He walks the line

You would not, of course, expect to find Petit cosied up in an armchair with pipe and slippers in the upstate New York home he shares with his partner, Kathy O’Donnell. This, after all, is the man who committed "the crime of the century" 28 years ago by covertly - and illegally - rigging a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Center in order to walk across the void some seven or eight times. He wasn’t counting, he says, swinging from side to side like a pendulum. Indeed, throughout our conversation his feet rarely touch the ground. "I don’t live on this earth much," admits the lithe 52-year-old.

Why should he? He has walked with his tawny head in the clouds and his short, stubby toes curled around a rolling, twisting steel rope no thicker than his thumb. "The sky is my domain," the self-taught aerialist explains in charmingly fractured English. He’s a self-confessed rebel, a "poet-in-the-sky", a prestidigitator who can do conjuring tricks and pick a pocket or two. He’s the sort of man who, if he sees three oranges, has a compulsion to juggle. When he sees two towers, he has to step out into the thin air between them "because they’re there".

In 1974, Philippe Petit even upstaged Richard Nixon by performing one of the few acts more sensational - at least in those days - than resigning the presidency of the United States.

Just a week before his 26th birthday, at a few minutes past 7am on August 7, Petit walked back and forth for the better part of an hour over the almighty void between the 1,360ft-tall towers - a dizzying distance of 140ft. He saluted the crowd of more than 100,000 New Yorkers gazing up at the tiny figure cavorting on a barely perceptible wire. He lay down on it, he danced on it, he even ran on it. This was a sublime piece of absurdist art as well as a breathtakingly audacious act. Years later, the art critic Calvin Tompkins wrote of Petit’s star turn: "He achieved the almost unimaginable feat of investing the World Trade Center with a thrilling and terrible beauty." For Petit it was "a romantic dialogue between myself as an artist and one of the world’s seven wonders. I loved those towers and I had to conquer them if only to inspire people."

The story of how he made that walk across the abyss is recounted in To Reach the Clouds: My High-wire Walk Between the Twin Towers, the book he started to write before the events of September 11, and which he had to lay aside for a while because he was so grief-stricken by the disaster. Now he has finished it, and the result is a beautifully written heart-stopping thriller, infused with poetry and the spirit of a monomaniac artist possessed of total tunnel vision and determination as steely as the rope on which he sashays in the buffalo-skin slippers he stitched himself.

The son of a colonel in the French air force, Philippe Petit was barely 17 years old when he saw an artist’s conception of what would then be the world’s tallest buildings in a French magazine while sitting in his dentist’s crowded waiting room in Paris. Spellbound, he drew a line between the rooftops. He had to have the article, so he faked an enormous sneeze to camouflage his ripping the page, then fled. He had toothache for a week.

For almost nine years, he plotted laying siege to the towers, spying and sneaking into the buildings while they were under construction. He and his gang of accomplices adopted disguises. For months they hid in undiscovered nooks and crannies on the 110 floors. They ran up stairwells and became more familiar with the soaring rooftops than the birds of the air. They plotted and planned. Finally, they decided to use a bow and arrow to shoot a nylon line from one tower to the other in order to thread his cable through the air. Later, after his running, jumping, skipping walk, Petit succumbed to the "octopus of hands" of policemen reaching out to seize him.

All charges were eventually dropped. When the NYPD let him go, a beautiful girl waved at him from the admiring crowds. Ever the red-blooded Frenchman, he soon had her under a silky comforter on a water bed. "It is revenge, it is abandon, an immense joy, the warmest entanglement, an ephemeral delirium of the senses. After all I have been through in the sky... I want the first step in my new life to be splashed with decadence," he writes.

When I ask about this incident, he says I am the first person who has read the book to ask him about sex. Was he affirming the life force after such a close brush with death? (He writes that before he left Paris for New York, he concluded, "in a few months I’ll be dead".) Could he not quite believe that he had survived? "I needed that sex. I deserved it," he says. "It was an explosion of the passions." And it was the best sex he had ever had.

One of Petit’s greatest allies in 1974 was photographer Jean-Louis Blondeau. Even looking at his vertigo-inducing photographs from that day makes you breathless. Read Petit’s own words about what it was like to walk between the two towers that pierced the sky over Lower Manhattan and you start hyperventilating, your heart pounding like mad. Although you know that he survived (he has fallen in practice, never on a walk), when you close your eyes after reading this profoundly moving and inspiring book, you always see him falling. You rebuild those tall towers in your imagination and in your mind the wiry, black-clad figure never makes it across that terrible yawning chasm.

If this is what it feels like for us post-September 11, what must it be like for Petit? He last set foot in the World Trade Center just one week before the terrorist attacks - he had the freedom of the place. No one knew the twin towers better than him. He had an almost mystical connection with the buildings. Spiritually, the towers belonged to Petit, they were part of the fabric of his soul. In his book, he writes of hearing "the cry of the tower" through the masonry when he was meticulously preparing his walk. He was rushing up - or down, he doesn’t remember - the stairs of the south tower when, "it let go a plaint of pain".

On the morning of September 11, 2001, he was working at his home near Woodstock, in the Catskills, when his phone rang. A friend shouted: "Philippe! Your tower is being attacked! Run to a TV!" Needless to say, he does not have a set, so he dashed to a neighbour’s house. Like the rest of the world, he watched in disbelief as the great skyscrapers crumbled to dust. "I was just staring at the screen saying, ‘Unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable…’ My first thoughts were not at all my personal feelings about the towers. I felt the immense human tragedy of loss of life and not knowing about loved ones."

He entwines his strong, muscular arms around the ropes supporting his swing, then says: "I felt I was losing my home, my twin children - something very precious. I had an intimate relationship with the towers. I even called them ‘my’ towers. It was like losing some alive part of myself." When the towers again "twin-tickle the clouds", writes Petit, he will offer to walk. "I will carry my life across the wire, as your life, as all our lives, past, present and future, the lives lost, the lives welcomed since." Then, he says emotionally, he just wants people to be able to look up again without fear.

Sixteen months on, he still finds it painful to talk about the atrocity. When I first ask about his feelings about that day, there is a long silence interrupted only by the sound of Petit gently swaying through the air. Fixing me with intense grey-blue eyes the colour of the sky’s changing moods, he says softly: "For me, it’s like talking about the death of my child."

The neighbour with whom he watched the events of September 11 is painter Elaine Fasula. Petit and Fasula had a daughter, Cordia-Gypsy. "We created a masterpiece," he writes. He takes me to his beautifully ordered workroom in the basement and shows me a wall in his office papered with photographs of his daughter, an enchanting little sprite with her father’s impish looks.

At the age of nine-and-a-half, the child he named after the cords that support him and his Gypsy-like lifestyle fell ill. "She was wonderful, witty, rebellious, then a volcano erupted in her brain," he says. He’s vague about her affliction - a cerebral brain haemorrhage - and exactly when it happened and where. She died in 1992 and her ashes are buried in the columbarium of the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine in New York City, which was struck by fire at almost the same time as the terrorist attacks. He is artist-in-residence at this, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world. Over the years, he has carried out a dozen wire walks inside and outside the Episcopalian cathedral, which he believes is imbued with Cordia-Gypsy’s ethereal presence. When the fire broke out, Petit was distraught.

Like a latter-day Quasimodo, Petit keeps an office in the quirky cathedral on Amsterdam Avenue, above the vast nave. It’s a balustraded eyrie in the triforium, the narrow gallery 60 feet above the ground. You reach it by going up a "medieval" stairway, then down a stone passageway. Here he writes, draws, gets beaten at chess by his friend Sting (with whom he sometimes explores the catacombs of Paris), and plans his next project - "my masterpiece". Petit wants to walk across the Little Colorado River Gorge in the Grand Canyon, which is 1,200 feet across and 1,600 feet deep. He has the blessing of the Navajo nation, but not the requisite 3million He desperately needs money, he says. "An angel is required," he smiles, opening up a wooden box in which he has fashioned an exquisitely painted scale model of the gorge, complete with tightrope and rigging in scarlet thread. Ironically, Petit could easily have become a multi-millionaire himself. Everyone wanted him to endorse products, but he had no desire to walk up a wire dressed as a hamburger.

Petit’s achievements are extraordinary. Long before the Twin Towers walk, he disported himself between the massive towers of Notre Dame in Paris, then he capered between the gigantic pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia. Since 1974, he has organised and starred in more than 70 performances around the world, all done without safety nets. (He has also been arrested 500 times for street juggling.) These performances have included walking the 2,300ft gap between the Trocadero Esplanade on the Right Bank, over the Seine and up to the second tier of the Eiffel Tower in 1989.

So why on earth does he want to make yet another death-defying walk in the Grand Canyon? "No! No! No!" he exclaims, swinging energetically in agitation. "You must understand what I do is not death-defying, it is life-affirming. I’m not a daredevil, I’m not a stunt man. I prepare; I spend months, sometimes years, researching everything - even the weather - and making sure that it is all perfectly safe. I’m not crazy! I don’t want to die, I want to live to be a very old man." But surely he takes the most incredible risks? "I know nothing about risk," he replies, shifting his compact, muscular torso on the swing. "I put profound thought into what I do and I have completely mastered the art of the high-wire. I am certainly not addicted to danger. It’s not about death. Whoever does not walk the wire is not living. When I’m walking the wire I can’t help laughing. It’s so beautiful, I feel as if I’m dying of happiness. And I have definitely not quit setting cables without permission."

What made Petit want to spend his life defying gravity? "My father was very strict, a military man. I would have to stand to attention and be disciplined. When I was a small child, I started climbing tall trees to get away from everything, but especially from him. I only felt really happy when I was looking down on the world from a great height." It was many years before father and son reached an uneasy truce. Then, before his father’s death a few years ago, they were reconciled. "I was content," says Petit.

Now, he’s working on his next book, The Art of the Pickpocket. He’s also building an 18th-century barn on his land, using antique tools or replicas he has crafted himself, in which he will store all his equipment. Petit’s and O’Donnell’s home resembles something out of a child’s fairy tale. A large, converted barn, it sits in sylvan woodlands by a sparkling stream. There’s a pond visited by ducks, geese, blue herons, otters, deer and the odd bear. While gazing on this idyllic view, Petit works on a screenplay he has written about his Twin Towers walk, and in which he not only plans to star but direct. He has found a way to play his 25-year-old self, but steadfastly refuses to let me in on the secret.

In order to discover more about the film maker’s art, he took Marlon Brando’s month-long acting class, Lying for a Living, in November 2001. Fellow students included Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Jon Voight, Nick Nolte, Michael Jackson and maverick British director Tony Kaye, who filmed proceedings dressed up as Osama bin Laden. Petit had to sign a confidentiality agreement, as did all the participants, but he felt that Kaye jeopardised the event. Brando taught him how to see a smile in the dark, he claims. "He’s a genius. I’ve never met anyone like him. He’s a master of deceit, but he taught me the discipline of self-imposed intellectual immobility. He calls it respect for stillness."

When his film is made - the word "if" doesn’t enter into Petit’s vocabulary - it will be produced by his business and life partner, O’Donnell, the claret-haired daughter of a former Manhattan publishing executive. "I’m the bitch of the organisation," she jokes. She goes around with the begging bowl raising money for her man’s artistic obsessions. And, yes, she has walked the wire with him. Was she nervous? "Oh, I trust him completely. I know how much preparation goes into every walk," she says. "My life was, indeed, in good hands." But surely she must watch with her heart in her mouth when the man she loves walks 12 storeys above Broadway on a tightrope, say, as he did recently for the David Letterman Show? "No," she replies. "When Philippe’s in the air he’s safe. It’s when his feet are on the ground that I worry. On terra firm he’s dangerous! That’s why he does the walking, I do the talking."

The Very Reverend James Parks Morton, Dean Emeritus of the Cathedral Church of St John the Divine, once said: "Philippe does not believe in God, but God believes in Philippe." So does Kathy O’Donnell. And so do I.

To Reach the Clouds: My High-Wire Walk Between the Twin Towers by Philippe Petit (Faber, 12.99)