Traversing the Towers In a Moment of Joy

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Petit on Being Arrested Atop the Towers

Philippe Petit discusses his famous walk on a wire between the Towers at the World Trade Center. The walk, the morning of August 7, 1974, is the subject of a new documentary "Man on Wire." He is sitting next to the film's director, James Marsh.

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Wisely, director James Marsh never so much as mentions Sept. 11.

"That was a very easy decision," he says. "No one in the world doesn't know that story. So it felt to me like, why not give the memory of those buildings to a bunch of dreamers and artists for an hour and a half. It doesn't take away what happened later on. But the memory of those buildings is so foul, the film allows us to enjoy, just for a period of time, something else, a different memory."

The coup starts the afternoon of Aug. 6, and it's like a bank heist planned by vaudevillians. Both teams -- there's one per tower -- are nearly caught getting into position, and Petit and his accomplices spend hours hiding under a tarp, waiting for guards to leave. They realize, too late, that while they thought up a hand signal to say, "We're ready to fire the arrow," they failed to think of one for the other team that says, "We're not!" One plotter, Alan Welner, abandons the project and his pals in the wee hours of the morning when the cable slips and has to be hand-hauled back to roof.

But as the elevators start spinning for another day of work, the cable is winched into place. Right after that hesitant first step, Petit is euphoric. "I was dying of happiness," he says later that day. He crosses back and forth eight times. He hops up and down. He lies down like he's sunbathing. When the police show up, he taunts them, sauntering almost within grabbing distance, then backing away.

"Officer Myers and I observed the tightrope dancer, you couldn't call him a tightrope walker, approximately halfway between the two towers," says one of the police officers who had tried to apprehend Petit, at a news conference. "Upon seeing us, he started to smile and laugh."

Petit relents only after officers threaten to send a chopper to pluck him out of the sky. He's a little manhandled initially and sent that very day to a hospital, where doctors test for signs of madness. But it's a relief to see how quickly the frowns of the authorities melt into smiles. A district attorney immediately offers to drop all the charges if Petit agrees to perform for a group of kids, a deal Petit quickly accepts. Even the taunted cop sounds like a fan.

"I personally figured," he says, "I was watching something somebody else would never see again in the world."

The rest of New York is just as awed. Petit is released from custody the same day as his walk and is beset by reporters and admirers. One is a young lady who makes him a rather blunt and earthy proposition. While Petit's friends scramble to find him, he's rolling around in a loft on a waterbed.

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Petit never stopped wire-walking. There was a stint as a headline act with the Ringling Bros. Circus, but he dislikes the showbizzy, fake-a-near-fall approach to his profession. Instead, he's staged very public events, on his own, at a clip of one or two a year, including a walk in Jerusalem that linked the Jewish and Arab quarters. He wrote an account of the World Trade walk called "To Reach the Clouds." He has an office at a cathedral in the city, where he's an artist in residence. What he doesn't have is a routine, or anything that sounds like a steady job. He leads an unabashedly hand-to-mouth life.

"I am a dreamer and I have many projects," he says. "My life is a beautiful mess."