Philippe Petit : To Reach the Clouds

On top of the world

In 1974, at the age of 25, Philippe Petit broke into the newly built World Trade Center, strung a 60m tightrope between the Twin Towers and, watched by incredulous security guards and a crowd of gawping spectators 110 storeys below, he danced for an hour across the skies of Manhattan. In the aftermath of the towers' destruction, he has written a book about his extraordinary feat. But, as he tells Adam Higginbotham, his next 'coup', the Grand Canyon Walk, will be his greatest.

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Philippe Petit knows a few things about faith. He is a professional wire-walker. He works alone, and in the open air, between buildings, monuments or natural structures. Other wire-walkers work for 300 days a year, in families, troupes and circuses, performing tricks and acrobatics designed to elicit awed gasps from a paying audience. Petit sees himself differently: not as a daredevil, but as a performer of a unique aerial artform. He writes and performs his own plays on the wire: 'I'm the only one,' he says, 'who uses the wire as a stage for theatre, opera and grand performances.'

Philippe Petit says he was a completely misanthropic child. He thought children his own age were stupid, and refused to play with them. Instead, he devised his own set of interests, using books where he couldn't find practical experience: 'Climbing, painting, printing, languages, poetry, theatre, stealing, drawing, and horses. I was spending all my life with horses. Sleeping in the stall.

'I engulfed myself in solitude at a very early age,' he says. 'And it went very well.' The climbing began at four. At six, he began teaching himself magic, polishing his tricks in front of a mirror. From magic, he progressed to tricks of manipulation with billiard balls, and from them to juggling. The misdirection of close-up magic led him to learn the art of the pickpocket. In 1963, at 14, he went on a school exchange trip to the USSR. He wanted to learn Russian and see the Moscow State Circus. At the beginning of the trip, he sloped off and began roaming the Soviet Union alone. It wasn't until three months later that he met up with his group again, just as they were preparing to return to France. 'It's strange,' he says, as if remembering the whole incident for the first time in years, 'that I never wrote about that. It was an amazing adventure.'

When he was 16, he began visiting the circus in Paris - the Cirque d'Hiver, the Circo Medrano in Montmartre - to watch the jugglers. Between shows, he would sneak in and practise with them. Philippe had no interest in formal education. He spent his time in class practising close-up magic tricks under his desk and picking the pockets of his teachers. His lack of attentiveness was handsomely repaid: by the time he was 17, he had been expelled from five schools.

On Wednesday, 7 August 1974, shortly after 7:15 a.m., Petit stepped off the South Tower and onto his 3/4” 6×19 IWRC (independent wire rope core[6]) steel cable. He walked the wire for 45 minutes, making eight crossings between the towers, a quarter of a mile above the sidewalks of Manhattan. In addition to walking, he sat on the wire, gave knee salutes and, while lying on the wire, spoke with a gull circling above his head.

  “Life should be lived on the edge of life. You have to exercise rebellion: to refuse to tape yourself to rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge - and then you are going to live your life on a tightrope.”

—	Philippe Petit, Man on Wire