![The original Paul Newman Rolex Daytona, a gift from Newman's wife Joanne Woodward, is perhaps the most famous timepiece ...](http://web.archive.org./web/20170905095239/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/y/9/z/8/1/image.related.afrWideArticleLead.940x529.gy9z3s.png/1504494237855.jpg)
Maybe you missed out on Jimi Hendrix's "Woodstock" Stratocaster, which sold for a reported $US1.3 million in 1993. Perhaps you were too slow to raise the paddle for the prototype Apple 1 computer, thought to be Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's first, which fetched $US815,000 last year.
Luckily, you still have a crack at Paul Newman's Rolex Daytona. This opportunity may not seem significant to the cellphone-toting masses who think of mechanical wristwatches as anachronistic devices once used by their grandparents to tell time. But to the swelling legions of watch geeks worldwide who think of vintage timepieces as fine art, a Paul Newman Daytona is the one watch that seemingly every self-respecting collector needs to own.
And Paul Newman's "Paul Newman"? It is basically the Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous timepiece in the world, coveted all the more because for decades no one outside the Newman family seemed to know where it was.
Well, the secret is out. On October 26, Newman's lost masterpiece will go on sale as the centrepiece of a watch auction at Phillips in New York, following a treasures-of-King Tut-style world tour to whip up interest – as if interest actually needed whipping up.
![Newman apparently thought so little of his now-famous wristwatch that he gave his away on a whim.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170905095239/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/y/9/z/7/z/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1504439035293.jpg)
Judging by the frothy response so far, you would think the lost ark of the covenant had just been listed on eBay.
"Paul Newman's 'Newman' could easily be seen as the most important watch there is," says Andrew Shear, a prominent New York vintage watch dealer. "I could see it selling for $US10 million ($12.6 million)."
Arguably, the ur-Newman is the watch that "created the entire vintage watch market we know today", says Charles Tearle, a vintage watch consultant and broker in Los Angeles, who estimates the watch would bring in at least $US3.5 million, and could climb to eight figures if a few heavy-hitter collectors decided to duke it out.
Quiet life
No one would be more baffled by the commotion than Butch Cassidy himself. Newman may have been a marquee-topping Oscar winner and global sex symbol but, in his daily life, he was the antithesis of Hollywood, his daughter Nell Newman said in a recent interview from her California home.
![Newman was given the watch when he became consumed with motor racing, the back engraved with 'Drive Carefully Me'.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170905095239/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/y/9/z/8/0/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1504478974084.jpg)
For decades, he lived a quiet life with his family in Westport, Connecticut, often driving a Volkswagen Beetle (albeit with a Porsche engine) and wearing a three-piece patchwork denim ensemble when circumstances forced him to dress up.
Back then, his watch was similarly low key. Although a modern Rolex Cosmograph Daytona costs $US12,400 (about $15,500) today, the models of the '60s and '70s cost about $US250 and were little more than timekeepers for gear heads, featuring a built-in stopwatch for timing laps and a tachymeter for calculating speed.
Newman's 1968 model was a gift from Joanne Woodward, his wife of 50 years, when the actor became consumed with motor racing. The back was engraved, "Drive Carefully Me".
Even so, the 6239 model that Newman would make famous (he owned at least one other version later) was distinctive and relatively rare, featuring an exotic dial containing a number of stylish design tweaks including, most notably, the art deco-style numerals on the subdials that any true watch connoisseur could spot from 10 paces. There may be only a few thousand in the world today, dealers say.
![Paul Newman and wife Joanne Woodward, who were married for 50 years, seen filming <i>Exodus</I> in Jerusalem in 1960.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170905095239/http://www.afr.com/content/dam/images/g/y/9/z/p/y/image.imgtype.afrArticleInline.620x0.png/1504443598091.jpg)
Regardless, Newman apparently thought so little of this horological treasure that he gave his away on a whim. In a story that is quickly becoming a watch nerd's version of Genesis, Newman casually handed over the watch to James Cox, Nell's college boyfriend at the time, one muggy summer afternoon in 1984.
"As far as he was concerned, it was a tool," Nell Newman says. "He definitely didn't have a strong attachment to things."
Sentimental value
In an interview, Cox, now 52, says he was helping repair a treehouse on the Newman property when the blue-eyed actor approached and asked the time.
"I said, you know, 'a hair past a freckle,' or some comment meaning 'I don't have a watch'," Cox says. "To which he replied: 'Well, here, here's this watch. If you remember to wind it, it tells pretty good time'."
And it did, for the next decade or so, as Cox wore it daily, whether gardening or doing light construction jobs, thinking it was really valuable only to him, for sentimental reasons.
His first inkling that his watch was valuable to others came at a trade show in 1993, when a Japanese man who spoke very little English approached Cox and excitedly blurted out, "Paul Newman watch!"
"I looked at him like, 'Oh, my God, how does this guy know that this is Paul Newman's watch?'," Cox says.
Unbeknown to Cox, the aura of the Paul Newman Daytona had been building since the early 1980s, when Newman, according to watch lore, started flashing it in glamour shots for European fashion magazines.
The legend continued to grow with the rise of the internet, when vintage shots of Newman, with his rugged good looks, no-nonsense air and, yes, really cool watch, became a staple of style blogs and Pinterest boards, where the actor was hailed an all-American king of cool to rival Steve McQueen.
Not that anyone besides Cox knew where the watch actually was. As recently as three years ago, the watch site Hodinkee listed it as one of the 12 "Greatest Missing Watches", alongside Pablo Picasso's Jaeger-LeCoultre Triple Calendar, John Lennon's Patek Philippe 2499 and Fidel Castro's Rolex GMT-Master.
Spilling secret
Cox, who lives in Santa Cruz, California, and runs a company that makes sunglasses for pilots, was only dimly aware of the hubbub. "At some point about eight or nine years ago, I realised that my watch had its own Wikipedia page and that there was this whole long 'where did it go?' question and all this stuff," he says.
"I kept thinking, 'I know the answers to these questions', [but] I've always erred on the side of trying to keep the family as private as possible, and that was just the classy thing to do, keep quiet about it."
Finally, however, after discussions with watch experts, Cox spilled the secret in June, when he came forward with his decision to auction off the watch and give "a big portion" of the proceeds, he says, to the Nell Newman Foundation, which focuses on environmental issues.
"I told James, 'Just keep it, man, what are you doing?'," Nell Newman says, joking about the potential windfall from the sale.
The likelihood of a huge payday increases with the building media attention.
"We've received absentee bids already," says Paul Boutros, the head of the Phillips watch division in the Americas. "Our best clients have been asking, 'Please reserve me a seat at the auction'. That immediate response, so many months in advance, has just not happened with any property we've offered."
While Cox plans to keep some of the proceeds (perhaps to buy a new Daytona?), he has little doubt what Newman would say if he were alive.
"If Paul was alive," Cox says, "and I went to him and said, 'Hey, Paul, that watch you gave me, it turns out that it's super-valuable, super-iconic', I think the first thing he would say would be: 'Well, kid, what are you going to do with it? You know, you're not going to keep it, are you? You're going to do something important.' "
The New York Times