In the early morning of Aug. 7, 1974, Frenchman Philippe Petit stepped off the ledge of the unfinished World Trade Center in New York City onto an inch-thick cable to start a high-wire walk that arguably was the greatest daredevil feat in history:
An aerialist performance between the Twin Towers, more than a quarter-mile off the ground.
The feat was so extraordinary that more than 40 years later, it’s the subject of a major motion picture, “The Walk,” starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt, that premiered Sept. 30 in 3D IMAX format and went into wide distribution in regular format Friday.
But largely forgotten, except for newspaper accounts of the day and the memories of those who witnessed it, was that just 10 days later, in his first public appearance after the World Trade Center walk, Petit was in Allentown, walking a wire strung 82 feet in the air, at an incline, across Hamilton Street at Hess’s department store.
In the rain. Blindfolded.
That much shorter, lower walk was astonishing too — not only for the life-threatening feat, but because it came so soon after what arguably was the top achievement in Petit’s professional life.
But in a telephone interview this week, Petit revealed one reason it’s largely been forgotten. He said it’s a performance he’d like to forget.
“I don’t want to talk about the walk I did in Allentown,” Petit said. “But if you want to talk about it, please quote me. It should say ‘Philipe has erased the walk in Allentown from his artistic memory.’ You can quote me on that.”
The power of Hess’s
Petit’s Allentown walk shows Hess’s mastery of public relations.
From the 1940s through the 1970s, Hess’s lured the biggest celebrities for promotions at the store at Eighth and Hamilton streets, where PPL Plaza now stands. Hess’s sold the store to The Bon-Ton in 1994, which closed it in 1996. It was demolished in 2000.
Movie stars Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Gina Lollobrigida and Rock Hudson; TV Superman George Reeves, Johnny Carson, Barbara Walters and Burt Ward (Robin in the “Batman” TV series) all made appearances. So did Donny Osmond. More than 3,000 waited in 1973 to see Liberace.
Miss and Mr. America would be on hand annually. United Nations diplomats and politicians cut ribbons.
Wolfgang Otto, who worked at Hess’s for nearly 40 years before retiring as a vice president, said in an interview last week that daredevils also were among the attractions.
“One [stuntman Ross Collins] called himself Mr. Suicide, who would jump from Hess’s fifth floor to a big mattress below on Ninth Street,” Otto said. “Another time we had roller skating on a platform on the roof, extending over the [edge] so people could see it.”
Escape artist Mario Manzini dangled upside down from a burning rope as he struggled out of a straitjacket.
“We would call it ‘Saturday Excitement,’ and the people could meet them, they would walk around the store. It was an interesting time,” Otto said.
Store officials always were on the lookout for the kind of flamboyance that founder Max Hess and his son, Max Hess Jr., sought for the store.
So it wasn’t unusual, Otto said, when in August 1974, Hess’s officials were gathered in a conference room when “somebody came in and said, ‘You have to see this,’ ” and brought in a television showing Petit’s World Trade Center walk.
Otto said the store’s advertising and public relations people in New York contacted “a person who was the go-between to see what he could do to get him out of jail,” where Petit was taken after being arrested by New York police as soon as he stepped off the wire.
After a psychiatric evaluation, Petit was charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct and sentenced to perform for children with a walk above Belvedere Lake (known now as Turtle Pond) in New York City’s Central Park.
Petit would not address questions about the arrangements to perform in Allentown.
“Whether we paid the bail or how this was done, I don’t know,” Otto said. “But days after he did this walk, he was going across Hamilton Street.”
‘The Walk’
The new movie, based on Petit’s 2002 book “To Reach the Clouds,” tells how Petit worked as a mime and street performer in France after first seeing a wire walker at the circus when he was 8.
In 1968, at 17, he first read about the proposed construction of the Twin Towers and saw drawings of the project in a magazine at a dentist’s office. Petit was seized by the idea of performing there, and began collecting articles on the towers.
As he did, Petit established his reputation as a high-wire walker by performing on cables between the spires of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris in 1971 and pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia, in 1973.
In six years of planning for the World Trade Center walk, Petit and accomplices gained entry to the towers several times to study security measures, analyze the construction and identify places to anchor the wire and supporting cables.
In heart-pounding scenes in the movie, Petit and his accomplices evade police and security to rig a 200-foot-long cable between the towers, 104 stories and 1,350 feet up.
“No one in his right mind would attempt this thing, and that is why I must,” Petit’s character says in the movie. “People ask ‘Why?’ I don’t think of it this way. For me, to walk on the wire, this is life. They call to me, these towers. They call to me and inspire.”
In a 2008 documentary, “Man on Wire,” that won numerous awards at the Sundance Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Documentary, Petit put it more succinctly: “If I die, what a beautiful death — to die in the exercise of your passion.”
Petit’s walk between the Twin Towers lasted 45 minutes, during which he made eight trips across the wire; got on one knee to salute the wire, the towers and “the good people of New York”; and sat and lay on the cable.
“All I could see was the wire floating out in a straight line to infinity,” his character says in “The Wire.” “The most intense joy; the most complete satisfaction I have ever felt in my life.”
In the telephone interview, Petit said he loves the movie.
“I love many parts of the film that share the true spirit of my adventure with the audience in an amazing way,” he said. “What [Director Robert] Zemeckis did, he managed to bring the audience on the wire with me on the top of the tower that are no longer there with me, and it’s an amazing experience.”
The Twin Towers walk immediately made Petit one of the most famous men in the world. When President Richard Nixon resigned from office the next day, he told the press on the White House lawn, “I wish I had the publicity that Frenchman had.”
In the interview, Petit said he was deluged with offers for movie deals, book proposals, beer endorsements, even hamburger ads, but turned down all of them.
“National sport in America seems to be for performers to do commercials,” he said. “And probably there’s nothing wrong with that, except me — it’s against the blood that is running into my vein.
“I cannot say on television and get millions of dollars for that, ‘The reason I walk on the wire is because of the beer and so and so.’ … Even if I love that beer and they give me that beer for the rest of my life for free, I would never do such a commercial,” he said. “It’s something I do not comprehend. But again, I am a, probably, fool, you know?”
Walking in Allentown
Instead, just a week after the World Trade Center walk, Petit found himself in Allentown.
There, he met with the media and lunched with Hess’s executives in the store’s famed Patio restaurant, Otto said.
“If we had a big event, I would meet the people, sometimes get an autograph,” Otto said. “In the Patio, there was a table called the Round Table, and whenever we had celebrities, we would get them and have either lunch or dinner with them. And so I remember meeting him.”
Otto said Petit’s Allentown walk was well publicized.
“You don’t put this on without letting people know. I know we were satisfied that we got publicity. Hess’s wanted publicity,” he said with a laugh.
The Allentown walk was delayed by rain. It was three days after Petit’s 25th birthday.
The day of the event, a crowd that officials estimated at 10,000 gathered, filling the streets from Seventh to 11th streets along Hamilton — outside the boundaries police had set up for the event.
The crowd waited nearly three hours, as the show again was delayed when heavy morning rain forced Petit to wait for the cable to dry.
The inch-thick wire was strung between Hess’s five-story store and the Wrangler Wroost store. Because Hess’s was taller, the cable was on an incline.
Dressed in white and walking with a 32-foot-long balancing pole, Petit performed to recorded music from a speaker on Hess’s roof.
A drizzle started again just as he stepped onto the wire, but the crowd refused to budge.
On the wire, Petit juggled, lay down, and even did a backward somersault before he ended by walking across the cable blindfolded. As soon as he began his final crossing, the dark sky let loose with rain. Less than halfway across the wire, Petit kicked off his white slippers to complete the 100-foot trek.
“The wire was too slippery,” he told a reporter at the time. “I had to kick off my shoes so I could feel the wire with my toes.”
At the time, Petit said it was only the second time he did a show in heavy rain — the first in what was then West Germany six months before the Allentown appearance.
The entire Allentown performance lasted 15 minutes.
After Allentown
Petit, now 66, has continued his professional career as a high-wire walker, though he said in the interview he doesn’t call it a career.
“I am not judging every moment of my life or not comparing things or planning the way, well, the way most artists or performers do because they want to have, construct, a career,” he said.
“This concept of a career was never gripped by me,” he said. “I don’t know what a career is, I don’t have good things, bad things to do — ‘Do this before because the people will understand and you’ll have a more easy way to do …’ I don’t feel like that. I continue to live my life as the idiot poet — not having any strategy. It is like a child, you know, in some ways.
“So I go where my heart tells me to go and I don’t see such a relation between one walk and another,” he said. “And certainly after the Twin Towers, what I did was trying to continue to do what I wanted to do. And I must say … the fame of the Twin Towers walk opened doors.”
Less than five months after the Hess’s walk, Petit suffered his only professional fall — suffering critical injuries in a 30-foot plunge onto concrete while rehearsing during a brief stint with the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.
He did several high-profile walks in the ensuing years. In 1975, he opened the Superdome in New Orleans by walking a wire strung across its interior. In 1986, he re-enacted the crossing of the Niagara River by Charles Blondin for an IMAX film, then performed at Lincoln Center in New York City for the reopening of the Statue of Liberty.
In 1989, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, he walked a wire strung from the ground to the second level of the Eiffel Tower. And in 2002, he walked across Broadway in New York City, 14 stories high, for the “Late Show with David Letterman.”
“It surprises people I am still actually performing,” he said with a laugh. “I am practicing three hours a day in upstate New York on a little wire in a garden. Yes, I still perform and I still have projects and dreams and nothing much has changed, actually.”
A dream of traversing the Grand Canyon has died, he said.
“I went there many times and I had some projections and the projections collapsed because the producer ran away or all kinds of things — which I’m not the only artist to experience,” he said. “In a distant point in my life it was something I wanted to do, but it did not happen.”
Petit said he doesn’t necessarily view the World Trade Center walk as the height of his professional life.
“Because I was not seeking a highlight,” he said. “I mean, yes, the Twin Towers was the highest towers in the world, but … I didn’t do my walk because they were the highest. I didn’t do such walk to become the highest wire-walker in the world — although if I wanted, it would be in the Book of Records, tripling the current height.
“But this is not who I am. I actually excuse the concept of records — to go through your life and try to be stronger and better than your neighbor and do something longer or higher, all those goals in life. You should try to do things that are meaningful — that will inspire people,” he said.
“So I also excuse myself on the fact that I put my wire the highest towers in the world. And yet it was one of the beautiful and majestic they were at the time the highest on Earth,” he said.
So why, after all these years, won’t Petit talk about the Allentown walk?
“I tell you very frankly,” he said. “The walk you mention, it happened, but it was one of those minor walks I did because I was not completely understanding what the people wanted from me to do.
“So I found myself walking under the rain in a little dark street in Pennsylvania, and it’s not something I think I should share with the world, mostly not in connection with the superb IMAX, three-dimensional movie.”
Hess’s Otto disagrees.
“Obviously, walking between the Twin Towers and then walking across Hamilton Street is nothing to compare,” Otto said.
“But for the people here, seeing somebody on a high wire, without a net underneath, if he had fallen, he could have been killed there as much as he could have been killed if he had fallen between the Twin Towers. [There] it just would have taken him longer to get down.”
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