Death Is Very Close: A Champagne Reception for Philippe Petit

There was an air of subdued anticipation at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine as we waited for Philippe Petit to take the stage. A clarinetist roved through the church improvising variations on Gershwin in spurts, making it hard to tell if the event, which was being held to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers, had begun. Eventually, the lights dimmed and we were told to turn off our phones, as even a single lit screen in the audience might cause Petit to fall from his tightrope. Music started, but so quietly that it seemed like it was being played from a phone, while a candlelit procession made its way down the nave. Large boards were set up, on which footage of the Twin Towers being constructed was projected. A group of child dancers imitated Petit’s walk along the ground, and were followed by a professional whistler. After we were shuffled through this sequence that felt like a performed version of ADHD, Petit finally appeared and began walking, first meekly, then quickly, to Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” wearing a white jacket laced with gold.

The original Twin Towers walk took place on the morning of August 7, 1974, after Petit and a group of conspirators broke into the World Trade Center while it was still partially under construction, and used a bow and arrow to span a tightrope between the towers. Petit walked, ran, lay down, and knelt on the wire, a quarter of a mile in the air, as the city looked on from below. It had taken more than eight months of meticulous planning to carry out the performance, including creating a mock-up of the distance between the Towers on a field in France, studying their engineering, and using various disguises and fake IDs to gain access to them. These heist-like aspects (it is referred to as “the coup”) have made it ripe material for movies including Man on Wire and The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit and featuring CGI Twin Towers.

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Three weeks before the performance, Petit held a reception in anticipation of the event on the eightieth floor of 3 World Trade Center. I exited the elevator into a space with perhaps the most impressive view of New York I’d ever seen. Under the influence of the height and temperature change (it was a hundred degrees outside that day), the vista was so impressive that it was almost addictive; it was hard to pull myself away from the windows, as though the space were designed to keep me there, like the interior of a casino.

The floor itself was open-plan and riddled with memorabilia from Silverstein Properties, the real estate firm owned by Larry Silverstein, which purchased the World Trade Center six weeks before September 11 and led the site’s redevelopment after the attacks. Littered around the space were newspaper and magazine covers about the rebuilding efforts, novelty-size ribbon-cutting scissors and fake keys, golden trophies and glass awards, posters for corporate events (“Dancing with the Silversteins”), pictures of Silverstein’s family, a red carpet with photos of runway shows that had taken place on the floor, works of art that had been made in the building’s studios, human-size scale models of the buildings, worn-out hard hats and boots, a full-scale I beam, American flags, emblems that commemorated every time a company like Uber or Spotify leased space in one of Silverstein’s buildings, the loudspeaker that George Bush used to give an address at Ground Zero, pieces of Petit’s clothing worn during the walk, and parts of a set from the show Succession, which apparently had been filmed there.

​​Outside the bathroom, a woman sat propped up against the wall, a victim of the heat, and was attended to by an employee who promised to bring her water. Inside the large windowless bathroom, an older man in white linen was standing at the sinks, scribbling notes on what looked like a piece of cardboard and talking to himself. He would consult his board, write something, then stare grimly, deadly, at himself in the mirror, before looking back at his board and beginning his recitation again. My presence didn’t seem to affect him at all.

Back in the main space, smooth jazz played overhead as champagne and hors d’oeuvres were served. Forty or fifty people circulated around me. Large, shiny real estate men mingled with aging artists; one group was talking loudly, nearly screaming, about how they’d just had lunch at Nobu, while another discussed the details of a recent real estate venture. An hour passed before the French cultural ambassador took to the stage to introduce Petit, whom I recognized as the man who had been talking to himself in the bathroom. He thanked the crowd, noting that he saw a lot of old friends in the audience. He began pointing to and naming some of them, causing others to raise their hands in hopes of being recognized. Clearly he’d forgotten some of them, as their hands remained in the air, as if they were desperate to be called on to answer a question. He pulled a red rose out of his pocket and said that he was going to balance it on the tip of his nose. “It is all about movement,” he said, before he placed the flower on his nose, splayed out his arms, and began walking from side to side. “The wire is never still, but moving, just like the buildings.” He moved his hands like a ball juggler.

Fifty years after the original walk, watching Petit gesticulate in an air-conditioned room with One World Trade Center behind him, it was hard not to feel that if the original event had been emblematic of the raw, unsupervised downtown New York of the seventies, this event perfectly encapsulated the downtown New York of today: every facet of life contained within a billion-dollar real estate development; a gluttony of high-efficiency glass, K-frames, and speculative investments.

After the talk, I spoke with Barry Greenhouse, who’d worked in the South Tower in the seventies, and had been Petit’s main contact in gaining access to the Twin Towers. Between roasted scallops, he told me about how he’d first seen Petit performing on the street in Paris, then saw him one day at the base of the Towers years later. Petit came and spoke to us briefly, and thanked Greenhouse for coming, before running off to the next group. Even offstage, he speaks and gesticulates quickly, almost as a form of misdirection. He has a clear gravitas and command of space, but arrives at that state almost by way of a frantic separateness; you get the sense that he isn’t really there, that he is moving ever farther away from you.

Still, the memory of him that stayed with me was the face I’d seen in the bathroom, and that I’d see again as he walked the tightrope. It’s a face that is like a death mask; gaunt, and filled with a particular worry, as if the severity of the situations he has put himself into over the years has imparted to him a certain darkness. The idea of death is embedded into all his performances; when you watch him cross the tightrope, half your mind is dedicated to thinking about him falling. The pleasure you get from watching is the feeling of your mind temporarily suspending that thought. What if he swayed too far to the side, if there was a gust? In the documentary Man on Wire, when describing the moment he shifted his weight from the South Tower to the wire, he says that he thought it was probably the end of his life, and that death was very close.

***

At Saint John the Divine, Petit sat at the edge of the rope on a metal platform that was fastened to a Gothic column. Satie continued to play as Merlin Whitehawk, a puppeteer, brought out a giant seagull made of wire on what looked like a fishing pole, a bit meant to re-create a scene that had happened between Petit and a real seagull during the original walk. Eventually Sting took the stage. “If blood will flow when flesh and steel are one,” he sang, as people in the flat church seating craned their necks to get a glimpse of him.

Petit walked, ran, lay down on, knelt, and sat on the rope over the next half hour before two fake policemen, dressed in loose, stripper-like fake uniforms, came to arrest him, ascending to the rope on a wobbly ladder; a slapstick that highlighted Petit’s particular form of artistry, which at times borders on vaudeville without ever fully crossing into it.

Petit picked the handcuffs and took the microphone to dispel some rumors about the original performance, including how long he’d actually walked (less than the initially reported forty-five minutes), and how long it had taken to plan the coup (months, not years). He apologized to his friend Jean-Louis Blondeau, who he said deserved much more credit for planning the original performance, and said that, after walking between the Towers, he’d become too egotistical to share the fame with those who had helped him. There was remorse in his voice, as if he sensed some end and felt the need to make amends. He left the stage to let Sting and others finish the show, only to come riding back out on his unicycle minutes later. Dressed now in black, he and Sting walked off stage arm in arm, with the rest of the performers in tow.

I watched the crowd leave as some—those who had paid five hundred dollars for their tickets—made their way to another private champagne reception at the back of the church.

Walking down Amsterdam Avenue in the light rain, I felt an intense alienation. Petit was impressive, but the performance was inescapably underwhelming. Simulating an original event that was impactful in part because of its spontaneity and illegality had only highlighted just how impossible that feat, or anything like it, would be in New York today.

The event that night had been replete with recordings of the New York Harbor and sirens (even as real sirens could be heard outside), in addition to the fake policemen and seagull puppet. All this had been done to evoke the 1974 walk, but part of what made that walk so profound was how ephemeral it was, how it had invoked the city to an almost sensational extent: it was the thousands of people who gathered on the streets below that gave it the aura of myth. Besides a few pictures, there is almost no documentation of Petit’s “coup” at all. It is this absence, not simulations, that reminds us most potently of what is gone. After 9/11, a good deal of what remained of the towers was sold as scrap metal to China to be melted down and reused; the debris that covered Lower Manhattan was trucked to the Fresh Kills Landfill in Staten Island. Below the nave in Saint John the Divine, in the basement’s crypt next to the children’s school, are fragments of the Twin Towers; below that, in the sub-basement, is a spring.

Patrick McGraw is the editor of Heavy Traffic.

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