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 re-emerged 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 ’60s ’70s—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,” Eisenberg, 53, 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. “And I would never sell them. I’d tour them and put them on display.”