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Howard Buten, a college dropout from Detroit, juggled three extraordinary lives.
In one, he was a tender, clumsy and wordless red-nosed clown named Buffo. He sold out theaters around the world. Critics compared him to Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx.
In another, he volunteered as an aide with autistic children, went back to school to earn a doctorate in psychology, helped pioneer a therapy for autism and opened a treatment center.
He squeezed in a third life as a novelist. “Burt,” written in the voice of a disturbed 8-year-old boy, flopped in the United States but implausibly achieved “Catcher in the Rye” status in France, where it sold nearly a million copies and he became — to his amusement and slight chagrin — a cultural sensation.
His partner and only immediate survivor, Jacqueline Huet, said the cause was a neurodegenerative disorder.
Mr. Buten’s three lives coalesced when he moved to France in 1981 after the unexpected success of “Burt,” which was published in French with a new title, “When I Was Five I Killed Myself” — the first sentence of the novel.
To organize his polymathic life, Mr. Buten used a color-coded system in his calendar: yellow and orange ink for Buffo performances, black for appointments at the autism center, blue to block out time for writing.
They weren’t nearly as disparate as they might seem.
After dropping out of the University of Michigan in 1970, Mr. Buten enrolled at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Venice, Fla. He toured with a circus for two years, then returned to Detroit and invented Buffo — a kind of homage to the celebrated Swiss clown Grock, a pantomiming, musical-instrument-playing, white-faced simpleton.
Howie was going absolutely nowhere.
He wrote a novel that nobody wanted. His girlfriend broke up with him. His dog Frank got run over. He was in a horrible place.
Hoping to pick himself up by doing some good in the world, Mr. Buten volunteered at a center for developmentally disabled children in Detroit. This was in 1974, six years before the criteria for the diagnosis of autism was established by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
He worked with a 4-year-old named Adam Shelton.
After dropping out of the University of Michigan in 1970, Mr. Buten enrolled at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College in Venice, Fla. He toured with a circus for two years, then returned to Detroit and invented Buffo — a kind of homage to the celebrated Swiss clown Grock, a pantomiming, musical-instrument-playing, white-faced simpleton.
In treating Adam, Mr. Buten also stumbled on a persona for Buffo: a clown who can sing and make noise but is unable to speak.
Howard Alan Buten was born on July 28, 1950, in Detroit. His father, Ben Buten, was a lawyer. His mother, Dorothy (Fleisher) Buten, had been a tap dancer and a vaudeville performer while growing up.
He majored in Far Eastern studies at the University of Michigan, but he spent most of his time skipping class and clowning around. Determined to pursue a career in real clowning, Mr. Buten did the math.
Despite never finishing college, he earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, Calif. in 1986, His clinic, the Adam Shelton Center, opened in 1996. “Burt” was reissued in the United States with its French title in 2000, this time to newfound appreciation.
The French adored Mr. Buten in a way Americans never did, a mystery that would puzzle him throughout his life. He was made a chevalier of arts and letters by the French Culture Ministry in 1991.
Mr. Buten returned to the United States sporadically to perform as Buffo. In 2004, he played a two-night stand at Cal State L.A.’s State Playhouse — performances a Los Angeles Times review described as “a sweet-hearted swirl of existential tomfoolery and sage understanding.”
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