Three words on the back
In 1969 Paul Newman played a racing driver in Winning. His wife on screen was his wife off it, Joanne Woodward. Somewhere around the making of that film, she bought him a Rolex Daytona, reference 6239, built the year before.
She had the caseback engraved with three words: DRIVE CAREFULLY ME.
It reads like a note left on a kitchen table. No date, no occasion, no name beyond a single word only he would need. Hold on to it, because it matters more than anything on the front of the watch.
The dial nobody asked for
Woodward chose the version most buyers were walking past. The trade called it the exotic dial: square-tipped markers in the sub-dials, Art Deco numerals and colours reversed against the main dial. Next to the plainer Daytonas of the period it looked busy, and it sold slowly.
Newman wore his anyway, every day, from 1969 to 1984. He raced in it, and the cameras kept finding it.
Collectors noticed. Over time, every Daytona with that dial became a "Paul Newman". Rolex never gave it the name. The people who wanted one did, and a dial that had been hard to sell became the one everybody was hunting.
The film ended, the racing didn't
Winning was supposed to be a role. For Newman it became a second career. He won four SCCA national championships, and in 1979, at fifty-four, he finished second overall at Le Mans.
He kept going long after most drivers stop. In 1995, aged seventy, he shared the car that won its class at the 24 Hours of Daytona. The watch, by then, had been gone for over a decade.
For a man who drove like that, his wife's three words were never a figure of speech.
A summer afternoon in 1984
James Cox was eighteen and dating Newman's daughter, Nell. That summer he was rebuilding the family treehouse. Newman asked him the time, and Cox admitted he didn't own a watch.
So Newman took the Daytona off his wrist and handed it over. "If you can remember to wind this each day," he told him, "it tells pretty good time."
No ceremony, no story attached. Within the collector world, meanwhile, the original Paul Newman simply vanished. For decades it was talked about as one of the great lost watches, while it sat with a young man who had been given it to tell the time.
Thirty-three years later
Cox kept the watch for thirty-three years. In October 2017 it came to Phillips in New York, with a signed letter from Nell Newman confirming its history, and Aurel Bacs took it to the rostrum.
It sold for 17.8 million dollars, at the time the highest price ever paid for a wristwatch at auction. Part of the proceeds went to the Nell Newman Foundation.
The record has since been passed. What hasn't changed is why that particular Daytona mattered. Other Daytonas carry the same dial, and the market knew exactly what it looked like. It had never seen the back of this one.
Drive carefully. Me.