The watch world is obsessed with vintage finds, but the final lot of the Phillips watch auction in New York last night couldn’t have been more 2019: up for grabs was the piece that Robert Downey Jr. wore as Tony Stark in Avengers: Endgame. Made by the Swiss techno-freaks at Urwerk, the watch features an arc of numbers on the bottom and a titanium shield on top—fittingly, it looks like a timepiece that wouldn’t be out of place in a battle against Thanos for half of humanity. The bidding began at a furious pace. “$20,000, 22, 24, 26, 28, 30,” said auctioneer Aurel Bacs. Numbers moved into hyperspeed from there: “40, 42, 45 is here in front of me. $50,000, 55,” Bacs said. Then: “$100,000!” he shouted in excitement. The numbers steadily climbed until they reached $250,000, the final selling price for Stark’s watch—fitting for a wild piece from the year’s biggest movie. And yet, somehow, a heated bidding war over Tony Stark’s Endgame watch was only, like, the fifth-most-exciting thing to take place at Phillips last night.
Phillips’ reputation for moving watches with sterling, mania-driving provenance has only helped the auction house bring more treasures like Tony Stark’s Urwerk into the fold. In 2017, Phillips was behind the $17.8 million sale of Paul Newman’s Rolex Cosmograph Daytona. It set a world record at the time, making global headlines and pinging around news feeds everywhere, including the one belonging to Russell Fischer. Fischer was brushing his teeth in the bathroom when he saw the news and mentioned it to his wife, Petra Fischer Brando.
“And he said, ‘Maybe you should look into selling it,’” Fischer Brando relayed over the phone the day of the auction. It was only one of the most famous watches in the whole world: the bezel-free GMT her dad Marlon Brando wore in Apocalypse Now, and which then seemed to mysteriously disappear. “In between brushing my teeth and getting ready, I typed in ‘Brando Rolex Apocalypse Now,’ and it came up as one of the 12 Missing Watches of the World [on watch site Hodinkee],” Petra said. “And I said, ‘Hon, can you come here?’ I think I was probably, you know, almost shaking.” Later that morning, an email was sent to Phillips, Marlon’s watch was pulled from a drawer where it’d hibernated unworn for two-plus decades, and the kids were dropped at school on time.
After emails and phone calls with the auction house, Petra agreed to meet with Bacs and Paul Boutros, Phillips's head of watches for the Americas, the following summer in Switzerland. She went to dinner with the pair, and then met with them for coffee the following morning, by which point she had fully exhausted Boutros’s restraint. “Well,” he said, “are you going to show it to us?”
She pulled the watch out of its pouch and presented it to them. “They kept looking at each other in fascination and I said, ‘What, what?” Petra said. “I was so green about watches that I said to them, “I don't know if it's too tarnished.’ And they laughed a lot about that cause they said said, ‘Um, that's called patina.’” The numbers were yellowed, and the bezel had been popped off by Marlon Brando himself. In other words, the piece was exactly what sells in the world of watches, where collectors obsess over pieces that have lived incredible lives with their owners. According to Petra, it was her father’s favorite watch—the one he slept in, and brought out for special occasions. Petra described the watch as a “piece of him.”
Pre-auction prognosticating among people in the crowd at Phillips last night put the sale of the watch somewhere in the $4 million range.
Before the Brando watch, though, another famous timepiece owned by a famous man came up for auction. Lot 18 was a gold Rolex Day-Date owned and worn for the past 50-some years by the Golden Bear himself, golfer Jack Nicklaus. A pleasant back-and-forth between a man in the room and a number in Bacs’s book (an advance, absent bidder) ensued and the watch eventually sold for $1,220,000 to the book.
A gold Rolex Daytona, a Patek Philippe Nautilus, and a Vacheron Constantin that appeared to have come from the school of famous watch designer Gerald Genta (who created Patek’s Nautilus and Audemars Piguet Royal Oak), came and went with a small handful of other watches before the watch everyone was waiting for—the Brando Rolex—arrived.
The bidding opened at $250,000 and quickly turned into a slow-motion ping-pong match. Over nearly 20 minutes, Bacs received bids at an excruciatingly slow pace. Even after the watch surpassed the $1-million mark, those trying to win the watch on the phone feebly hit back in relatively tiny increments of $10,000. “We might be here at midnight,” Bacs said, ribbing his bidders slightly.
Bidding from 1,300,000 up to 1,310,000 caused Bacs to do an impression of Don Vito Corleone from The Godfather: “Do you know that line?” he asked, “‘What have I ever done that you treat me so disrespectfully?”
Even Bacs’s good-natured ribbing soured slightly as time went on. “I’ll take your bid but please try to stick to reasonable increments,” he said to one of the snail-paced bidder as the numbers got into the $1.5 million range. “You do not set a good example here.” When the price reached $1.6 million, Bacs turned to pleading: “It would be a huge gesture to humanity if the next bid could be 1,650.” A bid of 1,610,000 came in.
Mercifully, the slow dribble ended there, and a winner was announced. Buyer’s fees put the Brando’s final sale price just short of $2 million, at $1,952,000.
In November, a brand-new, one-of-one Patek Philippe set the world record for most-expensive watch ever sold when it was bid up to $31 million. It smashed to smithereens the previous $17.8 million high set by a wristwatch, and did so in a flurry of bidding twice as fast as the slow march to Brando’s Rolex. The Brando was never going to get close to that record, nor will any watch any time soon, but the contrast between that timepieces and the ones at Phillips Tuesday night is worth noting. That watch and the Brando have almost nothing in common. The Patek is a brand-new watch, one that’s extremely complicated and made out of precious materials. The Brando, meanwhile, is fueled by provenance and patina—two qualities that have powered the nitrous-gas-fast rise of the watch market, the qualities Bacs and Boutros slobbered over at breakfast last summer. It’s thanks to both kinds of watches that the market for these things could best be described as completely on fire.
But the watch that realized the highest price at last night’s auction was the strangest piece in the whole auction, neither a beat-up vintage number nor a pristine piece of classicism. No, Lot 8 was the Urwerk Atomic Master Clock, which included not only a black wristwatch that looks like one of its buttons could summon a fleet of missiles, but a docking base that keeps time “with a margin of error of one second in 317 years,” according to Phillips. The docking base sat on a stark-white pedestal on the far right of the room, looking not unlike a turntable. Or, as someone nearby joked, “It comes with a stereo!”
But it turned out to be a highly desirable stereo: to the shock of almost everyone around me, bidding rocketed past the high estimate of $2 million. “What the actual fuck,” someone said. “Does it suck your dick or something?” Bidding touched down, very precisely, at $2,900,000
On a night that was supposed to be dominated by watches that tell stories about life on the wrists of Brando, Nicklaus, or even Tony Stark, the watch that came away with the highest sale price was a technical marvel. And—to answer that question—no, it’s not capable of that.
