Steve McQueen’s Destroyed-in-a-Wildfire Rolex Is Going Up for Auction
The emotional crescendo of any good superhero movie is when our hero, thought to be dead or defeated, triumphantly returns. And what works in Hollywood in this case also works in the watch world, where famous pieces go missing, break, or just get worn for decades—and then come back to smash records. Just consider the latest headline-making watch: a Rolex Submariner owned and worn by none other than Steve McQueen, a piece presumed dead. The watch market is exploding right now, and the Submariner is the latest in a string of watches that prove provenance—where a watch comes from, who wore it, how proudly it earned its dings and scratches—is king in this world.
In 2016, a wildfire killed two and destroyed 18 houses just outside of Los Angeles, including the home of Hollywood stuntman Loren Janes. Janes, who was suffering from Alzheimer’s at the time of the fire and passed away in 2017, worked closely with McQueen on movies like Bullitt and The Great Escape, and was given the watch in the mid- to late ’70s. “We're told a bunch of other memorabilia was burned up, including a collection of mugs from John Wayne and a Rolex from Steve McQueen,” TMZ wrote of the sort of memorabilia that was lost with Janes’s house. The last detail stood out to a savvy watch collector, revealed as Michael Eisenberg in Forbes this week, who knew that a Rolex watch had a pretty good chance of surviving a fire. Shortly after the fire, Eisenberg got in touch with Janes’s daughter and implored her to sift through the rubble to find the watch. “Sure enough, she listened to him and motivated her brother to get out there to the site of the fire with a shovel. They dug through the rubble and actually found it after a few days of searching,” says Paul Boutros, head of Americas for watches at Phillips auction house. Now the watch is set to go up for auction at Phillips in October of this year—almost one year to the day after Paul Newman’s Rolex Daytona set the record for the most expensive wristwatch ever when it sold at auction for $17.8 million.
McQueen's and Janes’s Submariner isn’t on par with Newman’s Daytona—Wei Koh, the founder of the watch magazine Revolution, described the latter to me as “the most iconic Rolex you could possibly imagine”—but it’s no slouch. Notably, elements of its story are arguably more emblematic of trends in the watch world than the Daytona. In 2018, the better a conversation piece a watch is, the more valuable it is—and this Submariner is a hell of a talker. Not only was this watch worn and owned by McQueen, unanimously considered one of the coolest and most stylish guys ever to walk the planet, but there’s also a caseback engraving from McQueen: “To Loren, the Best Damn Stuntman in the World. Steve.” And did we mention it survived a fire?
The engraving is important, because it links McQueen to the watch in a way no other timepiece owned by the actor can. “With the caseback engraving, it becomes that one-in-a-billion watch, and that makes it a trophy piece,” says Boutros. “Imagine if you owned the watch and presented your collection to your closest friends and family. If it didn't have that caseback engraving, it would have looked indistinguishable from a standard vintage Rolex 5513 [the “reference,” or model number, tied to the watch].”
What’s really fascinating, though, is how the fire will actually make the watch that much more valuable. It’s hard to imagine a similar phenomenon in any other industry: You don’t see charred Picassos or burnt-to-a-crisp Lamborghinis going for six digits on the auction circuit. But McQueen’s Submariner didn’t just survive a fire—it still shows signs of that struggle, and that makes it even pricier at auction. After the fire, the watch was mostly restored by Rolex’s headquarters, but Phillips brags in a press release that “the soot wedged between the Rolex bracelet clasp and on the caseback is indeed still present.” Boutros adds: “I think [the soot] gives it that je ne sais quois. That intangible authenticity that the story of the watch is reserved with that soot still in it. It's a great conversation piece for the future owner.”
The McQueen Rolex’s emergence is directly tied to the treasure hunt that started when the price of Newman’s watch left the stratosphere last October. That sale set off a wave of record-breaking pieces during last month’s auctions. Elvis Presley’s Omega and a TAG Heuer owned by race-car driver Ronnie Peterson became the highest-priced watches for those respective brands to move at auction, and a Rolex, nicknamed “The Unicorn,” became the second-most-expensive Rolex, trailing only the Newman. McQueen’s Rolex is the latest unearthed gem. “That was really our hope, especially when we got Paul Newman's Paul Newman,” says Boutros. “We're always hopeful that people will go into their drawers or they'll know about their watch and they'll come forward.”
There are still legendary watches out there, like Buzz Aldrin’s Speedmaster, which got lost in the mail on its way to the Smithsonian, or John Lennon’s Patek Philippe, allegedly given to the Beatle by Yoko Ono on his 40th birthday and never seen since. In the short term, though, Boutros believes McQueen’s Rolex will amp up the value of all Submariners, feeding the watch market’s explosive growth. “It could help them become more sought after,” Boutros says.
But make no mistake: This is still the best Sub on the market. The current estimate is pegged at $300,000 to $600,000 (a figure created by “a lot of art and a little bit of science” that’s meant to entice bidders, says Boutros), and that’s considered conservative. Today, watch prices are dictated by the lives they’ve lived: “The flavor, the patina, the signs of wear, what gives the watch all the charm and the history,” the auctioneer Aurel Bacs told me before the Newman auction last year. And any fast-food establishment can tell you that the McQueen watch has all of that in spades: There isn’t a better flavor than flame-broiled.
