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briefly stepping into the public eye, the Browns have become reticent again in the wake of a controversy over an as-yet-unpublished biography of Lee.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? ||||| Or his spur to a sales force: 
 
 You gotta be a good greeter — 
 
 Sell the car! 
 
 You gotta turn on the heater — 
 
 Sell the car! 
 
 And when you get to St. Peter — 
 
 Sell the car! 
 
 Sell the Edsel for ’59! 
 
 For DuPont, Mr. Brown created “Wonderful World of Chemistry,” a show that in all likelihood has had the greatest number of performances of any musical in history. 
 
 Marion Martin Brown Jr. was born on Dec. 14, 1920, in Mexia, Tex. As a youth, he played the piano and wrote songs; at 15, he entered the University of Texas. After receiving his bachelor’s degree there while still a teenager, he earned a master’s in English from the University of Virginia. 
 
 After wartime service as a cryptographer, Mr. Brown moved to New York, where he adopted the name Michael. He became a regular at supper clubs, including the Blue Angel, performing his own satirical compositions. 
 
 One of his best-known original songs from this period is “Fall River Hoedown,” a.k.a. “Lizzie Borden.” A lively ensemble number written for the Broadway revue “New Faces of 1952,” it contained this memorable lyric: 
 
 Oh, you can’t chop your mama up in Massachusetts 
 
 And then blame all the damage on the mice. 
 
 No, you can’t chop your mama up in Massachusetts. 
 
 That kind of thing just isn’t very nice. 
 
 The Chad Mitchell Trio popularized that song and another by Mr. Brown, “The John Birch Society,” which included these lines: “You cannot trust your neighbors, or even next of kin./If mommy is a Commie then you gotta turn her in.” 
 
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 His most widely seen show was without doubt “Wonderful World of Chemistry.” Presented in the DuPont pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, it was a rare example of an industrial musical open to the public. The show, written, produced and directed by Mr. Brown, was performed at least 40 times a day, by at least eight companies, for months on end. 
 
 Seen by an estimated five million people, the show, 24 minutes long, played some 17,000 performances. Broadway’s longest-running musical, “Phantom of the Opera,” by contrast, has had about 11,000 performances since opening in 1988. 
 
 It was the modest windfall from just such an industrial show — a musical fashion show for Esquire magazine in the fall of 1956, Joy Brown recalled last week — that let Mr. Brown and his wife help usher “To Kill a Mockingbird” into being. 
 
 The Browns had met Ms. Lee through her friend Truman Capote. Mr. Brown had contributed lyrics to a song in the 1954 Broadway musical “House of Flowers,” with a book by Mr. Capote and music by Harold Arlen. 
 
 By 1956, Ms. Lee, an Alabama native, was living in New York. Her longed-for career as a writer was stymied by the need to pay the rent, and she was toiling away as an airline reservations clerk. 
 
 That Christmas, visiting the Browns, she spied an envelope with her name on it in the branches of their tree. 
 
 “I opened it and read: ‘You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas,’ ” Ms. Lee recalled in a 1961 essay in McCall’s magazine in which she did not identify the Browns by name. 
 
 “It’s a fantastic gamble,” Ms. Lee, in the words of her essay, told Mr. Brown. “It’s such a great risk.” 
 
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 “He looked at me,” the essay continued, “and said softly: ‘No, honey. It’s not a risk. It’s a sure thing.’ ” 
 
 The result, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was published in 1960, and for nearly a half-century afterward the Browns and Ms. Lee kept their secret. News of the gift — Ms. Lee insisted that it be a loan — came to light in 2006 with the publication of “Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee,” a biography by Charles J. Shields. 
 
 In an interview last week, Ms. Brown declined to specify the amount of the loan but said it had long since been repaid. 
 
 Besides his wife, whom he married in 1950, Mr. Brown is survived by two sons, Michael Jr. and Kelly. Another son, Adam, died in 1994. 
 
 Mr. Brown wrote music, book and lyrics for the short-lived Broadway musical “Different Times,” staged in 1972. He was also the author of the popular children’s picture book “Santa Mouse” (1966), with illustrations by Elfrieda DeWitt, and its several sequels. 
 
 “To Kill a Mockingbird,” widely considered a seminal novel of the 20th-century, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and was the basis of an acclaimed Hollywood film starring Gregory Peck, released the next year. 
 
 Speaking by telephone last week, Ms. Brown recalled her and her husband’s astonished delight upon hearing what the book’s original publisher, J. B. Lippincott & Company, planned for it in 1960. “We thought, they’re printing 5,000 copies,” she recalled. “Who in the world is going to buy 5,000 copies?” 
 
 According to its current publisher, HarperCollins, “To Kill a Mockingbird” has been translated into more than 40 languages and has sold 30 million copies worldwide, a sure thing if ever there was one.
– 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.)