From Bond to Batman: why culture can't get enough of Rolex - British GQ

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I am not exactly sure when vintage sports Rolexes became a thing, but what I can tell you is that way back through the swirling mists of time, in that distant era known to history as the 1980s, when I got my first pay packet I rushed to Christie’s South Kensington (now closed) and bought myself a Rolex Oysterdate from the 1960s.

As well as it being what one did back then, I had been studying Rolex as an undergraduate, somewhat more attentively than I been studying the works of Shakespeare, and had the finals examinations featured more questions on the oeuvre of Hans Wilsdorf than Jacobean drama, who knows, I may have got a better class of degree.

Back then the Rolex I bought – a perfectly nice if unremarkable example with a black dial – was a secondhand watch, as distinct from a vintage one, which is why I paid little more than £100 for it. At that time, a vintage Rolex was personified, typified and exemplified by the Rolex Prince. Rectangular, sometimes with flared sides, an upper dial giving the time, a lower dial showing running seconds, the Prince had been launched in 1928 and by the 1980s it was in its fifties and considered a trophy (what we used to have before grail watches) – if you had a stripy Prince you were king of the world.

Mirabile dictu, the 1980s was the first time I wrote an article for GQ; I think it appeared in the second issue and among the important topics I tackled was the rise of the vintage Daytona and how certain models of what were still secondhand Rolex chronographs were catching up with new models in terms of pricing.

We were about to enter the era of the “Paul Newman”, the nomenclature that came about completely by accident thanks to the Italian watch-collecting community, as Auro Montanari, one of the world’s most important collectors, explains: “I saw a Japanese magazine in 1987 or 1988 with an old photograph of Paul Newman racing at Daytona wearing his 6239 with the very famous dial. In those days nobody called it a ‘Paul Newman’, it was just an ‘exotic’ dial.” Distinctly 1960s and 1970s in feel, these exotic dials were hard to shift when new and many purchasers chose to swap out the dials.

If the modern vintage sports Rolex movement (forgive the groaning pun) has a ground zero then this is probably it. The attachment of a movie star name to a watch hitherto known by a four-digit code transformed the way the world saw old watches – so tectonic was the shift that 30 years after Montanari had seen that obscure Japanese magazine, Paul Newman’s “Paul Newman” fetched £14.3 million at auction (that’s Picasso and vintage Ferrari money). Unsurprisingly, the halo of the Paul Newman is now so bright that it illuminates any Rolex Daytona, vintage, modern or contemporary, and there are times when it seems that ownership of at least one Daytona is a precondition of employment in the upper echelons of the financial services sector.

In those three intervening decades, assigning movie industry names to sports Rolexes (current and discontinued) became an industry of its own.

© Claude Bossel

James Bond was inevitably dominated by the Crown during the Connery- and Moore-era movies (the weight of scholarship favours the theory that in Dr No 007 wore the Big Crown ref 6538, but an alternative school of thought supports the idea it was a ref 5510; given the similarity of the two models, the way the movie is filmed does not permit a definitive verdict). For a time the Steve McQueen Explorer II (ref 1655 with orange hand) was a huge favourite with junior hedgies – even though McQueen wore a Submariner. Clint Eastwood’s name is attached to the steel and gold, brown-dialled, root beer-bezelled GMT-Master 16753 and is about the only thing of note I can recall from the film Firefox. More recently, when James Cameron went to the bottom of the Challenger Deep his name became indissolubly associated with the Deepsea Sea-Dweller ref 116660.

The attachment of a movie star name to a watch transformed the way the world saw old watches. Paul Newman’s sold for £14.3 million

And failing direct film star involvement, the collecting community will clutch at colours in search of a movie sobriquet: the blue and black ceramic bezel of the GMT-Master II 116710BLNR was apparently enough to earn the nickname “Batman”; “Hulk” is the name given to a green dial and green bezel Submariner ref 116610LV, as distinct from the “Kermit” (green bezel only).

And the Kermit is part of the problem. Not the watch – which, as the 50th anniversary Submariner, is a historically important timepiece – but the name, which sounds to my ears a trifle disrespectful. And even though I enjoy The Simpsons, I feel the same about the Bart Simpson ref 5513, so named because the Crown logo on the dial resembles the cartoon character’s hair.

Maybe I am being too precious. Then again, when it comes to the “Smurf” maybe not. This is a truly beautiful blue-on-blue white-gold Submariner ref 116618 that for a long time was a watch I was prepared to mortgage my soul to own, until I heard the nickname. I still love the watch, but in all conscience I really could not enter into a Faustian pact to wear a watch known colloquially by the name of a Belgian cartoon franchise featuring toadstool-dwelling miniature blue humanoids (although maybe I am missing a subtle subliminal link to Cameron’s blue avatars).

© Jean-Daniel Meyer

On the whole I would feel far more comfortable wearing a John Wayne or an Elvis Presley and, happily, such Rolexes do exist. The King and The Duke both wore the limited and numbered Rolex King Midas. A killer watch born out of the mythology and architecture of ancient Greece and hewn from a hunk of gold, it was more of a chunky gold man-bangle with a built-in watch, weighing in at around a quarter-kilo.

It is too early to say whether the esoteric Midas will ever rival the appeal of the sports Rolex, but even if it attains the more modest goal of becoming what the Prince was during the 1980s, at least it will be able to draw upon some 24-carat nicknames.

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July 01, 2020 at 12:03PM
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From Bond to Batman: why culture can't get enough of Rolex - British GQ

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