Long Live McQueen

For years, Steve McQueen’s Rolex Submariner was presumed lost. Then it was destroyed in a fire — until it wasn’t. Now the King Of Cool’s timepiece has reemerged and will go up for auction in October. The secret history of a grail watch.

- Michael Solomon

For more than half a century, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman have been cosmic twins of masculinity.

Box-office rivals throughout the sixties and seventies — they would have starred in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid but couldn’t agree on who would receive top billing — the actors were also revered for their offscreen passions: racing cars, riding motorcycles and collecting watches. Years after their deaths — McQueen died at 50 in 1980, while Newman passed away in 2008 at 83 — the two men still regularly compete over the ever-escalating prices of their memorabilia.

Last October, Paul Newman’s 1968 Rolex Daytona — with a white-and-red “exotic” dial that came to be known as the Paul Newman Daytona simply because he wore it — sold at Phillips auction house in New York for an astonishing $17.8 million. The price was not only a record for a Rolex at auction but also the highest amount ever paid for a wristwatch at auction.

More than a year before the gavel came down on Paul Newman’s Paul Newman, Michael Eisenberg, a Beverly Hills real estate broker and developer who is also a prominent memorabilia collector, was privately negotiating with the consignor of the Daytona, a deal that would have kept it from ever going on the block. “I really wanted to buy it,” the 53-year-old Eisenberg recalls. “I had the money, but obviously it wasn’t anywhere near the money the watch sold for.”

He also soon began a quest for another so called grail watch — one owned by McQueen. “The idea was to join the two watches — then I’d have Butch and Sundance,” says Eisenberg, who wears a Rolex 1675 GMT Master with a root beer dial and bezel. “And I would never sell them. I’d tour them and put them on display.”