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On Time

By ALEX WILLIAMS

Maybe you missed out on Jimi Hendrix’s “Woodstock” Stratocaster, which sold for a reported $1.3 million in 1993. Perhaps you were too slow to raise the paddle for the prototype Apple 1 computer, thought to be Steve Jobs’s and Steve Wozniak’s first, that fetched $815,000 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 so-called 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 Oct. 26, Newman’s lost masterpiece will go on sale as the centerpiece 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.

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,” said Andrew Shear, a prominent New York vintage watch dealer. “I could see it selling for $10 million.”

Arguably, the ur-Newman is the watch that “created the entire vintage watch market we know today,” said Charles Tearle, a vintage watch consultant and broker in Los Angeles, who estimated that the watch will bring in at least $3.5 million, and that the figure could climb to eight figures if a few heavy-hitter collectors decide to duke it out.

A Regift of a Gift From His Wife

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, said his daughter Nell Newman in a recent interview from her California home.

For decades, he lived a quiet life with his family in leafy Westport, Conn., 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 $12,400 today, the models of the ’60s and ’70s cost about $250, 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 auto 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 can spot from 10 paces. There may be only a few thousand in the world today, dealers said.

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,” Ms. Newman said. “He definitely didn’t have a strong attachment to things.”

In an interview, Mr. Cox said 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,’” Mr. Cox, now 52, said. “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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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?’” Mr. Cox recalled.

Daytona in the Pinterest Age

Unbeknown to Mr. Cox, the aura of the Paul Newman Daytona had been building since the early 1980s, when Mr. 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 Mr. 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.

Mr. Cox, who lives in Santa Cruz, Calif., 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 realized 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 said.

“I kept thinking, ‘I know the answers to these questions,’” Mr. Cox said. But, he said, “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, Mr. Cox spilled the secret this past June, when he came forward with his decision to auction off the watch and give “a big portion” of the proceeds, he said, to the Nell Newman Foundation, which focuses on environmental issues.

“I told James, ‘Just keep it, man, what are you doing?’” Ms. Newman said, 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,” said 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 Mr. Cox plans to keep some of the proceeds (perhaps to buy a new Daytona?), he has little doubt what Newman, the philanthropist behind the charitable Newman’s Own brand of salad dressing and popcorn, would say if he were alive.

“If Paul was alive,” Mr. Cox said, “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.’”