Herb Gardner, 68; Author of ‘Clowns,’ ‘Rappaport’

Herb Gardner, an award-winning playwright best known for his Broadway hits “A Thousand Clowns,” “I’m Not Rappaport” and “Conversations With My Father,” has died. He was 68.

Gardner, who had a long battle with lung disease, died Wednesday at his home in New York City.

Known for writing about convention-defying iconoclasts and contemporary urban misfits, Gardner achieved his first Broadway success in 1962 with “A Thousand Clowns,” a comedy starring Jason Robards as a dropout children’s TV show writer who will lose custody of his nephew if he doesn’t return to work.

The 1965 screen version of the play, also starring Robards, earned Gardner an Academy Award nomination for his adaptation and Martin Balsam, who played Robards’ brother, an Oscar for best supporting actor.

Gardner followed that success by writing and directing “The Goodbye People,” a 1968 flop about a man who wants to open a tropical drink stand on a beach boardwalk. It closed on Broadway after one performance.

Gardner didn’t have his next big hit until “I’m Not Rappaport,” a comedy about two cranky octogenarians starring Judd Hirsch and Cleavon Little. It ran for two years on Broadway and won the 1986 Tony Award as best play.

“I grew up with these people who lived at the top of their voices,” Gardner told the New York Times in 1985. “Some of them were in my family; some were just around.”

He tapped his personal life again with his hit “Conversations With My Father,” which opened on Broadway in 1992, also starring Hirsch. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

A memory drama about anti-Semitism and Jewish assimilation between 1936 and 1976, “Conversations With My Father” has been described as an open-ended dialogue with Gardner’s father, who operated a Canal Street bar in New York.

For the screen, Gardner co-produced and co-wrote the cult film “Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?,” a surreal 1971 comedy starring Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Harris.

Gardner also wrote the screen versions of his plays “Thieves” and “The Goodbye People,” the latter marking his debut as film director.

And he wrote, directed and was executive producer of the 1996 film adaptation of “I’m Not Rappaport,” starring Walter Matthau and Ossie Davis.

Born in Brooklyn, Gardner attended the High School of the Performing Arts, Carnegie Institute of Technology and Antioch College.

He began his career as a commercial artist and created and wrote a comic strip called “The Nebbishes.”

The strip ran successfully for eight years until, Gardner once told the Los Angeles Times, “the features editor of the Chicago Tribune pointed out that the balloons were getting larger and larger. There was hardly any drawing left. It was more like writing.”

For Gardner, it was a big leap from writing a cartoon strip to writing a play, but tapping his own life for inspiration helped him cross the divide.

“I wrote about what it felt like to start another life, and it became ‘A Thousand Clowns,’ ” he said.

In a 1985 interview with the New York Times, Gardner discussed what it was like to have had what many considered his greatest success as a playwright with “A Thousand Clowns” when he was 27.

“My ambition consists entirely of being able to do it well enough that they let me do it again -- and to avoid public disgrace,” Gardner said.

“I go from wondering whether they’ll ever put my stuff on to being absolutely shocked that they are putting it on. Here I am, 50 years old, and I never got over the shock of being taken seriously. Because I was in another profession and always wanted to write.

“I still think I started last year. When people say that ‘A Thousand Clowns’ was 23 years ago, I think, ‘Wasn’t that last summer?’ I don’t think of myself in a category with real playwrights, like Lanford Wilson and David Mamet. I still think I would like to be a playwright when I grow up.”

Gardner is survived by his wife, Barbara C. Sproul, chairman of the religion department at Hunter College; and sons Jake and Rafferty.