Traversing the Towers In a Moment of Joy
Long Ago and High Above New York City, A Dreamer Stepped Confidently Into the Air

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 30, 2008

NEW YORK

In the bad old, nearly bankrupt days of the mid-'70s, a French guy padded across a steel cable strung between the tippity top of the World Trade Center towers, holding a balancing pole and grinning. Police rushed to the roof of the buildings, but he ignored them, choosing instead to pirouette, talk to the seagulls and revel in the size of his gathering audience. He surrendered after 45 minutes and was arrested for trespassing.

By that afternoon, he was a national hero.

Unlike most urban legends, the truth about this caper -- which unfolded the morning of Aug. 7, 1974 -- exceeds the mythology. Which makes sense, because even those vaguely familiar with Philippe Petit and his oddball posse of collaborators have probably never considered the subterfuge behind their feat. How do you sneak roughly a ton of equipment into what were already a pair of heavily guarded buildings? How do you string several hundred pounds of wire between skyscrapers, without anyone noticing? Those questions, it turns out, were just as vexing as more obvious problems, like, how could you possibly take that very first step?

"Scared is such a little word," says Petit. "Terror is much more noble."

Now 58, Petit has kept his reddish hair and the merveilleux accent first heard when he explained, "There is no why," to reporters who kept asking the same question. Nor has he lost the grandiloquence that adds drama and a sense of personal destiny to just about everything that comes out of his mouth.

"I didn't choose America," he says, when asked why he stayed in this country for the past three decades. "America chose me."

On Saturday, he sat on a sofa at the SoHo Grand Hotel and reminisced about "my coup," as he calls it, which gets the full-length documentary treatment in "Man on Wire." The film, to be released in August, is screening at the Tribeca Film Festival, now in its second week.

In 89 minutes of vintage footage, interviews and reenactments, "Wire" recounts the story of Petit, then a 24-year-old street performer, and his co-conspirators, some of them Frenchmen who don't speak English, others Americans who don't speak French. (One of them, a musician, shows up stoned for an aborted first attempt.) They spend months fine-tuning their scheme, which ultimately includes disguises, scale models, reams of notes, a bow and arrow and some 200 preparatory visits to the towers.

Petit comes across as a merrily obsessed performance artist who seems to believe the towers were built tantalizingly close and vertiginously high to dare him, personally, to traverse the gap. He has a cockamamie-sounding scheme and a simple goal: to interrupt the nation's regularly scheduled programming for an interlude of pure and pointless delight.

"It's very subversive but also very innocent," says the movie's director, James Marsh, who is seated next to Petit. "They are committing a crime, but they're giving something to the people of New York, a performance, a miracle, a vision. It's something naughty and yet it harms nobody. They just want to create a beautiful moment."

They did just that. Petit made news around the world, and when he was released by the authorities, the same day as his arrest, the city embraced him. His impish, shrugging explanations -- including "When I see two oranges, I juggle. When I see two towers, I walk" -- were a break from the unhappy preoccupations of the day. Richard Nixon resigned two days after Petit tiptoed into the public imagination and by the time the president boarded his helicopter on the White House lawn, even he had the world's most famous aerialist in mind.

"I wish I had the publicity that Frenchman had," Nixon said in farewell remarks.

* * *

As famous as Petit was, he never cashed in the way insta-celebrities do today, though he didn't lack opportunity. He lives today in a Catskills village outside New York City, but if his tastes ran to Fifth Avenue co-ops, that's where he'd be living. In the months after Petit's World Trade walk, companies knocked into each other trying to entice him into an endorsement, an appearance, a commercial. MGM made an offer, reportedly in the seven figures. When a friend answered his phone and said the makers of Sweet'N Low were calling with a proposal, Petit said, "Hang up on them. I am strong and high." Burger King offered him $100,000 to wear some kind of Whopper costume and wire-walk over Eighth Avenue.

"I had learned a new epithet the day they asked me to do that," says Petit. "A New York epithet."

A sort of anti-Evel Knievel, he turned everyone down.

"I could have become rich in 12 days if I wanted to," he says, with so much defiant pride you'd think Burger King had just called back. "But I just couldn't do it. Then they'd add zeros to the number they were offering and that just made me mad because I am a self-taught artist and I can't be bought that way. I cannot sell my art cheaply. I have never done a commercial in my life and I never will."

You get the sense that Petit has a very particular idea of who he is and what he does. He's inclined by nature to quibble with the premise of your question, as politely as possible, and he seems braced to be misunderstood or mislabeled. Please don't refer to his walks as "stunts," merci beaucoup, and do not call him a daredevil. He prefers "poet in the sky," a term that captures, if nothing else, the purity of the man's motives.

Which, as "Man on Wire" makes clear, are hard to question. Petit starts to learn to wire-walk at the age of 16, on his own, and develops his act on the streets of Paris, passing the hat to sustain himself. He performs atop Notre Dame in 1971 and stops traffic when he shuffles across a wire on Australia's Sydney Harbor Bridge. These, it turns out, seem like limbering-up exercises when he spots a story about the as-yet-unfinished towers, which he reads about in a magazine in a dentist's office in France. Immediately, he is recruiting friends, all of whom are apparently hypnotized by Petit's determination. Only one says, "You're insane."

Nutters, however, rarely plot with such care. He and his friends hunt for ways to hurl a string from one tower to the next, experimenting with soccer balls and settling, finally, on that aforementioned bow and arrow. (The thin cord attached to the arrow is used to drag over a series of larger ropes, and finally, the cable.) Petit takes a handful of trips to the United States to study the towers and their denizens, filling notebooks about the work habits of the guards and the topography of the buildings, with details such as how much the structures sway in the wind. Masquerading as a journalist, he interviews management and construction workers and is given a tour of the roof, a photographer pal in tow. He visits several times a day for months.

A group of foreigners, quietly casing the towers, amid thousands of unwitting commuters -- it's heartbreakingly familiar, and it gives this movie a poignant subtext that nobody will miss. "Wire" is a perfect Tribeca entry because the destruction of the twin towers inspired the festival, and it's hard to imagine a more fitting tribute to those buildings than a look at the daring and whimsical act they inspired, just as they were being born.

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.

* * *

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."

He doesn't own a TV, so he learned about the attacks of Sept. 11 from a friend, who called to say, "Philippe, your towers are being destroyed." (He was devastated, of course.) Much of his time in recent years was spent building a farmhouse, using only 18th-century tools and 18th-century methods. It took the dedication of a true stickler and purist.

"I remember seeing him cutting a piece of lumber for like three days," says Tom Kellogg, a next-door neighbor and admirer. "And I went over there and said, 'Hey, Philippe, you want to borrow my circular saw?' " Kellogg laughs at the memory of Petit's reaction. "I didn't ask him again."

Petit's girlfriend at the time of World Trade walk, Annie Allix, says in the film that renown changed her ex dramatically. "I saw Philippe discover what it meant to be famous," she says, sounding forgiving in a way that seems very French. "To be recognized with expressions of friendliness and enthusiasm. People would cross the street to tell him, 'You gave us such a gift.' "

Pfft, replies Petit, shifting to the edge of the sofa and waving his hands for emphasis. Yes, fame opened some doors, and as a bio in the film's publicity packet makes clear, it brought him some high-profile friends, such as Sting, Robin Williams and Milos Forman. But he's happy to say that he still is a rule-breaker, still struggling against forces that are perpetually arrayed against a true artist. By which he seems to mean, more or less, the Man.

"Next Saturday and Sunday, I will be wire-walking in Washington Square Park, you can put that in your paper, at 3 p.m.," he says. "I will be passing the hat, and after that if my hat is full, I will invite my friends for dinner. If there is no money, I'll steal something to eat."

Steal something to eat?

"I am speaking metaphorically," he says, with a smile. "If an artist is not a little famished, then something is wrong."