Walk the line

In 1968, an 18-year-old street performer named Philippe Petit was waiting in a dentist’s office in Paris, nursing a toothache, when he came across an article about the planned twin towers in New York. Staring at an artist’s impression of the project, the young funambulist was struck by a notion that to less daring minds seems inconceivable.

“They called me,” he later wrote. “I didn’t choose them. Anything that is giant and manmade strikes me in an awesome way and calls me. It was something that had to be done, a calling of the romantic type.”
Affecting a sneeze, Petit ripped the relevant page from a magazine and made for the exit. His dental agonies would have to wait. “What was it to have a toothache for another week,” he reasoned. “I now had a dream.”
Forty years on he still appears fired up by the recollection of this fateful moment.
“I did not see the poetry of the towers at first,” he tells me. “But I was so attracted by the audacity, the notion of building something so impossible. I gasped at the idea. They were marvels of engineering if you study them as such. And finally, when I came to New York I came to know them in a tangible everyday way and I fell so in love with them, I had to marry them in my own way.”
The young Petit had always been a dreamer and maker of mischief. A series of grand schemes and a healthy disregard for authority had already seen him expelled from every school he had attended.
“When I started to learn magic at the age of six I was conjuring a lot,” he beams. “And at some point I was training how to pick pockets and steal watches. Even then I had a humorous distain for authority. I was identified as a criminal but really I just did not wish to conform to other peoples’ schedules. So I kept getting thrown out.”
Once legally emancipated from his parents, Petit became an autodidact polymath of staggering proportions.
“For me, it was not about the spirit of the times or anarchy or any tradition,” he tells me. “On the contrary, it was a very private personal process. I just did not like being told how to live my life. It drove me to learn by myself many things.”
He studied chess, fencing, juggling, sculpture, equestrianism, bullfighting and tightrope walking. He travelled the world and mastered five languages. But it was a dentist’s waiting room where he learned his true calling.
From the moment he discovered the towers, Petit would spend six years honing his skills for what became known as “the artistic crime of the century.” He gathered together a group of co-conspirators, including long time girlfriend Annie and pals Jean-Louis Blondeau and Jean Francois Heckel. In June 1971, the crew facilitated Petit’s first illegal high wire walk between the two spires of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral. One year later they came to the attention of the Australian authorities when Petit crossed a wire between the pylons of Sydney Harbour Bridge.
“It was illegal,” Jean Francois later noted. “It was against the law but not wicked or mean. It was wonderful.”
Speaking with Petit, it’s clear that he similarly regards his work as a mad, extravagant gift to those who look on from the ground below.
“I don’t have a goal to be famous or rich,” he tells me. “Like any artist I only want to inspire in a grand way. The idea of art making you immortal is a beautiful notion but that does not drive me either. I like to joke about where I was born, which in Old French translates into ‘never die’. But in my way of living on the high-wire the threat of instant death is too prevalent for me to ever consider immortality. It’s a dangerous idea in my line.”
As the towers neared completion, Petit touched down in a very different New York than the sleek, gentrified city we know today. It was 1974 and a dissatisfied populace experiencing record crime levels, an economic slump and the Watergate crisis found, in the World Trade Center, a monument worthy of their ire. The architect, Minoru Yamasaki, may have achieved a great technical feat but the basic design – two great 110 storey slabs placed 44 metres apart – was loathed by critics and public alike. Building costs had spiralled beyond the billion dollar mark and with most of the offices lying unrented and unwanted, the entire project looked like a financial disaster of gigantic proportions.
Everything changed on August 7, 1974, when Philippe Petit carried a 8 metre pole onto a 2 cm steel cable suspended almost half a kilometre off the ground. He stayed up there, between the towers, for 45 minutes. He crossed the gap eight times, smiling at the Port Authority police who had dashed to the scene, until it became clear that they were prepared to take him down with a helicopter if necessary.
When Petit took his bow, thousands of New Yorkers had gathered to see his astonishing performance. As Sergeant Charles Daniels, one of the arresting officers noted at the time; “I observed the tightrope ‘dancer’ - because you couldn’t call him a ‘walker’ - approximately halfway between the two towers... Upon seeing us he started to smile and laugh and he started going into a dancing routine on the high wire... He was bouncing up and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again... Unbelievable really... Everybody was spellbound in the watching of it.”
By the time Petit returned to earth he was a folk hero and the towers looked a damned sight lovelier. To the delight of the Port Authority it was a big enough story to knock Richard Nixon off the front pages a day before his resignation. All formal charges against Petit were swiftly dropped; the then 24-year-old was instead “sentenced” to perform his high-wire act for a group of children in Central Park and received a free lifetime pass to the observation deck on the south tower.
“It wasn’t a complete surprise,” says Petit. “It is always difficult to impress the French but there had been an extraordinary reaction at Sydney Harbour Bridge. I was, though, taken aback by the enormity of the response in New York. It is a strange thing to go up there as a high-wire artist and to comedown as a hero. Everywhere I went I was recognised and thanked. I still am. It is very touching.”
At 60, Petit seems to retain this event about his person. Perhaps it’s the acrobat’s physique or his poetic Gallic English, but there’s something genuinely magical about him. His extraordinary story has been recounted in his best-selling diary, To Reach the Clouds, a children’s book and now, in Man On Wire, the Sundance winning film from director James Marsh (Wisconsin Death Trip, The King). Seamlessly weaving archive footage with dramatic recreations, Mr. Marsh’s thrilling heist movie owes as much to Michael Mann as it does to Errol Morris.
“It was a heist,” insists Petit. “But we were giving something not taking something away.”
The walk in the clouds, it transpires, was a hugely dramatic event long before Petit ‘touched the void’. A cast of eccentric characters – the stoner who ran away on the day, the insurance drone turned inside man, the broadminded lady with a waterbed – form a fascinating you-couldn’t-make-it-up back story to a marvellous feat.
Though it all makes for a tremendous monument to the towers, Marsh and Petit decided it was best to omit certain tragic developments from this century.
“There was no room in the story for the aftermath,” says Petit. “This was not about destruction but joy. This is the life of the towers.”