Paul Newman's Daytona: An Inscription and a Documented Gift

First, what the name actually means

Start with what the watch is not. A "Paul Newman Daytona" is not, by itself, a rare thing — collectors use the name for a family of vintage Rolex Daytonas fitted with an Art Deco-styled "exotic" dial, and a few thousand of those dials exist. Rolex never put Newman's name on a watch, and he never promoted the brand; the nickname is the collectors' own, earned because he kept wearing one in public until the dial and the man were inseparable. There is exactly one, though, that Paul Newman owned and wore: a stainless-steel Cosmograph Daytona reference 6239, made in 1968, and its value flows from the paper trail of who gave it to whom.

A gift with a warning on the back

Joanne Woodward bought it around the filming of Winning in 1969, most likely at Tiffany & Co. on Fifth Avenue, as her husband's sideline in motor racing became a second career — the film, in which Newman played a racing driver, is the one that started his racing life in earnest. On the caseback she had an inscription engraved: "DRIVE CAREFULLY ME." It was not a joke. Newman had needed skin grafts after a serious motorcycle accident in 1965, and her worry rode on his wrist for fifteen years.

He used the watch the way it was built to be used — as a timing tool, worn daily until 1984, when Woodward gave him a newer Daytona and this one seemed to vanish. For decades it was one of watch collecting's great open questions. Hodinkee's 2014 survey of the greatest missing watches placed this one at its centre: the most important vintage watch in the world, possibly, and nobody in the market knew where it was.

The watch that vanished into a tree house

It had never been lost. In the summer of 1984, James Cox — then dating Newman's daughter Nell — was staying at the family home in Westport, Connecticut, rebuilding the tree house. Newman asked Cox if he knew the time, and learned Cox didn't own a watch. He took the Daytona off his own wrist and handed it over: "If you can remember to wind this each day, it tells pretty good time." Nell Newman later set the moment down in a signed letter that accompanied the watch to auction.

Cox kept it for more than three decades, preserved in its original, worn condition — and that condition became part of the evidence. When the watch resurfaced publicly in the spring of 2017, Hodinkee's examination found the dial original and unrestored, its cream face warmed to a patina consistent with its age, all the lume plots present and deeply aged, the hands aged with it, the case retaining its original proportions. Nothing had been polished back to newness in thirty-three years of private keeping. The wear was the documentation, worn honestly on the watch itself.

Twelve minutes in New York

On 26 October 2017, Phillips offered it in New York as Lot 8 of its Winning Icons sale — the house's inaugural New York watch auction, and this was its centrepiece: the only exotic-dial Daytona Newman ever owned, with a portion of proceeds benefiting the Nell Newman Foundation. The pre-sale estimate ran in excess of $1 million, a figure that already assumed the provenance would do extraordinary work — no ordinary example of the reference carried anything like it.

Bidding opened at $10 million and ran about twelve minutes before the hammer fell to an anonymous telephone bidder. More than 700 people were in the salesroom, and the sale was held in association with Bacs & Russo, the watch-auction specialists. The price was $17,752,500 including buyer's premium — at the time, the highest ever paid for a wristwatch at auction. The whole sale totalled $28.8 million, which means this one watch accounted for more than half of the evening on its own.

The room had not bid on rarity. Exotic dials exist in the thousands, and the reference is not mechanically exotic at all. It had bid on a chain of custody with no weak link in it: bought by a wife, engraved by her, worn by her husband for fifteen years, given by him in person, kept by the recipient for thirty-three, and vouched for in writing by the family.

Photographs: Hodinkee · Hodinkee · Hodinkee