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.
“Howard Buten is a kind of walking poem,” the French writer and actor Claude Duneton wrote in his introduction to Mr. Buten’s autobiography, “Buffo” (2005). “Images emanate from him, producing a slow music, a concentric adagio like ripples on water.”
Mr. Buten died on Jan. 3 at an assisted living facility near his home in Plomodiern, France, a town in coastal Brittany. He was 74. 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.
By day, Mr. Buten volunteered at an autism clinic before founding his own center in Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb. In the evening, at nightclubs and theaters, he was Buffo — an act that in 1998 won a Molière, the equivalent of a Tony Award. He wrote novels during spare moments in cafes, on trains and in the back seats of taxis.
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. “I manage these three aspects of my life quite well,” he told the Swiss newspaper Le Temps in 2003. “They’re all necessary to me.”
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.
A star was not born.
“Howie was going absolutely nowhere,” his childhood friend Jim Burnstein, the director of the University of Michigan’s screenwriting program, said in an interview. “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 were established by the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
The first child he met was a 4-year-old named Adam Shelton.
“He bit and he head-butted and he pinched and he pounded, himself as well as others,” Mr. Buten wrote in “Through the Glass Wall: Journeys Into the Closed-Off Worlds of the Autistic” (2004). “He had no language. He did not come when called. He would not sit still in a chair.”
Mr. Buten worked with Adam almost daily. Unable to communicate with him, Mr. Buten decided to imitate his actions — “rocking when he rocked, flapping my hands when he flapped his hands, screaming and humming when he screamed and hummed,” he wrote.
One day, Adam started imitating him.
Intrigued, Mr. Buten kept up the approach, ultimately using imitation to teach Adam acceptable social behaviors and more than a dozen words. While the method Mr. Buten stumbled on wasn’t entirely new, studies have shown that the technique, called reciprocal imitation training, is a helpful treatment for autism.
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.
“What I learned is how to be autistic,” Mr. Buten told The San Francisco Examiner in 1981. “It goes right into Buffo — his mannerisms, speech patterns (or lack of them), physical behaviors and perceptions of reality are all real autistic. A kind of idiot savant syndrome is what Buffo is: lovable, infantile, totally innocent.”
Adam was on Mr. Buten’s mind when he wrote “Burt” (1981), which sold fewer than 10,000 copies in the United States but is still read in French schools.
“It’s about a child who’s in a mental institution who is considered to be disturbed,” Mr. Buten told The Detroit Free Press in 1981. “I wrote it from the child’s own point of view because I don’t think he is disturbed.” He added, “The point of the book is a statement about how adults in general do not understand children even though they used to be them.”
Early in the novel, Burt wanders alone around the institution.
“I was sleepy,” Burt says. “I sat on my bed. It has sheets. At home is blankee. He is blue. I have had him since I was a baby. My mom wants to throw him away but I won’t let her. But one time I did something. I peed on blankee. He smelled very pungent.”
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.
Howie was precocious and artistic.
After his mother taught him to sing and dance, he taught himself to be a ventriloquist. His first singing gig was at a synagogue “as a sort of junior cantor,” he told The San Francisco Examiner. “I thought it was being religious but it was really showbiz.”
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.
“I could go to clown college for 13 weeks and become a clown,” he told his friends. “Or I could go to the University of Michigan for another two years and become a clown.”
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.
“Burt narrates in one of the most charming voices since Holden Caulfield’s,” Rick Whitaker wrote in a review for The Washington Post, adding that Mr. Buten was “too good to be left to the French alone.”
The French adored Mr. Buten in a way Americans never did, a mystery that would puzzle him. 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 described in a Los Angeles Times review as “a sweet-hearted swirl of existential tomfoolery and sage understanding.”
Culture Clown, a French magazine, once asked him what happened when he left the stage.
“Buffo disappears, and Howard returns,” he said. “That’s why I feel awkward during applause — Buffo is shy, and Howard doesn’t like taking credit on his behalf.”