As the end descends on another summer in the Hamptons, the Long Island resort popular among New York’s high society, Philippe Petit, the world’s most celebrated highwire artist, is preparing to stage what he mischievously calls “the best Hamptons garden party”.
The 75-year-old Frenchman strolled to fame 50 years ago for his spectacular, secret and illegal walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, stepping across, and lying down on, a wire 1,350 feet above ground.
His Hamptons wire show, entitled “Garden Stroll” and happening tomorrow in the 16-acre garden at LongHouse Reserve, concludes the half-century anniversary celebrations commemorating that Twin Towers feat, which Petit dubbed “Le Coup”. The celebrations have already included two highwire shows at St John the Divine in Manhattan, the world’s largest Gothic cathedral where Petit is artist-in-residence.
Although for this final event–for which tickets cost $500–he won’t be “miles in the sky”, he is a meticulous preparer (he has only fallen once on a wire, during a brief stint as a circus performer, and that was during a practice session). Which is why, when we speak, he’s not in the Hamptons, but planning his escapade at his home in the Catskill mountains, a hand-built timber 18th-century-style barn, where he lives with his producer and partner Judith Friedlaender, a former lawyer and executive director of New York’s Big Apple Circus.
Petit’s celebrity friends include Al Pacino, Woody Allen and Sting, who performed three songs at his Manhattan celebration. More big names will doubtless be present in the Hamptons, where he’ll walk a wire accompanied by clarinettist-saxophonist Anat Cohen. For all his fame and connections, however, he stresses that he lives a modest existence. Petit’s Twin Towers caper was dubbed the “artistic crime of the century”, which would suggest that, as with the more conventional kind, artistic crime doesn’t pay.
Does Petit even enjoy the Hamptons? “To be perfectly honest with you, it’s a dangerous question,” replies the ultimate daredevil. “Do I enjoy the spirit of the Hamptons? If I say yes, I will be lying a little bit and if I say no I will be immediately [classified] an outsider… what does not impress me very much is the display of richness. I have met millionaires and beggars. Each contains incredible human beings but I am not attracted to the multi-billion yacht and mansion. I like caviar but it’s good that I cannot afford it!”
Before the World Trade Center, Petit did highwire walks along Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral and Sydney Harbour Bridge. Even though he has lived in New York State since 1974, there is something stereotypically French about Petit’s brashness, animated commitment to highwire poetry and overblown declarations of his imaginative spirit. Among his eight books is a study on creativity. “I am equally happy when I am practising or performing magic, addressing an audience in keynote speaking engagements, painting, drawing, writing or street juggling,” he says. “You can already tell my life is a beautiful mess! Usually people have one passion–I am a prisoner of too many passions!”
“Le Coup” occurred the day before Richard Nixon announced his resignation following the Watergate scandal. The outgoing US president confessed on the White House lawn, “I wish I had the publicity that Frenchman had.”Petit recalls, “On the day he resigned, I was on the front page of some newspapers and Nixon was on page two!” The event received a further jolt following James Marsh’s Oscar-winning 2008 documentaryMan on Wire.
Did Petit know he was walking into historical folklore? “I only concentrated on the high wire walk itself,” he says. “I never thought of the consequences, they were uninteresting to me. There was no fear at confronting the deepest abyss man ever faced, the ground of Manhattan a quarter of a mile below my feet. Maybe impatience, but in the photographs you see my face lighting up with a giant smile. It was the happiest day in my life.”
Born in Nemours, south of Paris, Petit was obsessed with magic, juggling, pickpocketing and wire-walking as a child. He developed his rebellious streak from having a disciplinarian military pilot and historian father who displayed no interest in his son’s beloved pursuits. He now sees the advantages of not hailing from a family of tightropers: “I was fortunate not to be born in a world of entertainment, circus, music hall and daredevilry. Therefore I became the only theatrical wire walker in the world.”
Petit did not watch any of the Paris Olympics and isn’t interested in watching sport, which is surprising for one so obsessed with the extremes of physical activity. Yet like the first half of a football match, his Twin Towers walk lasted 45 minutes. Since then he’s traversed along wires in Jerusalem, the Eiffel Tower and New York’s Grand Central Terminal– but the World Trade Center still towers over the hundreds of his other walks.
Petit insists he has no plans to retire and while his body is becoming less supple, he says his mind when he is in motion is sharper than ever. He practises on a wire for two hours each day and still keeps an office in St John the Divine. The ashes of his daughter Cordia Gypsy, who died at the age of nine of a cerebral brain haemorrhage in 1992, are buried in the church’s columbarium. “I have immense sorrow over the loss of that child but I also have immense joy when I think of her,” Petit told the Observer a decade ago about his late daughter, whom he had with artist Elaine Fasula.
In true storytelling fashion, Petit is now revising his own history. His Manhattan anniversary show included a segment entitled Confessions. It turns out the much-recounted origin story of Petit first hearing about the World Trade Center in 1968–reading a magazine featuring a model of the Twin Towers in a dentist’s waiting room while he was suffering from toothache– was a lie. “It was a complete invention,” he admits. “I hope my friend James Marsh is not furious at me when I announced those falsities in his film!” Petit says now he took six trips across the divide in 45 minutes rather than eight: “I’m looking at the end of my life and sometimes you want to redress wrongs for your own satisfaction or for the sense of justice that the action carries.”
The destruction of the Twin Towers on September 11 2001, Petit once told theAM New York newspaper, left him “flabbergasted… I saw them as they grew like children, and when they grew up, I married them with a cable in the shape of a smile”. After 9/11 Petit said he no longer calls the twin skyscrapers “my towers” but “our towers”.
Petit was arrested for criminal trespassing and disorderly conduct following “Le Coup” but the charges were dropped on condition that he perform for children in Central Park. What a charming New York story, I say. “What nobody knows is that deal is a legend,” he replies. “The reality was they wanted me to do a tiny show juggling with 12 kids. I turned that into thousands of people admiring a long crossing over the Belvedere Lake in Central Park. The powers-that-be tried to stop me but I had already done my own press conference– it was completely illegal, which kept with the spirit of the adventure.”
Petit has also sought mend fences with Jean-Louis Blondeau, his erstwhile collaborator who helped him plan logistics, most notably firing a bow and arrow to string a cable between the Twin Towers. The pair have long been estranged but Petit has now admitted to diminishing his role. But he says the pair are in contact again and invited him to the 50th anniversary Manhattan show (Blondeau declined to attend). “There was some of his behaviour that I found distressing,” says Petit on why they fell out. “I cannot get into it but in my autobiography which is just finished, I am analysing both sides.”
FollowingMan on Wire’s success, Petit’s life was turned into a glossy 2015 Hollywood biopicThe Walk directed by Robert Zemeckis, whose credits includeBack to the Future andForrest Gump.The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit, bombed at the box office and although its subject helped promote it, he now reveals he was underwhelmed. “I was not happy withThe Walk,” Petit says. “Part of it made me happy–the beautiful cinematic ballad in the sky–but many parts of the film were a series of Hollywood cliches.
“I thought I would be involved in collaborating with Zemeckis. But the way my friends were portrayed, my parents were portrayed and my life was portrayed was too easy for me. It was not challenging. I don’t dislike the film but to me it’s a bit of a shame they did not turn to me and say ‘Philippe, collaborate’.” Petit himself still has cinematic ambitions. “It’s a painful question,” he says, “because my entire life I wanted to become a filmmaker and never fought enough for it. If the occasion presented itself, I would love to do my first film.”
One creative project he hopes will come to fruition is with Sting, who performed a new song Let the Great World Spin, about Petit. Ironically, since he claims to have been arrested by officers of the law over 500 times for illegal highwire walks, Petit has been pals with the former Police frontman for decades. The pair are rumoured to be collaborating on a musical. “No we are not,” he says. “But that song has something to do with a musical or a theatre piece or even a film. It’s unclear at the moment.”
He regrets previous projects with the singer that never happened, most notably a 2005 show at the Sage in Gateshead in which Petit would have traversed the Tyne accompanied by a musical performance from Sting. “I was so sad,” Petit says. “This was one of the fiascos in my life. It was nobody’s fault except the politicians who withdrew their financial support at the last moment.”
While there may be future shows devoted to Petit’s Twin Towers exploits, he’s certain that a similar kind of stunt would be impossible today. “I didn’t ask for permission so health and safety regulations are not part of my way of thinking but I think it would not happen now,” he says. “At midnight, if you see a group of human beings on a roof with tons of equipment, you would shoot them first and ask questions later!” Fifty years on, it’s Philippe Petit’s unique coup that continues to inspire questions.
