Fifty years later, Philippe Petit is still a ‘Man on Wire’

By Annie Aguiar

NEW YORK: It was 50 years ago this week that Philippe Petit defied gravity, and the police, by walking a high wire between the twin towers of the World Trade Center, braving the winds some 1,350 feet above the streets of Manhattan.

Petit, who will turn 75 next week, still has enviable balance, as was clear the other day when he ascended a simple metal ladder to reach what looked like a short diver’s platform 20 feet off the ground. A wire stretched out before him. Taking hold of a balancing pole, he stepped into the air, striding gracefully as if he were on solid ground — pausing only occasionally to assert his balance against the wire rolling underfoot.

“People think in old age you cannot do anything anymore,” he said in an interview. “I think it’s the opposite. I think I’m more majestic, more in control, more beautiful to look at today at 74 than I was at 18.”

He was inside the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine rehearsing “Towering!!,” a new show he will perform there on Wednesday and Thursday to commemorate the anniversary of his walk between the twin towers (which the two exclamation points in the show’s title suggest). The feat made Petit a national fascination. It took on a tragic dimension after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, destroyed the towers. Since then, new generations learned about his accomplishment through the Academy Award-winning documentary “Man on Wire” (2008) and a children’s book, “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers.”

The cathedral, in Morningside Heights in Upper Manhattan, is a special place for Petit: He has been an artist in residence there since 1980. The dean of the cathedral at the time, Rev. James Parks Morton, granted Petit the title to stop the police from arresting him after an illicit high-wire walk across its 601-foot-long nave. Two years later, he walked across Amsterdam Avenue to the cathedral to inaugurate a new phase of construction.

The venue has a personal resonance, too. The ashes of his daughter Gypsy, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage when she was 9, are interred in the cathedral. He said this show is important to him on many levels, and the connection to his daughter adds another.

The new show is not all high-wire walking, though Petit will walk along a 20-foot-high wire inside the cathedral, flanked on either side by a seated audience. “Towering!!” is composed of 19 scenes evoking different points in the story of his 1974 walk. The musician Sting, a friend of Petit’s, will also perform.

One segment will feature a group of students from Ballet Tech mimicking a shaky “high-wire” walk along a red-taped line on the stage before busting into a silly dance. At one point, Petit will take the microphone and “confess,” which he says is fitting for the cathedral setting. He will right some “embellishments” that he has made about his story that add to the legend of his adventure. He also said he would discuss how he wronged some friends after the success of his World Trade Center walk, especially Jean-Louis Blondeau, who helped plan the escapade and wept in “Man on Wire” when talking about the decline of their close friendship after the walk.

“It’s important for me, after all my life lying a little bit about what happened,” he said. “Why not tell the truth?” But above all he wants the “Towering!!” audience to first see the magnificent space of the cathedral and then see him up on the wire, walking in its hallowed air.

As a teenage street juggler working in Paris, Petit saw a photographic rendering of two buildings that didn’t yet exist in a city he had never seen. He felt the need to walk between them — and managed to do it. Fifty years after the feat, he still wants to amaze audiences.

“They will see a miracle,” he said. “A man dancing in the clouds.”