Howard Boutin, a college dropout from Detroit, has lived three extraordinary lives.
In one, he was a gentle, clumsy, wordless clown with a red nose named Bufo. It sold out theaters all over the world. Critics compared him to Charlie Chaplin and Harpo Marx.
In another, he volunteered as an aide for autistic children, went back to school to earn a doctorate in psychology, helped pioneer autism treatment and opened a treatment center.
He lived a third life as a novelist. “Bert,” written in the voice of a troubled 8-year-old, flopped in the United States but implausibly achieved “Catcher in the Rye” status in France, where it sold nearly a million copies and became, in some ways, an entertaining hit. A slight dissatisfaction, a cultural sensation.
“Howard Putin is a kind of walking poem,” wrote the French writer and actor Claude Donton in his introduction to Mr. Putin’s autobiography, “Bovo” (2005). “Images emanate from him, and he produces slow music, concentric adagios like ripples on water.”
Mr. Boutin died on January 3 at an elderly care facility near his home in Plumederne, France, a town in coastal Brittany. He was 74 years old. His partner and sole survivor, Jacqueline Hewitt, said the cause was a neurodegenerative disorder.
Mr. Putin’s three lives came together when he moved to France in 1981 after the unexpected success of “Bert,” which was published in French with the new title “When I Was Five I Killed Myself” — the first sentence of the novel.
By day, Putin volunteered at an autism clinic before establishing his own center in Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris. In the evenings, in nightclubs and theatres, he would play Poffo – a work that in 1998 won the Molière Prize, the equivalent of a Tony Award. books Novels In free time in cafes, on trains and in the back seats of taxis.
To organize his multicultural life, Mr. Putin used a color-coded system in his calendar: yellow and orange ink for Bovo shows, black for appointments at the autism center, and blue to block off time for writing. “I manage these three aspects of my life well,” he said He said Swiss newspaper Le Temps in 2003. “They are all essential to me.”
They were not nearly as dissimilar as they might seem.
After leaving the University of Michigan in 1970, Mr. Button attended Ringling Bros. College. and Barnum & Bailey Clown in Venice, Florida. He toured in the circus for two years, then returned to Detroit and invented pofo, a type of circus. In honor of the famous Swiss clown Your puppya pantomime, playing musical instruments, with a naive white face.
No star is born.
“Howie was never going anywhere,” his childhood friend said Jim BernsteinThe director of the University of Michigan’s screenwriting program said in an interview. He wrote a novel that no one wanted. His girlfriend broke up with him. His dog Frank was run over. “He was in a terrible place.”
Hoping to bounce back by doing some good in the world, Mr. Putin volunteered at a center for developmentally disabled children in Detroit. That was in 1974, six years before the revolution Standards The diagnosis of autism was determined 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, headbutted, pinched and hit himself and others,” Putin wrote in his letter. Through the Glass Wall: Journeys into the Closed Worlds of Autism (2004). “He had no language. He wouldn’t come when he called. He wouldn’t sit still in the chair.”
Mr. Putin worked with Adam almost daily. Unable to communicate with him, Putin decided to imitate his actions, writing: “I sway when he shakes, clap my hands when he flaps his hands, and scream and hum when he shouts and hums.”
One day, Adam started imitating him.
Amazed, Mr. Putin continued this approach, eventually using imitation to teach Adam acceptable social manners and more than a dozen words. While the method Boutin found wasn’t entirely new, studies have shown that this technique, called reciprocal imitation training, is a useful treatment for autism.
While treating Adam, Mr. Putin also stumbled upon a character for Poffo: a clown who can sing and make noise but is unable to speak.
“What I learned was how to be autistic,” Putin told the San Francisco Examiner in 1981. It’s about Bufu’s personality, his mannerisms, his speech patterns (or lack thereof), his physical behaviors and his perceptions of reality are all real. lonely. A kind of idiot syndrome is what Bufo represents: lovable, childish, completely innocent.
Adam had Putin in mind when he wrote Bert (1981), which sold fewer than 10,000 copies in the United States but is still read in French schools.
“It’s about a kid who’s in a mental institution and is considered disturbed,” Mr. Putin told the Detroit Free Press in 1981. I wrote it from the child’s own point of view because I don’t think he’s disturbed. He added: “The aim of the book is to show how adults in general do not understand children even though they were like them.”
At the beginning of the novel, Bert is wandering around the institution alone.
“I was sleepy,” Burt says. “She sat on my bed. She has papers. The house is empty. It’s blue. I’ve had it since I was a baby. My mom wants to throw it away but I won’t let her. But one time she did something. She peed on the blanket. It smelled so strong.”
Howard Alan Boutin was born on July 28, 1950 in Detroit. His father, Ben Botin, was a lawyer. His mother, Dorothy (Fleischer) Button, was a tap dancer and 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. He told the San Francisco Examiner that his first concert was in a synagogue “as a sort of novice cantor.” “I thought it was religious, but it was actually show business.”
He majored in Far Eastern studies at the University of Michigan, but spent most of his time skipping classes and clowning around. Determined to pursue a career as a true clown, Mr. Putin 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 two more years and become a clown.”
Although he never completed college, he earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara, California, in 1986. His clinic, the Adam Shelton Center, opened in 1996. Burt’s book was reissued “In the United States in its French version. title in 2000, this time for new recognition.
“Burt narrates in one of the most charming voices since Holden Caulfield,” Rick Whitaker wrote in a Washington Post review, adding that Mr. Putin was “too good to be left to the French alone.”
The French adored Putin in a way that Americans never had before, a mystery that would have baffled him. It’s been made – Medal of Arts and Letters from the French Ministry of Culture in 1991.
Mr. Putin has returned to the United States intermittently to perform as Povo. In 2004, he played a two-night show at the State Playhouse at Cal State L.A.—shows described in a Los Angeles Times review as “a gentle swirl of existential foolishness and wise understanding.”
Culture clownA French magazine once asked him what happened when he left the stage.
“Bufo disappears, Howard comes back,” he said. “That’s why I’m embarrassed when I’m clapping — Buffo is shy, and Howard doesn’t like to take credit for himself.”
