pair became close friends and Lee famously assisted Capote when he researched the Kansas murder that formed the basis of another classic, In Cold Blood. 
 
 Both Lee and Capote are honoured in the Monroe County Heritage Museum, which attracts 30,000 visitors a year. Most come in April and May, when the restored 1903 courthouse, which served as a model for the To Kill a Mockingbird movie, starring Gregory Peck, becomes the backdrop for a theatrical production of Lee’s novel. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Harper Lee with Gregory Peck, the star of the 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis 
 
 Lee’s only published novel is one of the great works of 20th century literature. It has sold 30 million copies and, according to her lawsuit, is on the required reading list for more than three-quarters of American high schools. The book is set in the 1930s in the fictional town of Maycomb, a place almost indistinguishable even today from Monroeville, a place of 6,500 people which adheres to Lee’s description of “an island in a patchwork sea of cotton fields and timber land”. 
 
 The extent to which Lee’s novel is an accurate reflection of her upbringing in the town is the source of much debate – and is likely to feature in the legal case. Lee's legal complaint recognises that the book was “inspired by Ms Lee’s home” in Monroe County, but adds: “Nonetheless, the setting, plot and characters are products of Ms Lee’s imagination.” 
 
 On 19 August, her lawyers filed a trademark application. The museum filed an opposition, prompting the lawsuit served on 15 October, which takes issue with the museum’s website and gift shop, which it accuses of “palming off its goods”, including t-shirts, coffee mugs other various trinkets with Mockingbird brands. The museum says the gift shop generates a paltry $28,000 a year, and helps employ a few “pitifully paid” people from the town. 
 
 The lawsuit even takes a swipe at Monroeville, saying the “desire to capitalize” on the fame of Lee’s book is evident in the town’s choice of logo: a mockingbird and the cupola of the Old County Courthouse. 
 
 Yet Lee, who stopped granting full interviews in 1964, has herself made clear that To Kill a Mockingbird was partly rooted in the Monroeville she knew. Her father, Amasa Coleman Lee, was, like the novel’s Atticus Finch, a local attorney and state senator. There are obvious streaks of Lee in the young female narrator of the story, Scout, and her close friend Dill appears at least loosely based on Capote. 
 
 “It is and it isn’t autobiographical,” Lee told the New York Herald Tribune in 1962. “The trial, and the rape charge that bring on the trial, are made out of a composite of such cases and charges. What I did present as exactly as I could were the clime and tone, as I remembered them, of the town in which I lived. From childhood on, I did sit in the courtroom watching my father argue cases and talk to juries.” 
 
 Harper Lee in the Monroeville courthouse. Photograph: Donald Uhrbrock/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images 
 
 For much of the last quarter of a century, Lee appears to have had an ambivalent view of the museum. Instinctively uncomfortable with anything that brings unwanted attention, she is once said to have complained about the “cottage industry” that has grown around the novel. But until now, the only time she is known to have expressed that view to the museum was in 2002, when it published a cookbook based on the character Calpurnia – an incident mentioned in the lawsuit. 
 
 According the museum, when Lee said that she wasn’t happy, they quickly removed Calpurnia’s Cookbook from the shelves – copies are still stored in the attic. 
 
 On the other hand, there is evidence the museum has had the tacit blessing of Lee’s family and friends. A plaque on the wall bears the name of the author’s nephew, Dr Edwin Lee, a local dentist. Some of those closest to Lee, including a lifelong friend, the Reverend Dr Thomas Lane Butts, have served on the museum’s board. And three years ago – on the 50th anniversary of the novel’s publication – Lee herself visited the museum, with the Hollywood actress Patricia Neal. When the museum sent Lee flowers, she replied with a note which read: “My dearest friends, the roses are spectacular and I love them, sincerely yours, Nelle Harper Lee.” 
 
 Since then, Lee’s health has deteriorated. Her infirmity partly explains a second, unrelated lawsuit that the author brought earlier this year against her literary agent. In that case, Lee’s lawyers claimed Samuel Pinkus, the son-in-law of the writer’s long-time agent, Eugene Winick, had duped Lee into signing over the copyright on the book. The case was settled two months ago. 
 
 Until 2011, Lee’s financial interests had long been protected by her sister, Alice, who was herself profoundly deaf, and relied upon lip-reading. Now 102, Alice Lee is, like her sister, known as a formidable character in town, having practiced law with the venerable Barnett, Bugg, Lee and Carter law firm. 
 
 The Carter in that firm is Tonya Carter, the lawyer most people in Monroeville seem to think has been given power of attorney by Harper Lee. There is no known documentary evidence to support that suggestion, and Carter has not responded to requests for comment. But two sources close to Lee confirmed that Carter had indeed been given power of attorney by the author. 
 
 Carter is also a well-known figure in Monroeville. She is married to Patrick Carter, a pilot who happens to be a cousin to Capote, and the couple run a restaurant, Prop and Gavel, a stone’s throw from the museum. With resentment over the lawsuit running high, some locals say they are boycotting Carter’s restaurant in protest. That may be unfair. Even if Carter does have power of attorney over Lee’s business affairs, she may still be acting on explicit instructions from Lee – or at the very least consulting with the author. 
 
 Gregory Peck, as Atticus Finch, argues his case. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar 
 
 Legal papers submitted in the lawsuit filed against Lee's literary agent, in May, said that while the author's physical health had seriously deteriorated since a stroke in 2007, it had not affected her “mental capabilities”. 
 
 But in a small town like Monroeville, it does not take long for ill-feeling to spread. The lawsuit, much like the fictional rape trial Lee portrayed in To Kill a Mockingbird , is forcing locals to take sides. 
 
 Stephanie Rogers, 29, the museum's executive director, talks of two “camps” emerging in Monroeville, but insists most people are behind the museum. “I haven’t heard anything else the other way,” she said. But dissenting voices can be heard, even if they are whispered. In the Courthouse Cafe, across the road, a hushed debate was recently overheard. 
 
 “The thing about small towns like this: everybody will put a foot in if they think they can make a dollar,” a woman said. “I think it is bad that they’re acting like Harper Lee don’t exist.” 
 
 Additional reporting by Verna Gates in Monroeville
– If it hadn't been for a New York City couple, the world might never have seen To Kill a Mockingbird. Its author, Harper Lee, was a ticket agent for British Overseas Airways in 1956, and it was difficult for her to find time to write with a separate full-time job, Ozy reports. She discussed this concern with her friends Michael and Joy Brown, a couple her friend Truman Capote had introduced to her. Michael, who died this year, worked as a writer of industrial musicals—performances, often with big budgets, that US corporations would produce to inspire their workers, the New York Times reports in his obituary. Michael Brown's work included, for example, a "Love Song to an Electrolux" and a DuPont musical called Wonderful World of Chemistry. The work brought in plenty of money, and at Christmas 1956, Lee found an envelope for her in the Browns' Christmas tree. "I opened it and read: 'You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas,'" she wrote in the 1960s, as the New York Daily News reported. Though she was reluctant to accept the gift—which she eventually repaid—the couple supported her during the period, allowing her to quit her job and write To Kill a Mockingbird. That gift's impact continues to reverberate, as the book still sells more than 750,000 copies per year, Ozy notes. (Lee, now 87, has had her fair share of trouble in recent years: She recently sued her agent as well as a museum in her hometown.)